EDITH SÖDERGRAN.

I was idly leafing through a book on Gunnar Ekelöf's "A Mölna Elegy" (don't ask me why, since I knew nothing about Ekelöf and have never been particularly interested in Swedish poetry) when I was struck by the mention of his great respect for the poet Edith Södergran. (So great was his respect that he incorporated chunks of her poetry into his own long poem without attribution, about the ethics of which there has been much discussion, but that's another story.) It turns out Södergran was one of the first modernist poets in Scandinavia, one of the Swedish minority in Finland... and she was born in Saint Petersburg in 1892, a year after Mandelshtam! She went to a German-language school in SPb and started writing poetry in German, only switching to Swedish later; as this impassioned webpage says:

Her first poems fill a school notebook, 225 altogether, never published. Most of these youthful poems were written in German — only 10% in her mother tongue, Swedish. At fourteen Edith Södergran had become a cosmopolitan, reading Heine, Goethe, and other classical poetry in French, Russian, German and Swedish. One day she wrote in her notebook, Ich weiss nicht, in wessen Sprache schreiben ('I don't know in which language to write'). At this point in her writing a long series of poems in German comes to an end. After one poem in French, she now began to write exclusively in Swedish.

For any poet, fluency in foreign languages enriches the diction of the mother tongue, as Chaucer's daily use of French as ambassador in Paris brought so much wealth to the English language. At the beginning of her switch to her mother tongue, Edith showed better mastery of German than Swedish. She had been intensely studying Goethe, Heine and other German poets, whereas she had read very little Swedish poetry. She grew up outside the boundaries of Swedish culture, just as Jules Laforgue and Isidore Ducasse ("le comte de Lautréamont") grew up outside of French culture in Montevideo, Uruguay. She spoke an old-fashioned Swedish, often grammatically incorrect. Her spelling was also shaky.

All of that interested me enormously, and of course one can't help but be fascinated by poets who die young (she died in 1923 of that killer of poets, tuberculosis, in Raivola, then part of newly independent Finland but now the town of Roshchino in Russia, a northwestern suburb of Saint Petersburg). When I looked her up in Martin Seymour-Smith's Guide to Modern World Literature, I was very taken with the brief bit he quoted in translation:

For my little songs,
The funny plaintive ones, the evening purple ones,
Spring gave me the egg of a water-bird.
I asked my beloved to paint my portrait on the thick shell.
He painted a young leek in brown soil—
And on the other side a round soft mound of sand.

So when I discovered there was a bilingual Selected Poems available, I sent off for it. I may even learn a bit of Swedish.

There's surprisingly little on her in Russian, considering that she was born and spent most of her life in what was then Russia and could rightly be considered part of the generation of Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, and Tsvetaeva, but here's a nice page with pictures of her, her gravestone in Roshchino, and a sculpture of her favorite cat Totti.

Addendum. Thanks to prinses Hyacinta, I've discovered a lengthy review by Johannes Goransson of the Selected Poems, which is well worth reading.

THREE YEARS OF LANGUAGEHAT.

I have to admit it surprises me this thing is still going after three years of near-daily posting. If I were simply talking to myself, I'd have given it up long ago; it's the feedback that makes me want to continue, so let me repeat what I said in my first anniversary post:

People occasionally apologize for intruding on my time or say they don't know enough to comment; I want to make it clear that I welcome everyone with an interest in the things I write about, whether they have any prior knowledge or not, and I love answering questions I get in e-mails—if your message comes at a busy time, I may take a while to get around to it, but I will answer it. And, of course, if you have an interesting link to pass along or a subject you'd like to hear about, let me know; I'm always on the lookout for new topics!

I thank all those I thanked there, and I note with pleasure that since the second anniversary the number of countries from which I've had visitors has grown from 120 to 150 (hello, Tonga and Ethiopia!). I quoted Pound (the end of Canto IV) in that first anniversary post; this time I'll quote him (in Canto CIX) quoting Coke:
Si nomina nescis perit rerum cognitio.
[If you don't know names the knowledge of things perishes.]

Well, actually, he's slightly misquoting Coke, who said (in Coke upon Littleton 86) "nomina si nescis perit cognitio rerum." (If you know not the names of things, the knowledge of things themselves perishes.) But if you googled that to try to find out who said it, you'd be convinced it was Linnaeus, because that's what virtually every hit tells you; only the Bouvier Law Dictionary (1856) gives the proper attribution. (I imagine Linnaeus said it too, but he lived over a century after Coke.) So be careful out there on the internet, folks, and double-check everything you read, even if you read it here.

Addendum. I thank everyone for their kind (and frequently multilingual) comments, and an amusing one by MM reminded me that it might be a good idea to point out, for those who don't know, that the family name Coke, as in the Sir Edward Coke quoted above, is pronounced like the word cook and not like the word coke. Amend your puns accordingly. Also, as long as I mentioned Linnaeus, I might as well debunk the myth that his real name was von Linné. His father's name was Nils Linnaeus and he was born Carl Linnaeus; he took the name von Linné when he was admitted to the aristocracy. Amend your cocktail-party chatter accordingly. (What, they don't talk about Linnaeus at the cocktail parties you attend? Pfft.)

QUIZ.

Name another city that falls into the same category as Carthage and Chiang Mai.

LEXICON OF GREEK PERSONAL NAMES.

Thanks to the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised aldiboronti at Wordorigins, I hereby present to all and sundry the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names.

The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) was established to collect and publish all ancient Greek personal names, drawing on the full range of written sources from the 8th century B.C. down to the late Roman Empire... The work thus starts with the period of epichoric scripts, embraces the classical and hellenistic periods of Greek history, following dialect and the development of koine, and continues through the period of the Roman Empire when Greek nomenclature underwent changes as a result of Roman rule, and religious, social and other factors. Excluded names include mythological and heroic names, Mycenaean names, later Byzantine names and geographical names.

The search page explains the two different searches available, and the Greek names section includes

an introduction to Greek personal names themselves, how they were formed and used, and how we know about them... Although LGPN is concerned with Greek names in antiquity, we are aware that many modern Greeks are interested in our site, and contact us with questions about their names. Although we must stress that this is not our area of expertise, we add here some paragraphs on how modern Greek name-giving has been influenced by the past, and how some ancient names came through to be used in the modern world.

A wonderful resource; may it thrive and expand!

AN EYE LIKE MA'S.

I was very happy to read about Baboo Jabberjee, BA, and his influence on the immortal Wodehouse in the latest post at Dick & Garlick, and you will be too if you have any interest in "Babu English," Bertie and Jeeves, or a good laugh.

APMONIA.

Plep yesterday featured Apmonia, The Modern Word's Samuel Beckett page. I'm familiar with the site and its wonderful author sections, but I wondered about the odd name. It turns out to come from Beckett's early novel Murphy; the quotes page has the relevant passage from the first chapter:

Murphy's purpose in going to sit at Neary's feet was not to develop the Neary heart, which he thought would quickly prove fatal to a man of his temper, but simply to invest his own with a little of what Neary, at the time a Pythagorean, called the Apmonia. For Murphy had such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it. Inspected, palpated, ausculated, percussed, radiographed, and cardiographed, it was all that a heart should be. Buttoned up and left to perform, it was like Petrouchka in his box. One moment in such labour that it seemed on the point of seizing, the next in such ebullition that it seemed on the point of bursting. It was the mediation between these extremes that Neary called the Apmonia. When he got tired of calling it the Apmonia, he called it the Isonomy. When he got sick of the sound of Isonomy he called the the Attunement. But he might call it what he liked, into Murphy’s heart it would not enter. Neary could not blend the opposites in Murphy’s heart.

Now, isonomy is an English word (meaning 'equality of laws, or of people before the law'), as is attunement, but not so "apmonia"; where did Beckett get it? I googled, and on the first page of results found a Greek book page that included the title EPΩTIKH APMONIA [erotikí armonía]. The upper-case form of the Greek word αρμονία 'harmony' happens to look exactly like Latin-alphabet "apmonia"; Beckett had presumably noticed this at some point and made a note of it for future use.

ELECTRONIC OXFORD LATIN DICTIONARY.

Daniel Foster of Logos writes to tell me his organization is hoping to produce the Oxford Latin Dictionary on CD-ROM; they are trying to gauge interest by soliciting pre-orders. The deal is that people who pre-order get a steep discount; they will not be charged until it's completed, and they won't be charged at all if the project is cancelled. If you're interested, you can read more about it here.

HYPOSTASIS.

English and Russian both have words derived from Greek hupóstasis 'sediment; foundation; substance; (in Christian use) any of the persons of the Trinity.' The Christian sense is basic to both English hypostasis and Russian ипостась (ipostás'). Looks like an easy case for bilingual equivalence, eh? Think again, and consider these sentences from "Stovelore in Russian Folklife" by Snejana Tempest, whose Russian seems to have taken precedence over her English:
"In Russian folk tales the stove frequently appears as a female character endowed with a specific, if varying, name. In this hypostasis, her main role is to reward respectful attention on the part of children by extending them protection in her bosom in case of danger."
"Different hypostases of the Russian dragon slayer—a brave protagonist of fairy tales and legends who rescues his bride-to-be from the clutches of the dragon—bore names which pointed to their connection with the stove: Ivan Popialov, Matiusha Pepel'noi, Zapechnyi Iskr, Ivan Zapechnik (from the Russian words for ashes and stove)."

Whereas the English word has remained a technical term in philosophy and theology, unknown (I would venture to say) to 99.9% of the speakers of the language, the Russian word has entered common use in the extended sense 'role, capacity'—the only definition in Katzner. The Oxford dictionary, stuck in an earlier era, defines it as 'hypostasis,' which helps not at all when trying to read modern texts. Another example of the perils of treating lookalikes as synonyms. (And another example of the havoc wrought by the lack of editing in books these days; even the laziest of copyeditors would query the use of "hypostasis" in the Tempest article, and it should definitely have been changed to "capacity" in the first sentence and "version" or perhaps "avatar" in the second.)

Incidentally, the Russian word, in the old spelling with initial izhitsa, is the last entry in Dahl's great Russian dictionary.

POVEST VREMENNYKH LET.

The Russian Primary Chronicle, or Повесть временных лет (Povest' vremennykh let, in traditional orthography Повѣсть временныхъ лѣтъ), is a remarkable document that has always been the basic source for the early history of Russia (or rather Rus, since "Russia" was a much later concept). It contains eyewitness, or at least contemporary, accounts of the late 11th and early 12th centuries and reports drawn from oral history for earlier periods. As James Billington says in The Icon and the Axe:

Chronicles were written in Church Slavonic in Kievan Russia long before any were written in Italian or French, and are at least as artistic as the equally venerable chronicles composed in Latin and German. The vivid narrative of men and events in the original "Primary Chronicle" struck the first Western student of Russian chronicles, August Schlözer, as far superior to any in the medieval West, and helped inspire him to become the first to introduce both universal history and Russian history into the curriculum of a modern university.

There are excerpts in English here, here, and here (among others), but the full text is available in Likhachev's modern Russian translation here, in manuscript reproductions here, and (the main reason for this post) in Donald Ostrowski's collation of the manuscripts here. The sections are in pdf files (and, alas, there is no Google cache, which means I can quote only as much as I'm willing to painstakingly type in), but it's worth downloading Adobe if you don't already have it—not only for the sake of the Chronicle itself, but most especially for Ostrowski's introduction (pdf), which is the best thing I've read on the history and practice of textual criticism in Russia and the West. He explains why the stemma came into use and then fell out of favor due to a logical conundrum, and describes his own solution to the latter. He discusses in detail the various proposed (or implied) stemmata for the MSS of the Chronicle, then proposes his own. There is of course much that is of interest only to fellow specialists, but the many lucid discussions of subjects of general interest (for instance, "Textual Criticism vs. Textology," about halfway through, comparing Western and Russian approaches) make it worthwhile for anyone interested in the subject.

My first impulse to write this post actually came from a book that recently arrived from Amazon, Food in Russian History and Culture (the table of contents should give an idea of why I wanted this book so much). I happened to open it to the footnotes to Horace G. Lunt's "Food in the Rus' Primary Chronicle" and was riveted by the first one:

Samuel Cross's 1930 translation called it The Tale of Bygone Years, but in fact the words poviest' vremennykh" liet" in the opening line make little sense, "the tale (or story) of temporary (or temporal) years." Russian scholars long ago decreed that here, and only here, this adjective meant "past, bygone." Now, the phrase vremena i lieta "seasons (or occasions, or special times) and years" recurs in biblical and liturgical contexts, and equivalent Greek phrases are found in reference to histories. It is plausible that an original sequence of noun (in genitive plural) plus connective "and" (vremen" i) could be miscopied as a genitive plural adjective (vremennyx). To posit that the original text had poviest' vremen" i liet" is well within the bounds of justifiable emendation.

That sounded somewhat dubious to me, but I really had no basis for judging. As it happens, Ostrowski deals with this very issue in his introduction:

In a recent article, Horace Lunt conjectures that the phrase "Повѣстъ врѣменъ и лѣтъ" came to be transformed into "Повѣстъ врѣменьныхъ лѣтъ." Yet, the existence of an earlier form of the phrase does not mean that we need to emend the text of the PVL itself. Since my concept of the text of the PVL is α, according to the stemma, then whatever preceded α is not α, but part of the text's sources. If we emend the title to read "врѣменъ и лѣтъ" in spite of the attestation of all the extant manuscript copies, then we have to explain how and why the copyists of β and γ managed to change "врѣменъ и лѣтъ" to "врѣменьныхъ лѣтъ" independently of each other...

Another possible explanation is that Sil'vestr wrote "врѣменъ и лѣтъ" in his authorial version. Then that authorial version was copied once and lost. The scribe of the copy changed "врѣменъ и лѣтъ" to "врѣменьныхъ лѣтъ" and all the other copies maintained the mistaken reading. At least two problems arise with this scenario. First, there is no convincing reason to think that Sil'vestr wrote anything different from what is in the common exemplar of all the other copies... Second, if an error occurred, the more likely place is for it to have occurred in translating the Greek phrase, καιρούς καί χρόνους, into Slavonic rather than in copying the Slavonic words from one manuscript to another... Subsequent copyists seem to have had no problem with this phrase since they do not try to correct it in any way, although in numerous other cases they do try to make corrections when they perceive their exemplar as being in error. Instead, they are comfortable with "врѣменьныхъ лѣтъ," and do not perceive it as being an error. To change "врѣменьныхъ лѣтъ" to "врѣменъ и лѣтъ" would, in my opinion, be a hypercorrection and completely unnecessary...

Instead, I prefer Lunt's alternative proposal—that is, "leave the attested words, but... insist on accurate translation, that is either The Tale of the Years of Time, or The Tale of Passing Years." As Dom Quintin pointed out, we need to accept the possibility that authors sometimes make mistakes.

I rather like "The Tale of the Years of Time." (Incidentally, can my Russian readers confirm that the adjective is in fact pronounced vrEmennykh, with the stress on the first syllable, the way I've been saying it? Because there's also an adjective vremennOi 'temporal.') The fact that the "incorrect" wording has been accepted all along by Russians is exactly what made me doubt Lunt's emendation. And in case anybody's wondering about the discrepancy between my "traditional orthography Повѣсть временныхъ лѣтъ" and Ostrowski's "врѣменьныхъ лѣтъ," with yat' in the first word, the Russian word is время and the Church Slavonic word врѣмя. I don't know why.

THE ENGLISH GYPSIES AND THEIR LANGUAGE.

Project Gutenberg has put online Charles G. Leland's The English Gipsies and Their Language (2nd ed., 1874).

The book contains some remarks on that great curious centre and secret of all the nomadic and vagabond life in England, THE ROMMANY, with comments on the fact, that of the many novel or story-writers who have described the “Travellers” of the Roads, very few have penetrated the real nature of their life... There is also a chapter containing in Rommany and English a very characteristic letter from a full-blood Gipsy to a relative, which was dictated to me, and which gives a sketch of the leading incidents of Gipsy life—trading in horses, fortune-telling, and cock-shying. I have also given accounts of conversations with Gipsies, introducing in their language and in English their own remarks (noted down by me) on certain curious customs... There is a collection of a number of words now current in vulgar English which were probably derived from Gipsy, such as row, shindy, pal, trash, bosh, and niggling, and finally a number of Gudli or short stories.

(Via wood s lot.)

JINDYWOROBAK.

Trying to find something else altogether (the Spanish writer José Jiménez Lozano, on whom there's almost nothing available in English), I happened on the entry Jindyworobak movement in my Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature; struck by the name, I did a little research and thought I'd post what I found. The movement was founded in 1938 by the poet Rex Ingamells (1913-1955), "in response to L.F. Giblin's urging that poets in Australia should portray Australian nature and people as they are in Australia, not with the 'European' gaze." It started as a literary club in Adelaide and emphasized the spirit of place and the importance of Aboriginal culture; you can read more about it here and (in the South Australian context) here (pdf; HTML cache here).

And the name? Ingamells took it from the glossary of James Devaney's The Vanished Tribes (1929), where it was said to mean 'to annex, to join'; it comes from Wuywurung or Woiwurrung, an extinct language of the Melbourne area that is not even listed in Ethnologue. (As a matter of fact, none of the "Victorian" languages mentioned in the last abstract on this page —Madhimadhi, Wembawemba, Wergaia, Yota-Yota, Wathawurrung, and Woiwurrung—are in Ethnologue; perhaps Claire can clear this up when she recovers from her fieldwork.)

A word attributed to Wuywurung is the Australian slang term yabber 'talk,' which is probably from Wuywurung yaba 'speak'; another possibility is mia-mia, a synonym for gunyah 'a temporary shelter of the Aborigines, usu. a simple frame of branches covered with bark, leaves, or grass,' about which you can read in exhaustive detail here:

In the Australian National Dictionary (1988) we are told that it comes from Wathawurung and Wuywurung. Wathawurung was the language spoken on the western side of Port Phillip Bay, including the present city of Geelong and the town of Bacchus Marsh, and extending inland probably as far as the city of Ballarat. Wuywurung was the language spoken in the area of present-day Melbourne, and extending as far north as Seymour, and to the north of Westernport, and from the Goulburn River across to Bendigo. However, in Australian Aboriginal Words in English (1990), a book that also emanates from the Australian National Dictionary Centre, we are told: ‘Although this word was much used in Victoria (the earliest Victorian instance is 1839) it appears to have originated as maya or maya-maya in Nyungar, the language of the Perth–Albany region’. The Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers were puzzled by this change, and sent us a friendly ‘please explain’...

You can see a simple example of such a shelter here, and a more substantial one here.

SONS OF COLUMBIA, AWAKE!

In 1939 Rolfe Humphries was asked to write a poem for Poetry. He was given the title ("Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion"), the meter (unrhymed iambic pentameter), and a request that the poem contain one classical reference per line. The poem appeared in the June issue, and in August the magazine printed an outraged editorial note banning Humphries from the magazine for writing "scurrilous" material. Here's the poem; see if you can figure out what they were so upset about. The explanation's in the extended entry.

Niobe's daughters yearn to the womb again,
Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone;
Chaos in cry, Actaeon's angry pack,
Hounds of Molussus, shaggy wolves driven

Over Ampsanctus' vale and Pentheus' glade,
Laelaps and Ladon, Dromas, Canace,—
As these in fury harry brake and hill
So the great dogs of evil bay the world.

Memory, Mother of Muses, be resigned
Until King Saturn comes to rule again!
Remember now no more the golden day
Remember now no more the fading gold,
Astraea fled, Proserpina in hell;
You searchers of the earth be reconciled!

Because, through all the blight of human woe,
Under Robigo's rust, and Clotho's shears,
The mind of man still keeps its argosies,
Lacedaemonian Helen wakes her tower,

Echo replies, and lamentation loud
Reverberates from Thrace to Delos Isle;
Itylus grieves, for whom the nightingale
Sweetly as ever tunes her Daulian strain.
And over Tenedos the flagship burns.

How shall men loiter when the great moon shines
Opaque upon the sail, and Argive seas
Rear like blue dolphins their cerulean curves?
Samos is fallen, Lesbos streams with fire,
Etna in rage, Canopus cold in hate,
Summon the Orphic bard to stranger dreams.

And so for us who raise Athene's torch.
Sufficient to her message in this hour:
Sons of Columbia, awake, arise!

Well, it seems Humphries had been a student of Nicholas Murray Butler, the famous president of Columbia from 1902 to 1945, and as the everything2.com article on Butler puts it, "great success usually comes with great arrogance as well." A lot of people resented Butler, and Humphries was clearly one of them; if you read down the first letters of the lines, you will get a clear statement of his attitude. The editorial note ran thus:

Not being accustomed to hold manuscripts up to the mirror or to test them for cryptograms, the editors recently accepted and printed a poem containing a concealed scurrilous phrase aimed at a well-known person. This was not called to their attention until several weeks after the issue had been published. The phrase in question is puerile and uninteresting, and would not be referred to except that it is necessary to disclaim editorial responsibility. Apparently it is also necessary to state a principle which one would have though obvious; namely, that any contributor who allows such matter to be printed without the editors' knowledge is guilty of a serious breach of confidence, and will automatically disbar himself from the magazine.

The ban lasted less than a year (he had three poems published in 1941, as you can see here), and I'm sure the joy of the prank was well worth it. (Via MonkeyFilter.)

Incidentally, Humphries is best known for his translations from the Latin poets, notably Ovid, from whom most of the imagery in the poem comes; Actaeon and the list of dogs who hunt him ("Laelaps and Ladon, Dromas, Canace"), for instance, are from Book 3 of the Metamorphoses.

ARABIC WORDS IN SPANISH.

Over at après moi, le déluge, silmarillion has posted a list of all the Spanish words borrowed from Arabic, using the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (both printed and online editions), the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE), the American Heritage Dictionary, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise, and the webpage Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana. The post and definitions are in Spanish, but if you're interested in the subject, that shouldn't be much of a problem. My only quibble so far (having skimmed the list) is that some of the words go back to Turkish, not Arabic:
Chaleco - quizá del it. Giulecco, y este del turco yelek
Zapato del turco zabata

But I'm certainly not going to complain about too many etymologies, and besides, for lagniappe there's a little annex of Basque words that come from Arabic. Gracias, amigos!

BLOOPERS.

The annoying Richard Lederer, who has a Ph.D. in English and Linguistics from the University of New Hampshire but whose voluminous writings about language place him rather in the amateur class, is (quite appropriately) standing in for William Safire this week at the NY Times Magazine, and his column is about bloopers, a favorite topic of his. As he says, "Word botches are music to my ears, and over the years I've arranged five anthologies of fluffs, flubs, goofs, gaffes, blunders, boners . . . well, you get the idea." In the first place, although they are language-related, bloopers are about as cliched a topic as could be imagined; you would think the Times would be approximately as thrilled as they would be with a story about how it's so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk, as our intrepid reporter demonstrates! At any rate, the column illustrates why I lost interest in the subject several decades ago, once I realized that published bloopers are as reliably authentic as the letters columns in porn magazines. Verbal goofs caught in the wild can be very funny, but that happens rarely, and it's much easier for teachers to make them up during boring stretches. Lederer says solemnly "As a word-bethumped language guy, I adhere firmly to the blooper snooper's code, taking only what I find and contriving nothing," but I believe him exactly as much as I believe a teller of tall tales who swears that this really happened. His culminating example is this:

Of the thousands of specimens of inspired gibberish that I've captured and put on display, my favorite is this gem from a student essay: ''Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.'' The statement is hysterically unhistorical, and we have no trouble believing that a student actually wrote it.

Actually, I have considerable trouble believing that. Furthermore, I'll bet you money everything in the column is cut-and-pasted from one of his many books. It's a lazy, useless excuse for a language column, and almost makes me long for Safire's return from vacation.

TAMADE!

The essay by Lu Xun on the Chinese national curse, mentioned in this post and the comments to this one, has been translated by Huichieh Loy of From a Singapore Angle; you can read it here. It begins:

Those who live in China will often have occasion to hear the swear: tamade (他妈的) and others like it. I think the geographical distribution of this phrase is probably as wide as the lands upon which the Chinese have set foot; and I'm afraid the frequency of its use may not be less than that of the polite nin hao ya (您好呀). If, as some have put it, the peony is China's "national flower", then this has to be considered China's "national swear" (guoma 国骂).

It's funny and interesting; Huichieh Loy says "The language used—earlier twentieth century ('May Fourth') Chinese, plus the many learned classical citations, make the piece not that easy for me to translate. I have not been literal in all instances, and suggestions for improvements are most welcome."

THE UNFOLDING OF LANGUAGE.

The good people at Metropolitan Books sent me a copy of Guy Deutscher's new book, The Unfolding of Language; I'm only a little over halfway through it, but I've accumulated enough things I want to talk about I thought I'd better start now, and leave the summing up for when I finish it. I will say that it's a great pleasure to read a book on historical linguistics written for the layperson by an actual linguist, and I hope lots of people read it and get a better idea of how languages change, so they can understand how pointless are all the demands for preservation, warnings of doom, and nostalgic looks back at an imagined time of linguistic perfection from which we've supposedly degenerated. (On this subject, read the excerpt from Chapter 3 here to be convinced that "the English of today is not what it used to be, but then again, it never was.")

To the details, then! The first thing that made me want to start blogging was a picture on page 117; it's in black and white in the book, but you can see it in glorious color towards the end of the excerpts page. It shows a Greek moving van blazoned with the word ΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΕΣ [metaforés], which is the normal Greek word for 'moves, removals'; as Deutscher says, "meta-phora is Greek for ‘carry across’ (meta = ‘across’, phor = ‘carry’). Or to use the Latin equivalent, meta-phor just means trans-fer." I used to see such signs in Astoria (the heavily Greek part of Queens where I used to live), and I'd point them out to whoever I was walking with and explain that "metaphor" is a basic everyday word in Greek; I'm delighted to be able to send everyone to this picture (and get a nostalgic thrill myself).

The other thing I had to get off my chest involves a classic joke he tells on page 153:

I don't know if you've ever heard the story about the two Jewish merchants in Poland who bump into each other at the train station in Warsaw one morning. Both are competitors in the same trade, so they eye each other suspiciously, and one of them asks, 'So where are you travelling today?' 'To Łódz,' comes the cautious answer. 'To Łódz, eh?' the first says skeptically. 'I know very well that you are only telling me that to make me think that you are actually going to Krakow. But — I happen to know that you really are going to Łódz...' And after a little pause he adds: 'So tell me: why are you trying to deceive me?'

Now, the minor point is that "Łódz" is misspelled: it should be Łódź, with a palatal z (the name is pronounced more or less "wooj" in Polish, like "wouldja" [="would you"] without the final vowel). The main point is that it seems odd to use the Polish spelling at all. The city is normally written Lodz in English, without any accents, so there would be nothing unusual in spelling it that way; furthermore, in Jewish jokes involving Eastern Europe (this joke is also told about Minsk and Pinsk, and I'm sure there are other versions), the protagonists are assumed to be speaking Yiddish, and in Yiddish the name is pronounced /lodz/, exactly how you'd read the normal English spelling, [or /lodž/, like English lodge but with the vowel of low]. So why go out of your way to use an "accurate" Polish spelling that implies a pronunciation foreign to the joke? I don't know if the spelling was the author's choice or a copy editor's decision, but I think it was a mistake. As always, however, I welcome disagreement.

INTERNET CHINESE TEXT ARCHIVE.

I wasn't sure if I should post The Internet Chinese Text Archive, a huge collection of texts in Chinese (which I found at Plep), since anyone who can make use of it probably already knows about it, but when googling it I ran across A Brief History of Asian Studies Online (through 2003) by T. Matthew Ciolek, so I figured I'd post both and see if anyone's interested. The "Brief History" has this under 1991:

sometime in 1991: Ulysses Li establishes "The Internet Chinese Text Archive" [now at www.ibiblio.org/ chinese-text] the first Chinese text archive on the Internet. It was formerly known to web surfers as "Xiaoyu's Collection" or "Carp Temple." This collection had once been served by the server of Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars (IFCSS) Chinese Community Information Center (CCIC).

ITALIAN DIALECTS.

I dialetti italiani: Language and Dialect on the Italian Peninsula (via Plep) is a potentially useful site, with all sorts of interesting-sounding links. Unfortunately, none of the external ones work ("Last Modified: 12/27/96"), but there's still a short essay and a map hosted on the site, so I figure it's worth mentioning. There are functioning links on Italian dialects here and here and relevant Wikipedia pages here and here (and I vote with those who think those pages should be merged).

CHINESE SWEARING.

We've discussed Spanish and Russian swearing, and had a brief go at Chinese; now, courtesy of Dinesh Rao, I direct your attention to a more detailed post on the latter over at From a Singapore Angle, wherein a Chinese article by Lin Siyun, "Inquiry into the Chinese and Foreign Philosophies of Swearing," is discussed and in part translated. Some very interesting stuff:

When a person does something wrong, the usual way in other countries is to swear at the culprit himself; the Chinese way is not to abuse the culprit directly, but to swear at his mother and ancestors. Foreigners found this peculiar way of doing things very hard to understand: This person did wrong, what's it to do with his mother or ancestors? Anglo-Americans will say "F--- you", but usually not "F--- your mother"; the Japanese will say "You bakaro", but normally not "Your ancestors bakaro." (bakaro = 馬鹿野郎 or ばかやろう; roughly, "dumbass".)

And when the Chinese swear, they seldom use terms that displays racial discrimination (unlike the case of the Anglo-Americans), and in any case, such terms are rare in the Chinese vocabulary. Take the often encountered waiguo guizi (外國鬼子; i.e., "foreign devil"): if we were to think it through, we'll realize that it actually contains an element of "respect". It seems that the Chinese would only call those foreigners who had been able to bully or invade them "devils"—such as meiguo guizi (美國鬼子; i.e., "American devil") or riben guizi (日本鬼子; i.e., "Japanese devil"). China fought wars with India and Vietnam before, but they don't usually say yindu guizi (印度鬼子; i.e., "Indian devil") or yuenan guizi (越南鬼子; i.e., "Vietnamese devil")—it is as if these are not good enough to be guizi.

I don't agree with everything the author has to say about English swearing, but I'm glad to know about the distinction in deviltry.

ETHNOLOGUE IN THE NEWS.

It's a pleasure to be able to offer unalloyed praise for a NY Times story about linguistics, Michael Erard's "How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages." I've been using Ethnologue in print form since I was in college (its availability online at no cost is one of the best things about the internet), and it was interesting to learn that it started as far back as 1951. There are some great quotes in the piece:

"I occasionally note in my comments to the press," said Nicholas Ostler, the president of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, "the irony that Ethnologue's total count of known languages keeps going up with each four-yearly edition, even as we solemnly intone the factoid that a language dies out every two weeks."

This dissonance points to a more basic problem. "There's no actual number of languages," said Merritt Ruhlen, a linguist at Stanford whose own count is "around" 4,580. "It kind of depends on how one defines dialects and languages."

The linguists behind the Ethnologue agree that the distinctions can be indistinct. "We tend to see languages as basically marbles, and we're trying to get all the marbles in our bag and count how many marbles we have," said M. Paul Lewis, a linguist who manages the Ethnologue database (www.ethnologue.com) and will edit the 16th edition. "Language is a lot more like oatmeal, where there are some clearly defined units but it's very fuzzy around the edges."

The Yiddish linguist Max Weinrich once famously said, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot" (or "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"). To Ethnologue, and to the language research organization that produces it, S.I.L. International, a language is a dialect that needs its literature, including a Bible.

I love the fact that he worked a Yiddish quote into a piece about a Christian organization, and remember, folks, you heard it here first! (I was wondering why I chose the spelling "diyalekt" in that entry, but it seems I picked it up from here; in any case, Erard's version is undisputably better.)

Update. See now UJG's post, with an actual image of Weinreich's original Yiddish.

MORE LATIN BLOGS.

When I wrote this entry, I lazily took Scipio's word for it that there were no other blogs in Latin; had I given it a moment's thought, I would have realized that couldn't be the case (there are a couple of blogs in Klingon, after all), and miram in the comments kindly directed me to three others: DEVS EX CRAPVLA, colloquia in lingua latina, and Diarium latinum. Furthermore, Justin of The Mad Latinist's Journal mentions that he will be posting only in Latin from July 29th to August 6th; he also links to a list of a half-dozen other blogs in Latin. Me paenitet offendisse!

POLYGLATT.

Zackary Sholem Berger posts about how he combines his medical studies with his interest in languages:

Like every other medical student, I have a command of several different kinds of medical terminology: the mind-numbing jargon of the scientific literature, the half-macho talk of rounds and last but certainly not least important, the normal words people use to talk in English about whatever's the matter with them.

It's this last kind of vocabulary that I lack in Spanish. I can talk a blue streak about genetic predispositions and infectious agents, about endoscopies and anesthesia — these are international terms, much the same in Spanish, English and many other languages. But lay language is different. I've already experienced a certain kind of linguistic blockage more than once. I've started a conversation with a Spanish-speaking patient, we've built up something of a rapport, she's complimented my Spanish, I've figured out why she's come to the hospital. Then, all of a sudden, I need to ask a specific question to narrow down the field of possible diagnoses. I use what I think is the right word, and one of two expressions appears on the patient's face: either outright incomprehension, or a polite glazed-over look that means, "I'm going to keep my mouth shut until I can figure out what the heck this nice doctor is saying." It's then that I have to search my dusty old neurons for a Spanish word I learned once, many years ago, or for a synonym that's used in the home country of this particular patient. During one memorable conversation, a patient and I sat through a long, awkward pause before she figured out that I was asking about her period.

He points out that a lot of people would think he should be concentrating on the medical stuff, but says "I'm a person who doesn't mind sacrificing a little efficiency (or even a lot) to get a good conversation going with the person sitting in front of me. Will that make me a better doctor? Beats me, but I know I'll have more fun this way." I personally think it will make him a better doctor, and in fact one reason my wife and I like our current doctor so much is that he actually converses with us as well as treating us. It is possible to be (in the words of his clever title) a medicine mensch.

Incidentally, poetry readers will also find his previous post, a review of a new translation of Pessoa, of interest.

SCIPIO SCRIPSIT.

Scipio Scripsit is the blog of someone who, frustrated that [he had found] blogs about Latin but none in Latin (or, as he puts it, "Plurimi de latina, sed nullos in ipsa latina"), decided to remedy the deficiency. [Note: I should have checked before taking his word for it that there were no others; see next entry.] (He's a real blogger, too—in his second post he has a picture of his dog Bomilcar.) Gaudete omnes! (Via Classics in Contemporary Culture.)

Update. Aug. 2006: Blog appears to be defunct, or, as the blogger would have put it, defunctus.

EUROLANG.

Eurolang "is a specialist niche news agency covering topics related to lesser-used languages, linguistic diversity and national minorities within the European Union."

It provides an expanding on-line daily service across Europe, to language NGOs, the media, European, State and local government, academia, researchers and the general public.

The purpose of Eurolang is to provide, on a daily basis, relevant and current news about lesser-used language communities to the general public and to national and regional media (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, internet media) in Europe and worldwide.

Thanks for the link, Rick!

A PLATE OF GREEK.

Via Incoming Signals I discovered an archive of scripts for the British sketch comedy show "A Bit of Fry and Laurie." As an aficionado of the Higher Lower British Humor, I was delighted, but didn't expect it to be LH material—until my wife drew my attention to "Gordon and Stuart eat Greek." If you have some acquaintance with Greek, either Ancient or Modern, you will enjoy this little scene.

If you don't know Ancient Greek, the bit about the word "genoymeen" will zip right past you, so I'll explain that it's an old-style Brit pronunciation of γενοιμην, an optative form meaning 'may I be' or 'that I might be' that was so familiar to those who partook of an old-school classical education that Rupert Brooke could insert it into an English poem, "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," which is online in many places but apparently only here with the Greek bit in actual Greek:
ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester!

MOSCOW-SPB DICTIONARY.

A Moscow Times story by Victor Sonkin reports on a dictionary I'd very much like to have (at least, if it were a convenient little book instead of a "module" for a piece of equipment I don't own):

In April, the Moscow-based company ABBYY Software House released a new electronic dictionary. It is the first work of its kind, even though the dwellers of Russia's two largest cities have needed such a tool since time immemorial. It is a Moscow-St. Petersburg dictionary—one that gives "translations" of Moscow words into Petersburgese.

Social and cultural differences between the two Russian capitals have been piling up for more than three centuries, and language has been no exception to this process. The variations start with phonetics: Muscovites pronounce certain words differently from their northwestern rivals. For instance, the "ah" sound, as in "Mahskvah," is more prominent in their speech. Small interjections and greetings follow suit. In Moscow a general question is "Chto?" (What?), while in St. Petersburg you will hear "Kak?" (How?) in the same context, at least from older people.

The more noticeable division, however, is lexical: when different words are used for the same things. One often cited example is the word for "curb," which is bordyur in Moscow but porebrik in Petersburg. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. ABBYY's dictionary contains 76 items; there are actually many more. The list of objects and notions that are expressed differently includes metro pass, house entrance, eraser, doughnut, turtleneck, newsstand, grand (as in the slang word for "a thousand"), cigarette stub and chicken, to name a few. Even borrowed words react differently. The Middle Eastern snack known in the West as a gyro or doner kebab is called shaurma in Moscow but shaverma—with a different stress!—in St. Petersburg.

The two "dialects" are mutually comprehensible, but misunderstandings do occur. Once, while visiting my St. Petersburg relatives, I went to a shop to buy some bread. "Is the bread fresh?" I asked the woman behind the counter. Bewildered, she replied, "We don't have any." Now it was my turn to be puzzled, since the shelves behind her were bursting with bread. Then it dawned on me: It was all white bread, called bulka in St. Petersburg; they only say khleb, or "bread," when referring to the dark kind.

I can't find any mention of it at the ABBYY sites (Russian, English), but I probably just don't know where to look; I don't imagine Sonkin made it up. At any rate, I'm fascinated by this sort of dialect difference, and would appreciate any further information from Russian readers. For one thing, what are the differing stresses on shaurma and shaverma? And of course I'm curious about the words for metro pass, house entrance, eraser, and so on.

(Via blogchik, Michele Humes's Russophile blog.)

Addendum. See the article by V.I. Belikov, "Сравнение Петербурга с Москвой и другие соображения по социальной лексикографии" [Comparison of Petersburg and Moscow and other observations on social lexicography].

UNKNOWN TO DICTIONARIES.

A Language Log post by Mark Liberman introduces me to a very interesting word which he spells "dykes," meaning 'diagonal cutting pliers' ("as a tool term, dykes is always plural, like scissors"). Now, googling "diagonal cutting pliers, dykes" (without the quotes) gets me 367 hits, while changing "dykes" to "dikes" almost doubles the number, to 706, so there may be a slight preference for the latter spelling, but both the totals and the difference between them are small enough that it's impossible to tell. One wants, therefore, to consult a dictionary—but as Mark says, the word "isn't in the AHD, M-W Unabridged, the OED, or Encarta."

I think this is really strange. As far as I know, dykes is the standard American term for this ubiquitous and useful tool. In my experience as a child working on bicycles and later cars with my friends, as a mechanic in the army, and hanging around electronics technicians at Bell Labs, "dykes" was as common as a term as hacksaw or chisel. I mean, what else would you call them?

It is indeed strange; I don't recall previously seeing a normal word of long standing, even one of limited circulation, that was not in any dictionary; that snub is usually reserved for recent slang terms. For what it's worth, this site says "The diagonal cutting pliers, commonly called 'diagonals' or 'dikes'...", which suggests a shortening of diagonal and would seem to support the spelling with i. But one JAX in this discussion says "Dykes was the surname of the guy who invented the best of its time wire cutters. 'side Dykes' was the name of the later diagonal model." Until the lexicographers take note of this neglected lexical item and settle on an etymology, you can pick whichever spelling looks right to you and no one can prove you wrong.

THE PERILS OF LEXICOGRAPHY.

Thanks to the indefatigable aldiboronti (who should really set up shop as a linguablogger), my attention has been directed to a wonderful essay, "The Perils of Lexicography," by Judith Robertson, an Australian lexicographer who takes the trouble to investigate the true origins of a number of purportedly Australian words:

I was recently examining Jonathon Green’s Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang (1998). This work contains 70,000 words and phrases from a variety of English-speaking countries. In its Acknowledgements Green admits that ‘the profession of lexicography is, inevitably, a plagiaristic one, a linguistic Pacman that moves on, gobbling up its predecessors as it goes’. But there are very real dangers in this kind of plagiarism...

Cornelius Crowe’s Australian Slang Dictionary has been widely used by scholars researching Australian English. In spite of the book’s title, it obviously includes words that are not exclusively Australian. But what scholars have failed to realise is the fact that almost every entry in Crowe’s dictionary has been plagiarised from other dictionaries... Matsell’s Secret Language of Crime and the anonymous Slang Dictionary of New York are not well known in Australia. The entries in both American dictionaries are close to identical, and both dictionaries were produced for the New York Police. The 1997 reprint of the Slang Dictionary of New York describes the work as ‘the comprehensive dictionary to which novelists and historians turn to make the streets of 19th century America come alive’. Unfortunately, Cornelius Crowe turned to these American dictionaries to make the streets of nineteenth-century Australia come alive...

There is a very good lexicographical lesson to be learned from all this. Although it is common practice to use other dictionaries, and it makes sense to do so, the lexicographer who uses dictionaries without discretion is in great peril. And the lexicographer who uses only other dictionaries for evidence of the existence of a word is in greater peril.

Ouch! I've already emended the false entries in my copy of Cassell (a superb work otherwise), and I hope more lexicographers are doing the unglamorous but essential work of eliminating such fake words from reference works.

HYBRID TIBETAN.

Dick & Garlick has a thought-provoking post on Jamyang Norbu's

five-part essay in the Times of Tibet which attempts to refute propaganda myths about the Chinese 'modernization' of the Tibetan language. In response to the claim that the language lacked a scientific vocabulary prior to Chinese intervention, Norbu methodically lists every neologism adopted in the early 20th century, demonstrating that the Tibetans had names for modern inventions like electricity, radio, photography and the airplane long before the occupation of their homeland. In the process, he creates an unusual portrait of a society and a language adapting to modern times.

Dick & Garlick quotes some of the borrowings used in the early part of the century:

Tibetans called the telegraph tar from the Hindi for wire, a motorcar was a mota or gari, from gaadi, flashlights were known as bijili after the Hindi word for electricity, and the postal service was called dak. Borrowed words like these were in common use throughout the country, while in Lhasa you could smoke a shik-ray (cigarette), chew gig-chiri (chewing gum), or buy a tikkus (ticket) to the beskop (bioscope, cinema) to watch the movies of Charlie Chumping.

The first part of the series is here; you can get to them all from Norbu's author page, linked to his name above.

MA, A SMALL BIRD.

Another entry from Davidson I had to share:

Gallimaufrey (gallimaufry, and other variant spellings), an obsolete culinary term, corresponding to the French word gallimaufré [actually galimafrée—LH], meaning a dish of odds and ends of food, a hodge-podge.

The obscurity surrounding the origin of this word, whether in the French or English version, prompted Dallas (1877) in Kettner's Book of the Table to compose one of the most elaborate and far-reaching essays in culinary etymology which has ever been written. He devoted over 14 pages to the matter, treating also several other words (galimatias, salmagundi, salmi, etc. — even Hamlet's 'miching malicho' and the Anglo-Indian mulligatawny) which he perceived to be connected by the root 'ma', meaning in his opinion a small bird or chicken and serving as an important piece of evidence for the previous existence of a language, possibly older than Sanskrit, which had already been lost in medieval times but which was the source of numerous words used in the kitchen.

Although the term itself is of little consequence, the fact that it engendered this towering edifice of etymological speculation is more than enough to warrant giving it an entry.

Lest I leave you with the impression that Dallas was simply an idiot, I'll also quote his robust explanation (found at the Food Timeline) of the history of the Chateaubriand steak:

Take another example of mystification, and it must be added, of exceeding folly—to use no stronger epithet. It is connected with the illustrious name of Chateaubriand. One of the foremost clubs in London one day changed its cook; and its members were astonished to find that the steak which had formerly been served to them under the name filet de boeuf was now always announced as a Chateaubriand. The cook was called to account. What was the meaning of the new name? Why should plain Englishmen be puzzled with a new name—the slang of the kitchen? Why should they not, as of old, get the fillet [to which they] were accustomed? The cook had really nothing to say. He could only tell that a Chateaubriand was the fashionable name in Paris for a steak cut from the ordinary fillet-steaks—nearly two inches. The members of the club were not satisfied with this explanation; and to the great disgust of the chef, who felt the sublimity of the name of Chateaubriand, the order was given that henceforth a steak from the fillet should be announced as before on other bills under the time-honoured name of filet de boeuf.

They were quite right; and even if the cook, better informed, had been able to give them the true history and meaning of a Chateaubriand, there can be little doubt that they would have still arrived at the same decision. He was correct in stating that a Chateaubriand is cut from the best part of the fillet, and is nearly twice the ordinary thickness of steak: but is this all? The thickness of the steak involves a peculiar method of cooking it. It is so thick that by the ordinary method it might be burnt on the surface when quite raw inside; and therefore—though the new method is neglected and is even forgotten very much—it was put upon the fire between two other slices of beef, which, if burnt upon the grill, could have been thrown away. It may still be asked, what has this to do with Chateaubriand, that his name should be attached to a steak so prepared? Here we come into a region of culpable levity. Chateaubriand published his most famous work under the name of Le Génie du Christianisme. The profane wits of the kitchen thought that a good steak sent to the fire between two malefactor steaks was a fair parody of the Génie du Christianisme. If I remember rightly it was at Champeaux' in the Place de la Bourse that this eccentric idea took form and burst upon Paris. As to the name, it is needless to say a word; as to the good sense of the mode of cooking the steak, judgement is pronounced in the fact that, though the Chateaubriand still remains as thick as ever, it is rare now to see it grilled between two other steaks—that being too extravagant. Indeed, in Gouffé's great work on cookery, which must always be mentioned with respect for the good sense and taste which pervade it, there is not a hint given that the Chateaubriand is to be cooked, or was ever cooked, between the two robber steaks. Most cookery books say not one word of the Chateaubriand, which ranks now as the prime steak of the French table, and which appears in Parisian dinner bills to bewilder the benighted Englishman with a magnificent but unintelligble name.

Update. Jim of Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey, who has an understandable interest in the subject, has posted a German etymology of galimafrée („geröstete Fleischreste‟). No pre-Sanskritic culinary syllables, I'm afraid.

EL INDIO.

An interesting article, "Proverbs and prejudice: El Indio in Hispanic proverbial speech" by Shirley L. Arora (De Proverbio, Vol. 1, no. 2, 1995):

The proverbial speech of Hispanic America preserves, even today, numerous traces of the interaction between explorers, conquerors, or settlers and the native populations they found in the various regions of the so-called New World, while printed sources record others that have apparently disappeared from current usage. Many, though not all, of these expressions involve stereotypes of the Native American, some resembling those found in English, others diverging markedly from them.

A little long and could have used editing, but there's a lot of good data there. (Via dhruva's MetaFilter post.)

SMERT' NEIZBEZHNA.

Avva has announced a wonderful find: the original source of the epigraph to Nabokov's Dar (The Gift, currently my favorite of his novels). The epigraph reads:

Дуб — дерево. Роза — цветок. Олень — животное. Воробей — птица. Россия — наше отечество. Смерть неизбежна.
П. Смирновский.
Учебник русской грамматики.

[The oak is a tree. The rose is a flower. The deer is an animal. The sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.
P. Smirnovskii, Textbook of Russian Grammar]

It sounds too good to be true, and one could be forgiven for assuming Nabokov made it up, but Avva links to an image of the actual page; the quoted line, which can be seen in its full splendor at the top of his entry, is at the upper left of the page image. (It turns out to be a series of examples illustrating section 10, which concerns gender; I'm not sure how the examples help, since only the last uses an adjective to make explicit the gender of a noun—the rest are simple equations of two nouns, though it's true that examples of all three genders are given.) This makes me very happy.

IN FORME OF SPECHE.

Daniel W. Mosser has a good website on "The Evolution of Present-Day English" that has pages on each phase of the history of English, starting with Indo-European. I'm too familiar with the material to be sure of this, but it seems pitched at a level accessible to everyone, whatever their prior acquaintance with the subject. (Thanks to aldiboronti at Wordorigins for the link.)

If you're wondering, the title is from Chaucer, specifically a remarkable passage in Book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde that could serve as an epigraph for any book on historical linguistics:

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Eek for to winne love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry been usages.

ROMANIZATIONS OF CHINESE.

John Emerson of Idiocentrism (where incidentally you will find a new section on "Frankophilia": "All the way back to the Chrétien de Troyes and the Song of Roland, the French have had a knack for lewdness, irony, and the freedom of women") sent me a link to a page called "A Non-Exhaustive Euro-Hannic Transcription Engine: English, French, German, and Chinese Romanisations of Chinese." Very useful comparative charts, and as an added bonus (since it's on a Marxist site) you get the amusement of occasional references to "comrades" and injunctions like "'Jiang Zhongzheng' (adopted after entering politics) is a more admiring name for Chiang Kai-shek than is 'Jiang Jieshi'—and thus to be avoided."

MISSING WORDS.

Avva has a thread about words that one knows from one language and feels the lack of in another; he kicks it off by saying that he misses the English noun mind in Russian and Hebrew, the Hebrew word stam 'simply, just' (he explains its wide range of uses here) in English and Russian, and the Russian word ved' 'you see; you know; after all; isn't it?' in English. If you read Russian, you'll find lots of interesting suggestions.

Y'ALL.

I have previously posted about the use and abuse of y'all, and I thought I'd mention that there's a vigorous discussion going on at MetaFilter about the fact that "The use of 'y'all' is slowly but steadily gaining acceptance in standard English far outside...'the South'." There are a few idiots and bigots, but in general I'm pleased with the standard of discourse, which has risen noticeably (on language-related topics) in the three or four years I've been following the site.

SWEETER/FATTER.

From the Dagestan and Chechnya entry in The Penguin Companion to Food:

Still on the topic of sheep, Chenciner observes that both main types of sheep are eaten: the plains sheep with fat tails, and the mountain sheep without. He quotes from Thomas Love Peacock (1823):

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter,
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.

Peacock... hmm, was peacock ever eaten? Sure it was! "It was so greatly prized in classical Rome as a bird to serve at banquets that Cicero (1st century BC) said that it was 'daring' to give a banquet without one." But

Witteveen..., in an essay which is the best source of information on the subject, observes that peacocks seem not to have made good eating. He cites modern experiments which confirm the view expressed by some authorities in premedieval and medieval times that the flesh of a peacock is tough and needs to be hung and then given a prolonged cooking if it is to be edible. Implicit confirmation is provided by the fact that when the turkey arrived from the New World it rapidly displaced the peacock... A full explanation of its high status at banquets for 1,600 years and its subsequent eclipse within a century would have to take into account more factors than can be considered in this brief note.

THE CHINESE BABEL.

An article by Howard W. French in today's NY Times does a surprisingly good job at describing the complex linguistic situation in China:

DATIAN, China - As a crowd formed around a rare foreign visitor in this town's open-air market, the conversation turned quickly from the price of dried fish and fresh fruit to how many dialects people here could muster.

Hoisting her cherubic 6-month-old daughter, Lin Jinchun, a 29-year-old dumpling seller, claimed that she could speak two, drawing a quick counterclaim of three from her mother, Lin Guimei.

What was the third dialect? someone asked. "Putonghua," the mother answered, counting the standard national language of China as if it were just another minor tongue. Meanwhile others, shouting above the din, chimed in that they could speak four, five or even six tongues...

China has 55 ethnic minorities, many of them with cultural roots in neighboring countries. The linguistic diversity among these minorities, however, pales in comparison with the variety of tongues spoken among China's Han, the ethnic group that makes up more than 90 percent of the population. The Han speak as many 1,500 dialects, with the bulk of those concentrated in the southern half of the country.

The official view here is that all of the tongues spoken by Han are variants of one language, Chinese. But in a country with a traumatic history of civil war and fragmentation, many specialists say this theory may have more to do with politics than with linguistic reality. Many of the Han dialects are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible, more distinct than languages from disparate regions of Europe.

"No one can clearly answer the question how many dialects there are in China," said Zhang Hongming, a professor of Chinese linguistics at the University of Wisconsin who is in China doing fieldwork. "The degree of difference among dialects is much higher than the degree of difference among European languages. In Europe they call them languages, but in China we share a culture, so the central government would like to consider that one language is shared by many different peoples. It is simply a different definition."...

Even by the standards of China's complicated language matrix, Fujian Province stands out for its richness, a dense thicket of tongues laid down by waves of migration over time from central China.

"We have an expression, that if you drive five miles in Fujian the culture changes, and if you drive 10 miles, the language does," said Zhang Zhenxing, a linguist from Fujian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "In recent years, because of economic growth things have been getting better, but there are still an extraordinary number of dialects in Fujian."

If Fujian Province can be said to have a Babel, tiny Datian County can stake a pretty solid claim. In this 800 square miles of rural central Fujian, where fields of rice and tobacco grow in the shadow of tall mountains, no fewer than five dialects are spoken in addition to Mandarin.

To drive a few miles down the road from one village to another is indeed to plunge into a new linguistic universe. Things can be as confusing for someone from the next town as they are for the total outsider.

In one village near the county seat, where an old Daoist shrine sits high above the roadside, a man who said he spoke southern Min, one of Fujian's most widely spoken dialects, tried to exchange words with some boys who said they also spoke southern Min. A few words from each side, however, sufficed to show they were mutually unintelligible.

Chen Wenxian, a shopkeeper in his late 20's in another village, grimaced with incomprehension when a driver pulled up and inquired about the price of shoes in his glass display case. The two switched into heavily accented but mutually comprehensible Mandarin.

Mr. Chen, slouched in his chair behind his counter, shrugged when asked the name of the village's language. Consultations with a cluster of family members did not unearth a name either.

"It's just what we speak here," he said. Asked if he could understand the language in the next village, a short distance down the road, he said: "I have no idea what they speak. Those people talk too fast."

Ethnologue says: "Putonghua is inherently intelligible with the Beijing dialect, and other Mandarin varieties in the northeast. Mandarin varieties in the Lower Plateau in Shaanxi are not readily intelligible with Putonghua. Mandarin varieties of Guilin and Kunming are inherently unintelligible to speakers of Putonghua."

In the same article they mention this interesting form of speech: "Hezhouhoua is spoken in the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture and Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of southern Gansu Province, and in neighboring areas in Qinghai Province. The grammar is basically Altaic or Tibetan, while the vocabulary and phonology is basically Northwestern Mandarin, or a relexified variety of Tibetan." I don't know why they don't include it in their list of mixed languages (see also an earlier LH post on the subject).

DAVIDSON'S COMPANION TO FOOD.

I got another birthday present today (I like these birthdays that stretch on and on): Alan Davidson's magisterial Penguin Companion to Food (available in hardcover as The Oxford Companion to Food). I have been keenly interested in this book ever since I learned about Davidson, but I didn't think I'd actually get my hands on it except at a library. Now I can play with it to my heart's content; my first of what will doubtless be many quotes from the book is the entry "Laksa" (by Charles Perry, "the leading authority on early Arabic cookery"), which will give an idea of the interest the book has for me as a lover of languages:

Laksa a term which derives from the original Persian word for noodle, lakhsha (meaning 'slippery'). Although Iran has not been a heavy consumer of noodles, it has an ancient history of noodle-making; indeed, there has been speculation that the Chinese learned the idea of noodle-making from the same Persian merchants who introduced the flour mill to them during the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220). The term lakhsha was certainly used in medieval Arabic and has shown considerable powers of survival. It is still used in E. Europe (Hungarian laska, Russian lapsha, Ukrainian lokshina, Lithuanian lakstiniai) and in Afghanistan (lakhchak).

Also, it is known that Arab traders or Indian Muslims had spread the use of pasta to Indonesia in perhaps the 13th century. The old Indonesian and Malaysian name laksa shows that this pasta originated in Persia, not from a Chinese source (as in the case of the modern Indonesian name mie).

A quaint Persian tale retold in a 10th-century Arabic recipe collection has King Chosroes I offhandedly inventing laksha during a hunting expedition in the course of a discussion of how to flavour a soup of wild ass's meat. However, by the 13th century, reshteh ('string') had supplanted it, and this is now the usual word for a flat, sliced noodle in the Near East.

I can't resist quoting a cautionary note as well:

The fact that something is mentioned in the book as being eaten or having been eaten by humans does not in itself imply that to eat it now or in the future would be appropriate, legally permissible, or safe.

Kids, don't try this at home!

LEPCHA [MORA].

Lepcha is a language of the Indian state of Sikkim and nearby regions; it's a Sino-Tibetan language, but its exact relationship to the others is apparently in dispute. It's spoken by the Lepcha people (self-designation: Róng), and it has its own script dating to the 17th century. Now there's a proposal for encoding the rather complex script; you can read all about it at abecedaria.

Addendum. Since the discussion in the comments is almost entirely about morae (or, if you prefer, moras), I've added "mora" to the entry title. The discussion is over my head but very interesting: thanks, Tim and Suzanne!

ENSIGN CHEER.

Still reading Mason & Dixon, and I've run hard aground on the following passage:

Summer takes hold, manifold sweet odors of the Fields, and presently the Forest, become routine, and one night the Surveyors sit in their Tent, in the Dark, and watch Fire-flies, millions of them blinking ev'rywhere,—Dixon engineering plans for lighting the Camp-site with them[...] Jeremiah will lead the Fire-flies to stream continuously through the Tent in a narrow band, here and there to gather in glass Globes, concentrating their light to the Yellow of a new-risen Moon.

"And when we move to where there are none of these tiny Linkmen?"

"We take 'em with huz...? Lifetime Employment!"

"But how long do they live?"

"Ensign Cheer."

I've racked my brains but can come up with no interpretation of "Ensign Cheer" that makes sense. Can anyone come up with an idea? Perhaps a translated version might shed some light?

Update. David A. Heal explains it perfectly in the comments: it's not a direct answer to the question, it's a commentary on the question: "My, what a cheerful fellow!" Once again, the LH readership comes through.

Incidentally, I regret to report that the doubtless illegal German site that reproduced the entire text of the novel has been taken down, as was inevitable, so it looks like I'll have to copy out my quotations by hand from now on.

RIP LORENZO THOMAS.

The poet Lorenzo Thomas, whose speech on "Poetry and the Vernacular" I blogged last year, has died.

Thomas was born in Panama in 1944. Four years later the family immigrated to New York City, where Thomas grew up. Spanish was his first language, and he strove to master English to escape getting beaten up by other kids for "talking funny."

"Never forgot it," he once said. "Went way, way, way away out of my way to become extra fluent in English."...

References to American popular culture — music especially — abound in Thomas' work. He cited as influences such blues legends as Robert Johnson, Houston native Lightnin' Hopkins and the Houston poet-singer Juke Boy Bonner, whom Thomas eulogized in the journal Callaloo. Thomas helped organize Juneteenth Blues Festivals in Houston and other Texas cities.

"I write poems because I can't sing," he once said.

The sad news comes via wood s lot, where his poem "Back in the Day" is quoted; it begins:

When we were boys
We called each other "Man"
With a long n
Pronounced as if a promise

We wore felt hats
That took a month to buy
In small installments...

THE SUPERIOR PERSON'S BOOK OF WORDS.

That's the title of a book I was given for my birthday, and a lot of fun it is. Unlike books that list unusual words and simply give definitions, this one makes snide comments about them ("a ridiculous word" is a favorite) and provides suggested uses ("'Calefacient, anyone?' you inquire as you pass around the cognac"). But—and I hate to say this—it badly needed fact-checking and editing. When a headword is misspelled, things have come to a pretty pass:

EPHETIC a. Habitually suspending judgment, given to skepticism. Like aporia (q.v.) an exceptionally Superior word. The fact that ephecticism generally engenders ineffectualness should enable you to develop one or two phonically pleasing sentences. Alternatively, cultivate its use in the same sentence as eclectic (wide-ranging in acceptance of doctrines, opinions, etc.).

As you can see from the abstract noun employed in the second sentence, it should be ephectic (a fine word, I must say, deserving of better citations than the anodyne ones provided by the OED: 1693 Urquhart, "The Schools of the Pyrronian.. Sceptick, and Ephectick Sects"; 1883 Saintsbury, "Montaigne's attitude was ephectic"). Also, the definition of codger as 'mean old fellow' is simply wrong for normal use; the OED classifies the sense 'mean, stingy, or miserly (old) fellow' as dialectal (1880 W. Cornwall Glossary, "Codger, cadger, a tramp; a mean pedlar; a term of contempt") and gives the primary definition as 'an elderly man, usually with a grotesque or whimsical implication... In more general application: Fellow, chap.' Ah well, let it serve as a reminder that one should always get a second opinion.

DARMOK.

I was never a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation (I'm a Deep Space Nine man myself), so I hadn't heard of the invented language that was used in the episode "Darmok" until now; you can find out what little there is to know about it here. The salient aspect is that it seems to be made up entirely of allusions, and while this may be impractical, it's original and thought-provoking. As Kathleen Van Horn says on the Possible Precedents page, "there is a similarity between Tamarian and the highly allusive speech of the characters in Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji," but this takes allusiveness to an entirely new level. Too bad they didn't do more with it after putting all that work into it. (The linked site has an exiguous appendix on "Other unusual languages in science fiction" that would be extremely useful if expanded.)

Via MonkeyFilter.

SLEEPY CAROTID.

I was looking up a different word in my Oxford Russian-English dictionary when I happened to notice the phrase sonnaya arteriya, defined as 'carotid artery.' Now, sonnyy means 'sleepy,' so sonnaya arteriya literally means 'sleepy artery,' and this suggested that carotid (a word whose etymology I don't think I'd ever investigated) had something to do with sleepiness. Sure enough, it turns out it's "ad. Gr. καρωτίδ-ες, f. καρούν ‘to plunge into deep sleep, to stupefy’, because compression of these arteries is said to produce carus or stupor. (Galen.)" (OED). The AHD takes it back to Indo-European *ker- 'head' (“to feel heavy-headed”), but that may be pushing it. At any rate, I like the plain-spoken Russian phrase better than the opaque English one.

THE X OF WHICH YOU SPEAK.

Arnold Zwicky of Language Log has reported on a long-needed investigation into the history of the cliché (or, to a Language Logger, "snowclone") What is this X of which you speak? I'm astonished to learn it was already being bandied about in Usenet in 1983:

There has been a lot of net discussion about "toilet paper" recently. Just what is this "toilet paper" of which you speak? Where can I find it? (from net.misc, 24 August 1983 (link))

But there doesn't seem to be an actual, identifiable original from which the parodies were derived: "The origin seems to be in the collective memory of big-screen and small-screen science fiction from the '50s and '60s." There is also discussion of the spurious quotation "Kiss"? What is "kiss"?. Now if only the Loggers would get to work on alternative negations.

IT ISN'T/IT'S NOT.

Avva posts a question that I have occasionally wondered about: under what conditions are the negations it isn't and it's not used? There must have been studies done on this; speakers' intuition is clearly useless here. The only distinction that occurs to me is that the former is more emphatic, requiring a separation of syllables and at least a minuscule stress on it (we no longer say 'tisn't as our forefathers did), whereas it's not can be reduced to a single syllable and muttered if need be ("T's not fair!").

CORBITO.

I'm reading a (surprisingly good) book by Lucy Herndon Crockett called Popcorn on the Ginza (William Sloane Associates, 1949), about the first few years of the Occupation of Japan (she was there with the Red Cross from 1945 to 1947 and has left no biographical trace online that I can find, apart from a stint as a Bread Loaf fellow in 1949); on p. 144 I ran across a word that has stumped me: "The only death to date of an Occupationer at the hands of our former bitter enemy is that of an Air Force lieutenant who, about to return to his fiancée in the States, was poisoned in a geisha house by his corbito, who then took her own life." (Italics in original.) "Corbito" gets a few hundred Google hits, but they're all family names as far as I can tell, and the word is not in any of my dictionaries. It occurred to me that it might be an odd anglicization of some Japanese word based on hito 'person' (which can become -bito in compounds), but I haven't found such a word in my Japanese dictionaries. Any ideas?

In the category of "my, how things change in half a century," here's a snippet from a section on weird Japanese food:

Half an hour later the artist's wife brought in a plate of hot roasted chestnuts in sweet syrup of which no one could complain, then Japanese "sandwiches"—slices of a roll of cold vinegary rice wrapped in what looked like fish skin but was actually seaweed, in the middle of which were bits of fish, pickles, scrambled eggs, and I would hesitate to guess what else.

If you'd told her that Americans would get so addicted to those "sandwiches" in the '90s that chain restaurants would have special sections devoted to them and well-off New Yorkers would spend $300 a meal for them, she would have thought you were out of your mind.

DEATH OF A FISH.

As usual, I've dilly-dallied on reading the latest New Yorker until it only has a few more days on the newsstands, but for any fellow Adam Gopnik fans, the July 4 issue is indispensable (as usual, they don't put Gopnik's piece online—they know how to sell a magazine). "Death of a Fish" ("Through a glass bowl, darkly") begins:

When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Bluie, died, the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or, at least, more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie's life and his passing came to involve so many cosmic elements—including the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchcock's "Vertigo"—that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

It's as good as "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli," and that's high praise indeed. A word of warning: those of you who have not seen Vertigo (and I must deplore the New Yorker's cockamamie tradition of putting movie titles in quotes) should not read the article until you've seen the movie, because there are spoilers aplenty. (Then again, why haven't you seen Hitchcock's greatest movie yet?) The rest of you, you know what to do.