STRAY NOTES, TRANSLATING.

John Latta, poet and proprietor of the apparently now shuttered Hotel Point, has moved to Rue Hazard, where he has been doing some "rough translating" of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Ma Haie: Un privé à Tanger 2. He interrupts the numbered paragraphs of Englished Hocquard to say:

Stray notes, translating. Th’impulse is mostly to avoid the literal: disappointment with the loss of exoticism of the French results in a certain tendency to gussy up th’English. Tant mieux. I’m trying to make a device as thrilling to the tactile tongue of the ear in English as I find even the most maladroit or mundane French original. La camionette est en panne, il me faut marcher. It is an unutterly untenable comme but. I cannot decide if my meretricious English combined with my slaughterhouse French is “up” to the task. That is, if th’execrable is of service.

It is preposterously slow work, even done “messily.” Am I entering into Hocquard’s head? No. I am riffing, rambunctious, one way to begin. Le Commanditaire, and Battman: completely unbeknownst and mystifying. The Pound lines: wolfishly aping filler for Loup qui fait sa cour pour de la nourriture. The Hammett via Marcus: “somebody ought to check that.” Don’t ask, as Philip Levine’d say.

(The "Pound lines" are in paragraph 10: "Then when the grey wolves everychone / Drink of the winds their chill small-beer / And lap o' the snows food's gueredon"; they're from "Villonaud for This Yule.")

I like his style. And currently at the bottom of the Rue is a quote that speaks to me and shames me:

Melville, in Pierre or The Ambiguites: “Now he began to curse anew his fate, for now he began to see that after all he had been finely juggling with himself, and postponing with himself, and in meditative sentimentalities wasting the moments consecrated to instant action.”

Like the man says: To work.

(Via, as so often, wood s lot.)

ESSENTIALIST EXPLANATIONS.

This page, maintained by John Cowan, "comprises a list of 736 'essentialist explanations' of the form 'Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z'." I think quoting a few samples will give you the idea:

English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary.

English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that.

Danish is essentially Norwegian spoken with a sore throat.

German is essentially a philosophical cough.

Lots of funny stuff there. (Thanks, Thandi!)

YIDDISH DICTIONARY ONLINE.

The Yiddish Dictionary Online is just what it says; you can open it in English or Yiddish alphabetical order or use the search box. This will save me having to go over to the bookshelf and pull down my Weinreich, and most people don't have a Weinreich to pull down, so this is a great thing to know about. (Via Plep.)

MEXICAN AND GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARIES.

The Academia Mexicana de la Lengua maintains on its website the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos, containing Spanish definitions of words peculiar to Mexico, and the Diccionario geográfico universal, whose entries often give "local pronunciation" and the Spanish adjective derived from the place name (e.g., Acaya 'Achaea' has the adjective aqueo 'Achaean,' which is logical but might not immediately occur to the inquiring mind; that for Acapulco is acapulqueño). The geographical dictionary gives Latin forms when available (Adour, latín Aturus) but no other etymologies; for Mexican place names, however, the etymology is often available via the adjective's listing in the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos:

acapulqueño, acapulqueña. (De Acapulco, Acapolco, municipio del estado de Guerrero, del náhuatl Acapulco, literalmente = 'lugar de grandes cañas', de acatl 'caña, carrizo' + pol, aumentativo, + -co 'en, lugar de'; la ciudad fue fundada en el siglo XVI.) 1. adj. Perteneciente o relativo a Acapulco. || 2. m. y f. Nativo o habitante de Acapulco.

There's also a Refranero collecting popular sayings. A valuable site.

NHEENGATU.

Today's NY Times has an article by Larry Rohter on a 17th-century language still spoken in a remote corner of Brazil, língua geral or Nheengatú (Ethnologue: Nhengatu).

When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil five centuries ago, they encountered a fundamental problem: the indigenous peoples they conquered spoke more than 700 languages. Rising to the challenge, the Jesuit priests accompanying them concocted a mixture of Indian, Portuguese and African words they called "língua geral," or the "general language," and imposed it on their colonial subjects.

Elsewhere in Brazil, língua geral as a living, spoken tongue died off long ago. But in this remote and neglected corner of the Amazon where Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela meet, the language has not only managed to survive, it has made a remarkable comeback in recent years.

"Linguists talk of moribund languages that are going to die, but this is one that is being revitalized by new blood," said José Ribamar Bessa Freire, author of "River of Babel: A Linguistic History of the Amazon" and a native of the region. "Though it was originally brought to the Amazon to make the colonial process viable, tribes that have lost their own mother tongue are now taking refuge in língua geral and making it an element of their identity," he said.

Two years ago, in fact, Nheengatú, as the 30,000 or so speakers of língua geral call their language, reached a milestone. By vote of the local council, São Gabriel da Cachoeira became the only municipality in Brazil to recognize a language other than Portuguese as official, conferring that status on língua geral and two local Indian tongues.

As a result, Nheengatú, which is pronounced neen-gah-TOO and means "good talk," is now a language that is permitted to be taught in local schools, spoken in courts and used in government documents. People who can speak língua geral have seen their value on the job market rise and are now being hired as interpreters, teachers and public health aides.

The article goes on to give more of the history of the language and report on opposition by elements of the military. (I can find no trace of "River of Babel: A Linguistic History of the Amazon," but maybe that's a translation of a Portuguese title. And of course "neen-gah-TOO" is a ridiculous attempt at indicating the pronunciation of the first syllable, but you know what? I give up. They can tell people to pronounce it SPIN-ach for all I care.)

A MOTE IN YOUR EYE.

I do love a good language rant, as long as it's the sensible kind and not the usual prescriptivist lament, and fev of the copy-editing blog headsuptheblog (active since April) has a dandy one, called "Is that a mote in your eye, or are you just glad to see me?":

OK, we wouldn’t all be gathered ’round this little electric campfire if we didn’t think whingeing about language was fun, right? A downside, as some of you might have noticed already, is that those who would complain about language should do it really, really carefully, lest they be held up as examples for the rest of us.

Hence today’s food for thought, a column from one of the two leading local daily papers. The problem with it is not necessarily that it’s prescriptivist. We all have a little prescriptivist in us (some of us have a lot). Rather, it’s the array of side dishes – grammatical glitches, inability to distinguish fundamentals, dialect chauvinism, BoCoMo ethnocentrism, hyperformal usage and annoying J-school-isms – served up along with the implausible, and essentially untenable, thesis.

Details are gone into, and a conclusion is drawn:

So, to summarize: Speech isn't writing. Usage isn't syntax. Complaining about grammar isn't the same thing as understanding it. Every dialect is its own glass house. Read a lot. English is no danger of being "destroyed" (it got run over by French 900 years ago and survived, 5-year-olds can apparently cop to its syntax pretty fast, and it's about to take over the world). People who complain about the coming death of English aren't usually talking about language; they're talking about something else (on the order of "And your music, it's just noise").

And he calls William Safire a "linguistic sin." Give 'em hell, fev!

SCUTCH.

Reading Brodsky always sends me to my dictionary, but usually it's my Russian dictionary. Making my way through Пятая годовщина ("The Fifth Anniversary"), I ran into the usual slew of difficult Russian vocabulary (и к звездам до сих пор там запускают жучек 'and to this day they're still flinging zhuchkas to the stars'—zhuchka looks like a diminutive of zhuk 'beetle,' but it turns out it's an affectionate name for a pet dog) and learned that лишая, the genitive of the word for 'lichen,' is accented lisháya these days instead of lishayá as my dictionaries have it, but the worst trouble I ran into was with the line я чувствую нутром, как парка нитку треплет 'I feel in my gut the Fate something-ing the thread.'

Trepát' is one of those verbs I've never managed to assimilate because it bundles ideas that don't go together in English: it can mean 'dishevel (by tugging at),' 'blow about,' 'pat,' 'fray,' 'pull (someone's hair, ears, &c),' and 'whip,' among other things; trepát' yazykóm 'to trepát' with the tongue' is 'to babble, chatter,' and the reflexive trepát'sya ('to trepát' oneself') is 'flutter,' 'go around,' or 'talk nonsense.' But here, in the context of the Fates and thread, it clearly takes on its primordial meaning, 'to scutch.' Yes, that's the first definition in my trusty Oxford: "to scutch, swingle (flax, hemp, etc.)." Well, it was off to the OED with me, where I found it means 'to dress (fibrous material, flax, hemp, cotton, silk, wool) by beating.' (There is another verb scutch meaning 'to strike with a stick or whip, to slash, switch,' but although it is "not impossible" that this is "a transferred use of [the verb meaning 'to dress by beating'],... more probably the present verb is an independent onomatopœic formation: cf. scotch vb.") Unfortunately, due to my deficient understanding of the process of turning fibers into thread, I still don't have a clear picture; this page helps: "The flax is passed through it, slamming the break as you go, until the brittle outside layer starts to fall away, leaving the fiber intact. Then you 'scutch' it, which requires scraping the last of it away with a dull knife." At least I'm pretty sure it's Clotho (Клото [Kloto]—why did Greek theta give Russian t here rather than f?) who's doing the scutching.

So how do you translate it? Brodsky, in his own translation, cheats, which he can get away with, being the author: "I sense the thread within strained by the Parcae's shuttle." (I note, sadly, that he mistakes "Parcae'' for a singular; the Latin singular is Parca, but that's not used in English, where we have to say "one of the Parcae.") Nabokov, of course, would have taken delight in using "scutch"; I suppose I'd go with "I feel in my gut the Fate tugging the thread" for phonetic and associational reasons, but I would regret losing the specificity of the technical term. This is the problem with the English language's plethora of specialized vocabulary—it can make a grand impression, but it doesn't serve well when translating a foreign term that is a perfectly ordinary word outside of the particular technical sense used in the given context. (And speaking of context, can any of my Russophone readers tell me what "треплешь парк" means in the fifteenth stanza of Памяти Геннадия Шмакова?)

This is just one tiny example of how difficult, verging on impossible, it is to translate Brodsky (and I have to say I'm not fond of his self-translations in general—he tries too hard to be flamboyant, and is too disrespectful of his originals). Pushkin is untranslatable because of his (surface) simplicity: if you translate literally, it sounds like nothing, and if you gussy it up, it sounds gussied-up. With Brodsky there is the opposite problem—he uses register, reference, polysemy, and every other resource he can work into his text until it presents an interwoven thicket that can be plucked at or hacked at but not, in the normal sense, translated. Which brings me to the final line of the poem:
Скрипи, скрипи, перо! переводи бумагу. [Squeak, squeak, pen! perevodí paper.]

Normally, perevodít' means either 'take/carry across' or 'translate,' but here Brodsky is using the colloquial sense 'use up, waste' (Не переводить бумагу 'Don't waste paper!'). But if you translate "waste paper," you lose everything that's memorable about the line. Brodsky renders it "Scratch on, my pen: let's mark the white the way it marks us"; does that make sense? Is it poetry? You be the judge.

KAURNA WARRA.

The Kaurna Warra site reproduces a 19th-century dictionary of the now extinct language of the Kaurna people of southeastern Australia (the second link says the name is "pronounced garna"):

In Adelaide, 1840, a remarkable event occurred. Reverends Teichelmann and Schürmann published their work Outlines of a Grammar, Vocabulary, and Phraseology of the Aboriginal Language of South Australia. The amazing feature relates to its creation. Two German priests recorded essentially the language of the Kaurna people for the English speaking colonists to read. Indeed, these two remarkable men began teaching the Kaurna children in their own vernacular until forbidden to do so by the government.

Their book was originally self published. Advertisements in the local newspaper detailed the availability of this work. But interest was slight and copies sold slowly. If the Kaurna people were now subjects of the king, it was important that they deal in the king's English...

I'm not sure why the creators of the site felt the need to sneer at attempts to revive the language ("The good folk of Adelaide will not accept the learning of an ancient language as a substitute for English because of sentimental reasons")—or why the site renders my Back button inoperative, which is extremely annoying—but it's an interesting enough site I'm posting it anyway. There's a nice links page too. (Via Plep.)

Some of the entries are quite discursive, for instance:

burka

adj. and s. old, of age, an adult, man. It is frequently as an affix in compound words, corresponding with the terminating syllable "er" in English; as pinnariburka - loiterer; nittatiburka - idler. In these examples the first or radical parts are verbs; but burka may be an affix to a substantive, for instance, wodli-burka, an inhabitant of the house. If affixed to a district of country, it implies that the individual is the proprietor and inhabitant; as mullawirraburka, dry-forest-man (King John's Kaurna name). If affixed to the name of a child, it means the father of the child; as ngultiburka, kudmoburka. See the word pankarra.

SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN.

Speculative Grammarian is "the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics," if they do say so themselves.

We are nearing the end of our transition from the real world to online, and we have nearly completed digitizing the tattered remains of our once glorious Archive, re-publishing each issue on the internet.

Having re-emerged from the shadow of our most recent exile, we are, of course, also looking for submissions for forthcoming issues of SpecGram. Standards have never been lower, so get published while you can!

They have just put online Better Words and Morphemes:The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia, Volume I, Number 3 (May 1991), with (among many other items of equally dubious value) an entirely new scientific folk etymology of wombat. You thought it was of Australian Aboriginal origin? Well, you're right, but they'll do their damndest to convince you it's "a purely English descriptive compound." Go, enjoy, but don't say I didn't warn you you might get your brains addled.

OUGUIYA AND ARIARY.

Frequent commenter Tatyana just sent me the word ouguiya, which is in the dictionary and legal for Scrabble use. I had never heard of it but was thrilled to know it existed; when I googled it, I discovered the equally marvelous word ariary, of a similar nature. What do these exotic lexical items mean? The answers lie within.

The ouguiya is the currency of Mauritania; it's from Arabic ūgīya, a dialect form of ūqīya 'ounce,' and should thus (in my opinion) be pronounced /u'giyə/ rather than Merriam-Webster's preferred /u'gwiyə/. The Wikipedia article I linked to goes on to say "The only circulating currency other than the Malagasy ariary whose division units are not based on a power of ten, each ouguiya is comprised of five khoums (singular and plural in English; Arabic: خمس)"; this sent me to the article ariary, where I learned that "The ariary replaced the previous currency, the Malagasy franc (also known as by its French name, the franc malgache)..., on January 1, 2005. One Malagasy franc was valued at 0.2 ariarys; that is, one iraimbilanja." Not being a Scrabble player at anything other than the most amateur (dinner-table) level, I wonder: is ariary unusable until a new Scrabble dictionary is printed, even though as the official name of a national currency it will presumably automatically be included?

It's probably worth mentioning, by the way, that final /i/ is always written y in Malagasy (you have to wonder how they came up with that arbitrary-seeming rule); the word is pronounced /ari'ari/.

AFRICAN LANGUAGE RESOURCES.

The African Language Resources page has links to Dictionaries, Glossaries and Lexicons and a list of the Mande languages. (Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org.)

HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN TYPEWRITER.

Artemy Lebedev has an interesting history of the typewriter keyboard, concentrating on the Russian version.

The Russian letterkey layout originated from America in the late 19th century. The author has failed so far to find any credible evidence of the first company to produce typewriters with this layout, let alone its authorship. The only thing definitely known is that all firms that produced typewriters with the Russian key layout employed the same one— ЙIУКЕН (or ЙЦУКЕН after the reform of the Russian language) that was dubbed “Standard”.

It's fascinating to see the reproductions of early keyboards, and to learn that in the prerevolutionary version "the numerals row lacks one, zero and three that would be replaced with I, О and З respectively." And here's a fun fact:

The first typewriter (the Yanalif model) was produced in the USSR in Kazan only in 1929. At first it was manufactured with Latin (!) letterkeys. It means that for at least 30 years after being put on the market all typewriters with the Russian font had been made abroad.

Via blogchik. ("Yanalif" means 'new alphabet' in Tatar—you can read about the sad history of Tatar writing systems here.)

GIONGO AND GITAIGO.

Those are Japanese terms for "words which express voice or sounds" and "words which express actions, states or human emotions," respectively, and this website is all about them. As mj klein of Metrolingua, from whose post I got the link, says: "The only downside (not for me) is that you have to be able to read Japanese—there is no English or any other language there, not even in the about page of the site." Go to her post for a description of the various features of the site; it sounds well worth bookmarking if you know Japanese!

SO.

I was startled by the following sentence in today's Pepys' Diary entry: "One thing more; there happened a scaffold below to fall, and we feared some hurt, but there was none, but she of all the great ladies only run down among the common rabble to see what hurt was done, and did take care of a child that received some little hurt, which methought was so noble." (Emphasis added.) I had thought that this use of so as a mere intensive, unattached to any other components of the sentence, was much later, but apparently not; it's the OED's 14.a. ("In affirmative clauses, tending to become a mere intensive without comparative force, and sometimes emphasized in speaking and writing"), which they take all the way back to Beowulf ("þæt we hine swa godne gretan moton"), and there's another startlingly modern example from 1741: Richardson, Pamela III. 168 "My Face.. was hid in my Bosom, and I looked so silly!"

On my way to definition 14, I couldn't help but notice 7.b., which I have to share:

b. slang. Homosexual. Obs.

1937 in PARTRIDGE Dict. Slang. 1963 C. MACKENZIE Life & Times II. 254 ‘I've come to the conclusion,’ he told me, ‘that I'm not really “so” at all. I much prefer girls.’ At this date [sc. 1899] the cant word among homosexuals for their proclivities was ‘so’. That seems to have vanished completely from current cant. 1968 J. R. ACKERLEY My Father & Myself xvi. 192 A young ‘so’ man, picked up by Arthur in a Hyde Park urinal. 1973 Daily Tel. (Colour Suppl.) 23 Feb. 51/4 Wilde used to call him ‘the architect of the moon’. Rothenstein, Beerbohm,.. and Epstein were his more predictable friends, as he was not.. at all ‘gay’, as it is now called, or, as it was then called, ‘so’.

OLYMPIC SLOGAN.

Victor Mair of the very useful Pinyin.info has posted his Remarks on the slogan for the Beijing Olympics, in which he compares the Chinese version of the slogan, 同一个世界，同一个梦想 (tóng yī ge shìjiè, tóng yī ge mèngxiǎng) to the English original, One World, One Dream. He has a most interesting discussion of the Chinese word for 'world':

Shìjiè is composed of graphs that individually mean "generation, era, lifetime" and "boundary." They were brought together over a thousand years ago to render into Sinitic the Buddhist Sanskrit term LOKA(-DHAATU), which was also rendered as shìjiàn, composed of graphs that individually mean "generation, era, lifetime" and "space between." So how do we get from this translatese for LOKA(-DHAATU), which signifies the finite, impermanent realm, to the contemporary understanding of shìjiè as "world"? (Bear in mind that ancient Chinese did not have a word that means what we now mean by "world." Instead, they had concepts like tiānxià ["all-under-heaven"], sì hǎi zhī nèi ["all within the four seas"], and jiǔzhōu ["nine administrative divisions"], all of which basically indicated the Chinese empire, beyond which was a cloud of unknowing and barbarism.) It was not until the second half of the 19th century that shìjiè was transformed by the Japanese (using the pronunciation of the graphs as sekai) into the equivalent of English "world." I call words like this (which began in Chinese with one meaning, went to Japan and acquired another meaning, and then were sent back to China with the newly acquired meaning) "round-trip words."

(For what it's worth, an article by A.G.S. Kariyawasam says that loka "implies the limitless cosmos in its entirety as a cosmographic concept" while lokadhaatu means 'solar system,' or "the area covered by the movement of a sun and a moon.")

Mair also claims that "The Mandarin version would sound much better and more natural if the repeated tóng yī ge were reduced to just yī ge," but this is disputed by a native speaker in the comment thread at Matt's No-sword post (where I got the link):

[Mair] proposes: 一個世界，一個夢想。 That's okay, but it could also mean "There is only one world, there is only one dream".

Whereas the official version: 同一個世界，同一個夢想。spells it out neatly, "Being in the same world, we share the same dream".

Hard to argue with native-speaker intuition.

NATIONAL PUNCTUATION DAY.

OK, this is a little silly, but I can't resist: someone has decided that August 22 is National Punctuation Day. I'll take that as an excuse to pass along a history of punctuation (including English, Spanish, French, and East Asian) and an exhaustive account of Greek punctuation, ancient and modern. (All links via a MetaFilter post by—who else?—?!.)

I'll also use this opportunity to repeat my plea for a history of Russian punctuation, specifically the late-nineteenth-century change from a "natural," intuitive system to the present artificial, rule-bound one. Anybody got a link?

WORD 4 WORD.

The BBC is beginning a series of programs called Word 4 Word; Simon Elmes, the executive producer, says:

Word 4 Word is the Radio 4 outlet for a unique piece of social and linguistic research called VOICES conducted this year.

Dialect experts at Leeds University devised a set of word prompts for the VOICES survey. Then 'audio-gatherers' from local and regional radio stations recorded over a thousand individuals from across the UK. The researchers were interested in recording the vernacular (everyday words and phrases) rather than 'Standard' or 'BBC' or 'Oxford' English.

The fruits of this enormous exercise are explored on Word 4 Word from 3 August.

You can read more about the VOICS survey and add to the regional library of vocabulary on the VOICES website.

The page with the Elmes quote also has a list of "delicious words" and phrases, one of which I intend to start using immediately:

Crimes o' Paris - exclamation, used as expression of exasperation, as in 'Crimes of Paris! Whatsisname?'. (Potteries usage)

Incidentally, in the lead-in to the Elmes quote, the word minging is used; for those who, like myself, were wondering how it's pronounced, it rhymes with singing and is Scots in origin, meaning (according to the OED) "That smells bad, stinking; (more generally) unpleasant, foul. Also: very drunk." It comes from the noun ming 'a bad smell' (of uncertain origin).

(Thanks for the link, Glyn!)

BIRCH-BARK MAT.

No, not the kind of mat you sleep on—I'm talking about Russian mat (curse words), and the birch bark used for documents in medieval Novgorod and other areas of north Russia. A new blog, Language Geek, reports that "Archaeologists in Veliky Novgorod have dug up some birchbark documents containing Russian profanities" and quotes from a Novosti article:

Archaeologists did not disclose the texts. They only said one of the findings was a note written by a woman to her acquaintance in which she reprimanded the latter for not paying her debt. The other piece is said to be part of a larger document not found so far. ... The first bark document did not contain profanities, but was rather unusual. It said a Velikiy Novgorod resident, known as Shilnik, had stolen pigs and horses.

I await further details with considerable interest.

The Geek also translates from a Russian article in Izvestia Nauka:

...This document said that a Novgorod resident known as Shilnik "poshibayet" other people's pigs and horses. Historians note that in old Russian the word "poshibayet" had several meanings. In particular, it could mean "steals, robs". "However, the word 'poshibayet' had another, quite different meaning for our ancestors," the historians explained.

The implication seems to be that it had a sexual meaning, which might fit the quote “Аще кто пошибает боярскую жену, за сором ей 5 гривен золота, а митрополиту такоже” 'if anyone poshibaet a boyar's wife, for the shame five grivnas to her, and the same to the metropolitan' (in an article by T.M. Nikolaeva on the language of medieval statutes) at least as well as Dahl's 'hit, beat' (implied in Nikolaeva's "берет ее под защиту от побоев" 'protects her against beatings').

Incidentally, in looking up birch-bark documents on Amazon, I discovered an interesting sounding book Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300, but when I looked at the price I got a shock: how can Cambridge University Press charge $70 for a 342-page book? It's insane.

THE NEWEST INDIANS.

That's the title of an article by Jack Hitt in today's NY Times Magazine. It's about the amazing increase in Native American population in recent decades, an increase fueled by change in self-identification rather than birth rates (and no, it's not about cashing in on casinos). There's a good deal about language, and the conclusion is that language-learning is a good way to prove who's really serious about belonging.

Laura Redish sees language revival at the heart of the new anxiety of identity: ''It also takes a commitment to learn a language. I've noticed that urban mixed bloods, especially, want to learn—to not be wannabes. And language shows they are serious about connecting to who they are.''

From a small country lane in Connecticut, Stephanie Fielding rambled down a few dirt roads to a small clearing beside a rushing river. Her great-great-great-aunt Fidelia Fielding died in 1908, and a memorial stone dominates the sloping cemetery here. Fidelia was the last speaker of Mohegan. Today, Stephanie Fielding is devoted to reviving the language that Fidelia Fielding spoke. She travels from library to library scouring books and ancient missionary letters and documents. She is putting together her ancestral language, brick by brick, word by word.

You might mistake Stephanie Fielding for just another nice-looking lady with reddish hair and, judging from that name, British extraction. But she is a member of the wealthiest Indian tribe in America—the Connecticut Mohegans, whose members divide the revenue from two lucrative casinos. Fielding is 59, and she has devoted the rest of her life to reviving her great-great-great-aunt's language. This June, she received her master's degree in linguistics from M.I.T. Like so many people devoted to language restoration, she admires the example of Hebrew, a language that essentially died more than two millennia ago, surviving only as a sacred text. It wasn't until the 19th century that a Zionist linguist took on the painstaking work of confecting a modern, slangy, day-to-day tongue out of the hallowed idiom of Moses. Fielding is trying to do the same, and then some. She doesn't begin with a body of Scripture, like the revivers of Hebrew had, but with not much more than some missionaries' notes and transcripts of long-dead speakers. Most of Fielding's work at M.I.T. has focused on creating a kind of linguistic algorithm that will permit her to take many of the accepted proto-Algonquian words and generate an authentic Mohegan vocabulary. Her tribe has commissioned her to put together a dictionary and a grammar to give the next generation a voice from the past.

Because it is time-consuming and difficult to learn any language, the commitment it takes to attend one of Wendy Geniusz's camps or to sign on with Fielding's work or to participate in any of the widespread Native American language revivals weeds out the easy hobbyists and leaves a cohort of Indians whose authenticity—regardless of genealogy or blood quantum—may one day be hard to question.

''Language is an important vehicle of transmission of culture,'' says Angela Gonzales, a Hopi Indian and an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell University. ''Some tribes resist letting any outsiders even speak their language. But that's why language is important. It's a great vehicle for the storage of important inaccessible cultural material.'' Since it is no longer enough for a man passing you on the street to look Indian, maybe the next generation will note in passing that that guy certainly sounded Indian. In 50 years, many of the tribes now being dissed as wannabes will have age, tradition and solemnity on their side. Who will be around to question their authenticity? Far more likely is the possibility that the reshaping of American identity, among Indians as well as other ethnicities, will simply be accepted as the way it always was and always was meant to be.

Incidentally, there's a nice page of "Original Tribal Names of Native North American People" on Redish's Native American languages site; it focuses on Eastern and Plains tribes, but presumably they'll be adding West Coast and other tribes as time goes on. (Thanks to Eliza at Wordorigins.org for bringing this page to my attention!)

B.S.

Don't miss Mark Liberman's ongoing investigation over at Language Log of the history of the word bullshit as applied to deprecated speech acts. Having taken it back to 1914 or perhaps 1910, he's now pushed it to 1900. Oddly, he refers to but does not quote the first cite for "B.S." in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, so I'll reproduce it here as a public service:
B.S. v. BULLSHIT.
1900 Howitzer (U.S. Mil. Acad.) (No. 1) 118: B.S.—volubility of discourse, or verbosity. Ibid. 138: Be-esse. n....Rough, crude talk.

Mark does, however, quote the glossary provided in the 1905 Howitzer yearbook "for the benefit of our struggling relatives and others who try to read our letters"; it expands "B.S." to... British science!

COWBOY.

Still reading American Colonies: The Settling of North America, I just came across a detail that upended everything I thought I knew about the history of the cowboy. The context is the creation of the Carolina colony in the late seventeenth century; it was settled mainly from Barbados, which had too many people crammed into too little space (in 1680 the most populous town in British America was not Boston but Bridgetown), and it had to find a way to support itself—it was too far north to grow sugar, the crop that made the Barbadian landowners rich. The colonists traded with the Indians for deerskin and slaves, but those were "volatile and diminishing commodities"; they harvested pine trees for lumber and tapped their pitch to make tar, vital for shipping.

Carolina also became the preeminent cattle country in the English empire, as the Carolinians pioneered many practices later perfected on a grand scale in the American West, including cattle branding, annual roundups, cow pens, and cattle drives from the interior to the market in Charles Town. Many owners entrusted the roaming cattle to the care of black slaves, who had previous experience as herdsmen in Africa. In Carolina the black herdsmen became known as "cowboys"—apparently the origin of that famous term.

The OED, however, takes cowboy in this sense only back to 1849: "The Mexican rancheros.. ventured across the Rio Grande.. but they were immediately attacked by the Texan ‘cow-boys’." Does anybody know about this earlier use in the Carolinas?

OGDEN NASH.

Today wood s lot features the inimitable Ogden Nash, whose off-kilter verse delighted several generations of readers. I don't know if he's much quoted today aside from the immortal "Reflections On Ice Breaking" ("Candy/ Is dandy/ But liquor/ Is quicker"), which everybody attributes to Dorothy Parker anyway, but anyone with a taste for absurd rhymes, invented words, and a jaundiced viewpoint (all on display in the three-word "Further Reflections on Parsley": "Parsley/ Is gharsley") should investigate the trove at PoemHunter.com. I'll limit myself to reproducing "Peekabo, I Almost See You," which shows off the full range of his comic arsenal:

Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn't long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it,
And your friends get jocular, so you go to the oculist,
And of all your friends he is the joculist,
So over his facetiousness let us skim,
Only noting that he has been waiting for you ever since you said Good evening to his grandfather clock under the impression that it was him,
And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won't do.
You need two.
One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and Keats's "Endymion" with,
And the other for walking around without saying Hello to strange wymion with.
So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put on your reading glasses, and then remembering that your reading glasses are upstairs or in the car,
And then you can't find your seeing glasses again because without them on you can't see where they are.
Enough of such mishaps, they would try the patience of an ox,
I prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.

—Ogden Nash

WAMPANOAG.

My dictionaries of first resort, the OED, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, and American Heritage, all give a four-syllable pronunciation for the name of this New England Indian tribe; M-W renders it "wäm-p&-'nO-(")ag, AH is the same (rendered in their own system), and the OED differs only in having a schwa in the final syllable. But the original pronunciation was clearly three syllables; the first citation in the OED (Roger Williams, 1676) calls them "Wampanoogs," and the ending must be the same as in the original Narraganset name for the Pequots, Pequttôog, and the word for Europeans, Wautaconâug 'coatmen,' which I presume are two spellings of the same vowel or diphthong. It was still three syllables in the early nineteenth century; John Greenleaf Whittier's 1830 poem "Metacom" rhymes "Beneath the closing veil of night,/ And leafy bough and curling fog,/ ...Rested the fiery Wampanoag" and "The scorched earth—the blackened log—/ ...Be the sole relics which remain/ Of the once mighty Wampanoag!" In 1847, John Brougham's parody of the wildly popular play Metamora: Or, the Last of the Wampanoags was titled "Metamora, or the Last of the Pollywogs," which strongly implies a pronunciation WAMP-anogs. And I just found a recording (mp3) of Chief Wild Horse, the last speaker of the Wampanoag dialect, reading the Lord's Prayer (followed by a detailed linguistic explication) in 1961, and both he and the guy who introduces him say WAMP-anog, three syllables. So why do the dictionaries list only the spelling pronunciation wampa-NO-ag?

Addendum. Martin, in the comments, links to some extremely interesting sites: an article about Jessie "Little Doe" Fermino, a Mashpee Indian who last year earned a master’s in linguistics and is trying to revive the Wampanoag language (there's more about the revival effort here, where the table on the upper right is, oddly, the syllabary for Inuktitut, a language not mentioned in the piece), and the website for the Wôpanâak Language Revitalization Project (and I note that the address line at the bottom refers to the "Wampanog Tribe").

I should also mention that I got the mp3 recording from this webpage.

SAADAT HASAN MANTO.

A MetaFilter post introduced me to the writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who at the time of Partition left a successful screenwriting career in Bombay for a miserable existence in Lahore, where he wrote brilliant stories and drank himself to death in early 1955. (There's an affecting account of his life here.) He's been compared to Lawrence and Gorky for the unblinking honesty of his writing, which frequently got him in trouble with the government; his most famous story is Toba Tek Singh, which is available in both Urdu and English here (there's even a set of notes on the language). You won't soon forget the lunatic's nonsense mantra (اوپڑ دی گڑ گڑ دی اینکس دی بے دھیانا دی منگ دی دال آف دی لالٹین, uupa;R dii gu;R gu;R dii enaks dii be dhyaanaa dii mu;Ng dii daal aaf dii laal;Ten).

FOREWORD.

If you're interested in book design and book covers, you'll probably want to, er, bookmark Foreword, "a community in the service of books and book design, with authors in the US and UK." Check out the collection of The Bell Jar covers and the book cover waiting to happen.

QUIPU.

I had just started the article "Those Ancient Incan Knots? Tax Accounting, Researchers Suggest" by Nicholas Wade in today's NY Times when I had occasion to grind my teeth: "They believe they may have decoded the first word - a place name - to be found in a quipu (pronounced KWEE-poo)..." What the hell? Is the Times too proud to actually consult a dictionary? Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, for instance, which says "Pronunciation: 'kE-(")pü." Or the American Heritage, which says the same thing in its own transcription. You'd think anyone with the slightest acquaintance with Spanish would be able to grasp that qui = /ki/; if you wanted further confirmation, you could look up the etymology—M-W gives the Quechua word as khipu and AHD as kipu, but either way there ain't no /kw/. But the Times in its corporate wisdom (I'm not going to blame Wade, since it may well have been an idiot editor who added the "information") says "I ignorantly pronounce it this way, and since I am the Times I am by definition correct in all things, so I will inflict my ignorance upon the public at large." Well done, O Newspaper of Record!

JOURNAL OF WELSH STUDIES.

The North American Journal of Welsh Studies "is comprised [sic, tsk] of material originally presented at a conference or event sponsored by the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History." The web pages for each issue are HTML (the latest is Winter-Summer 2005), but the individual articles are pdf files. There's some interesting stuff there, like Grahame Davies, "Beginnings: New Media and the Welsh Language" (pdf); if you read Welsh and are interested in new media, of course, you should bookmark morfa. (Via wood s lot.)

DURATION: TRANSLATION.

The poetry publisher duration press has put online the first of its new critical e-book series, towards a foreign likeness bent: translation (pdf, html cache). It contains fifteen essays, from Ammiel Alcalay's "Politics & Translation" to Chet Wiener's "The Legacy and Future of 'Horizontal' and 'Vertical' Translation in Contemporary Poetry," of which (I regret to say) too many are marred (for me) by an excess of politics, theory, and/or self-indulgence. But at least two are worth downloading the book to read, Jonathan Skinner's "A Note On Trobar" (followed by a selection of his own translations, "Petit Chansonnier: Provençal Lyrics") and Rick Snyder's "The Politics of Time: New American Versions of Paul Celan." The first begins:

While it is a commonplace that the troubadours “invented” (or found) the art of love (whose key words we all know well—vernal, auzel [bird], dona, pretz [worth], amors, cor, remirar [glance], dezir, joi, sofrirs, mezura, servir, merce, lauzengier [slanderer], senhal [nickname]), the formal, lyric specificity of that invention has been lost to us. What was unique about the troubadour canso was its secular artifice, its engagement with social and linguistic particulars in an ideal vernacular, a koine relatively free of (Latin) ecclesiastical and juridical control while also not particularly tied to local dialects. The troubadours elaborated a frankly sexual (and, I might add, social) sensibility in a “field of rhyme” with little compare in the history of Western literature—in fact, Occitan rhyme’s likely connections with Arabic and Hebrew poetry, in forms including the Mozarabic zagal and muwashshah, remain relatively unexplored to this day. (Indigenous influences such as refrain songs associated with the round dance have been considered more important.)

The classical background of written, quantitative measures must be kept in mind— stretching from the troubadours almost two millenia back to Sappho at least (who “reconciles us to the strangeness of her dialect by the sweetness of her songs” [Apuleius])—to get a sense of how new poetry, as elaborate artifice, must have sounded rhyming in the vernacular. Occitan poetics gave Dante the courage to write in Italian, and for this reason William Carlos Williams comes most to mind when I think forward from the troubadours: who wrote poetry “in the new dialect, to continue it by a new construction upon the syllables.” (If the troubadours had come at the end of five centuries of abuse of rhyme, they too would have rejected it; as it was in 1071, rhyme stood fresh, untapped, a handy constraint.) Without Williams, Paul Blackburn, the greatest American translator of the troubadours, would not have been able to bring us his ‘projective’ versions (see his Proensa, sadly out of print). And as with Williams, the troubadours’ cansos were their own answer to questions of love; the “allegory” of which was concocted elsewhere (whether via the doctrines of the dolce stil nuovo, Chretien de Troyes’s romances, or the courtly fables of Marie de France), as part of the translation of Occitan culture that accompanied its violent suppression and dispersal during the thirteenth century, in the crusade against the Albigensians.

And here's his fine translation of William of Poitou's "Ab la dolchor del temps novel":

In the sweet new season
Forests rustle and the birds
Chant each in their own Latin
In verses tuned to new song
Then it’s good a man seize
That which he most desires

Neither message nor letter
Brings what is most pleasant
My heart doesn’t laugh or sleep
Nor dare I take one step
’Till I’m sure about the end
Whether it’s as I require

This is the way our love goes
Just like the whitethorn branch
Trembling in the tree-top
All night through rain and frost
’Till daylight when the sun
Spangles the leaves and branches

Remembering a morning
When we’d had enough of war
And she gave me the best gift
Pledging me heart and ring
God keep me alive long as
My hand’s beneath that cloak.

No worries that strange Latin
Will put off my Bon Vezi
I know how it goes with words
The way small talk gets around
Let them gabble of love
We’ve got the bread, the knife

Snyder says:

Translation is fundamentally an ethical undertaking. Of course, it’s not an undertaking at all—but an overtaking, an afterlife—a taking over of words from one culture to another, one language to another. These transferences constitute the same act because language and culture are so intimately bound to one another that their distinction can be seen as a taxonomic convenience. To follow the basic thrust of linguistics, then, and attempt to isolate language from the larger social environment in which it lives is to put it in a laboratory in which its sole measure can be instrumentality. Language needs its larger social fabric to retain the valences that make it meaningful—and thus make poetry a possibility. This necessary entwining of language, culture, and history is unmistakably prevalent in the poetry of Paul Celan. Though the varying keys Celan used throughout his career make it difficult to speak of his work in the singular, these poems, in their very realizations, are always already linked to the contexts and circumstances, the real (lost) world in which Celan created them...

Anyone hoping to render a version of Celan’s work in English must grapple with the resistances of Celan’s work, in general, and with how to render his highly compressed, involuted verbal constructions, in particular. The ways in which each translator approaches Celan’s unique constructions has everything to do not only with the resulting poem in English, but with the basic assumptions that underlie his or her approach to poetics and aesthetics. Such decisions are not merely linguistic and contingent on the given differences between German and English, but as Voloshinov/Bakhtin would contend, are like anything linguistic in nature, at heart ideological, and reveal the translator’s orientation in the sociocultural and even physical landscape as constituted by reciprocal interactions with language. Moreover, in the arc of Celan’s oeuvre and the particular tragedy of his circumstances, the linguistic decisions of his translator take on an amplified importance, one that relates directly to Celan’s relationship to time, history, Judaism, and German language and literature.

He goes on to compare Michael Hamburger’s classic translations with newer versions by Pierre Joris, John Felstiner, and Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh (the latter collaboration being by far his least favorite). He says "Felstiner’s versions are typically both more literal and colloquial than those of Hamburger, whose word choice and syntax tend to be more formal as he moves Celan onto a longer, graceful line," and provides the following comparison:

With a changing key
you unlock the house where
the snow of what’s silenced drifts.
Just like the blood that bursts from
your eye or mouth or ear,
so your key changes.
(Felstiner)

With a variable key
you unlock the house in which
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.
Always what key you choose
depends on the blood that spurts
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.
(Hamburger)

My immediate reaction is to prefer Felstiner's; my almost as immediate counter-reaction is that of course that's my immediate reaction, because it's easier and more accessible, like a wine without tannins. I suspect the Hamburger might hold my interest better over time. Here's another comparison:

But in you, from
birth,
the other wellspring foamed,
on the black
jet remembrance
dayward you climbed.
(Hamburger)

Yet in you, from
birth,
the other wellspring foamed,
on the black
beam of memory
you climbed to daylight.
(Felstiner)

But in you, from
birth,
foamed the other spring,
up the black
ray memory
you climbed to the day.
(Joris)

They're all effective, but here I think I prefer Joris. Anyway, there's lots of good stuff here, and if you're interested in thinking about translation in a literary context I recommend the collection.

Incidentally, if you're wondering (as I was) about "Voloshinov/Bakhtin," it turns out that V.N. Volóshinov's seminal books Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) have recently been said to be the work of his mentor Bakhtin. I take no position on that controversy, but I'm getting more and more interested in the ideas of that school, and will probably wind up getting The Bakhtin Reader.

(Via wood s lot.)

POEME EN LANGUE INCONNUE.

Cerdis zerom deronty toulpinye,
Purois harlins linor orifieux,
Tictic falo mien estolieux,
Eulfiditons lafar relonglotye.

Gerefeluz tourdom redassinye;
Ervidion tecar doludrieux,
Gesdoliou nerset bacincieux,
Arlas destol osart lurafirie.

Tast derurly tast qu'ent derontrian,
Tast deportulast fal min adian,
Tast tast causus renula dulpissoitre,

Ladimirail reledra survioux,
C'est mon secret ma Mignonne aux yeux doux,
Qu'autre que toy ne sauroit reconnoistre.

—Marc Papillon, seigneur de Lasphrise (1597)

(Found at Le Petit Champignacien illustré, text corrected according to the version posted here.)

JAPANESE GUIDE TO JAPANESE.

Tae Kim's A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar "was created as a resource for those who want to learn Japanese grammar in a rational, intuitive way that makes sense in Japanese. The explanations are focused on how to make sense of the grammar not from English but from a Japanese point of view." The Introduction says:

The problem with conventional textbooks is that they often have the following goals.

1. They want readers to be able to use functional and polite Japanese as quickly as possible.
2. They don't want to scare readers away with terrifying Japanese script and Chinese characters.
3. They want to teach you how to say English phrases in Japanese...

This guide is an attempt to systematically build up the grammatical structures that make up the Japanese language in a way that makes sense in Japanese. It may not be a practical tool for quickly learning immediately useful Japanese phrases (for example, common phrases for travel). However, it will logically create grammatical building blocks that will result in a solid grammatical foundation. For those of you who have learned Japanese from textbooks, you may see some big differences in how the material is ordered and presented. This is because this guide does not seek to forcibly create artificial ties between English and Japanese by presenting the material in a way that makes sense in English. Instead, examples with translations will show how ideas are expressed in Japanese resulting in simpler explanations that are easier to understand.

That makes a lot of sense to me, and if I ever decide to really learn Japanese, I think I'll give it a try. (Via Plep.)

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Still on my colonial history kick, I'm reading Jill Lepore's The Name of War, about the worst conflict in early American history, King Philip's War of 1675-76 (although, as she says, "Its very name, each word in its title—'King,' 'Philip's,' 'War'—has been passionately disputed"). I checked it out of the Athenaeum because I couldn't resist the title of Chapter 1, "Beware of Any Linguist," and I'm glad I did—I've found all kinds of goodies just in the introduction, "What's in a Name?" The first one I want to share is this discussion of the name of the eponymous Wampanoag leader:

It is possible that Philip called himself "Philip" when addressing the English and "Metacom" when talking with Indians. But it seems more likely that he simply abandoned the name Metacom after 1660. After all, Philip was raised in a culture in which people commonly adopted new names, leaving old names behind. Edward Winslow had observed in 1624, "All their names are significant and variable, for when they come to the state of men and women, they alter them according to their deeds or dispositions." For just this reason, it is possible that Philip renamed himself during the war, to mark a new stage in his life, but surely he would not have returned to Metacom, the name of his youth. That no record of Philip's new name survives should come as no surprise. Those who knew Philip by the name he went by at the time of his death, in August 1676, would not have uttered it: a strict naming taboo prohibited it. As Roger Williams had reported, "the naming of their dead Sachims, is one ground of their warres"; in 1665 Philip himself had traveled to Nantucket to kill an Indian who had spoken the name of his deceased father, Massasoit. If Philip took another name during the war, it has not survived. (Although one small, uncorroborated bit of evidence suggests that he may have been renamed "Wewesawamit.") And, since he seems to have initially taken "Philip" in earnest, calling him "Metacom" today is no truer to his memory, especially because "Metacom" became a became a popular substitute for "Philip" only in the early nineteenth century, when white playwrights, poets, and novelists sought to make the war sound more authentically, and romantically, Indian.

I love this kind of detailed discussion. And something that completely delighted me was discovering the reason he was given the name Philip when he and his brother asked the Plymouth Court for new names after their father died:

But, in 1660, naming Metacom and Wamsutta "Philip" and "Alexander" after the ancient leaders of Macedonia was most likely a reference (oblique to us but obvious to them) to the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an engraving of an Indian mouthing the words, "Come Over and Help Us," and itself an echo of Acts 16:9, in which the Apostle Paul sees a vision of a Macedonian begging him, "Come over into Macedonia, and help us." Plymouth authorities, like their Massachusetts counterparts, saw Indians as pagan Macedonians who, at heart, were desperate for the light of the gospel.

Philip and Alexander... Macedonia... Of course! You've got to know your Bible to understand the thinking of those learned Puritans.

Incidentally, you can see a reproduction of the Bay Colony seal accompanying a talk that Jill Lepore gave at the 1998 Advocating Massachusetts History Forum.

ORNITHONOMY.

Reading Jonathan Franzen's annoyingly self-absorbed "My Bird Problem" in the latest New Yorker, one reason I kept going was the profusion of wonderful bird names: gadwall, veery, redstart, dunlin... Then I hit "parauque" (at the bottom of the middle column on page 66, if you're following along at home) and thought I'd better look it up so I'd know whether to mentally pronounce it as if it were French or Spanish. Well, it wasn't in any of my dictionaries, so of course I googled it, and was suprised to find only a few hundred hits—bird names shouldn't be that rare. Following my usual practice with unfamiliar plants and animals, I googled the Linnean name, in this case Nyctidromus albicollis, and what do you know, every hit gave the English name as "pauraque." So I googled that, and sure enough, there were over 15,000 hits, and when I looked it up in my massive Webster's Third New International, there it was (pronounced \pau'räkā\ in their transcription, like "pow RAH kay"). The New Yorker had allowed a misspelled word into their once famously perfect pages. Once again, the modern world had let me down.

I was a bit consoled, or at least distracted, when I followed the trail left by Webster's laconic definition (pauraque n [MexSp] : CUIEJO) and looked up cuiejo. I was rewarded with this:

cuiejo \kü'yāhō\ n [modif. of AmerSp cuyeo] : a tropical American nighthawk (Nyctidromus albicollis) the dried and ground bones of which are highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion — called also pauraque

"Highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion"—why, it's lexicographical poetry! And the endearingly awkward phrasing "the dried and ground bones of which," contorted to avoid the perfectly good "whose dried and ground bones," was the icing on the cake.

Later in the same paragraph Franzen mentions "my first northern beardless tyrannulet"; I liked "tyrannulet" very much but was unable to find it in any dictionaries: not Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, not the big Webster's, not the OED. And yet it's an English word in good standing; not only does it get 20,000 Google hits (besides the northern beardless, this page lists dozens of others: Rufous-lored, Cinnamon-faced, Minas Gerais, Oustalet's, Mottle-cheeked, Rough-legged, Greenish, Tawny-rumped...), it's the subject of an Encyclopædia Britannica article. So why isn't it in the dictionary, not even the OED? I'm mystified and annoyed; at least the pronunciation is clear, but what if it weren't? I'd be lost in the sea of words without a compass!

THE IROQUOIS BOOK OF RITES.

Horatio Hale's The Iroquois Book of Rites (Gutenberg text of entire book, Sacred Texts version broken up into chapters), originally published in 1883, contains all sorts of historical and cultural information about the Five (later Six) Nations of the Iroquois; its centerpiece is the Ancient Rites of the Condoling Council in both Iroquois and English (preceded by a sketch of The Iroquois Language). Here's the famous Condolence Hymn chanted at meetings of the League:

Kayanerenh deskenonghweronne;
Kheyadawenh deskenonghweronne;
Oyenkondonh deskenonghweronne;
Wakonnyh deskenonghweronne.
Ronkeghsotah rotirighwane,—
Ronkeghsota jiyathondek.

I come again to greet and thank the League;
I come again to greet and thank the kindred;
I come again to greet and thank the warriors;
I come again to greet and thank the women.
My forefathers,—what they established,
My forefathers,—hearken to them!

LITTLE LATIN.

The Tensor has a convenient list of English words derived from Latin words with the diminutive -culus suffix; he adds:

The oddest one I found was muscle, which comes from the diminutive of mus 'mouse'. According to the OED, this bit of oddness comes down to us from Indo-European: "The word for mouse also has the sense 'muscle' (esp. of the upper arm) in many Indo-European languages, e.g. Middle Dutch, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Icelandic, ancient and Hellenistic Greek, post-classical Latin, and Armenian [woo-hoo!], app. because of the resemblance of a flexing muscle to the movements made by a mouse."

(The bracketed excitement about Armenian is his, not mine.) He also includes "a few words that I would have guessed contained -culus, but don't."

YO!

According to an article in Der Standard (seconded by a badly written Moscow News story), the city of Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk, near where Karamzin, the inventor of the letter, was born) is planning to erect a stone monument to honor the letter ё [yo], which has long been ousted from official Russian documents. The Wikipedia article on the letter says "The fact that yo is frequently replaced with ye in print often causes some confusion to non-Russians, as it makes Russian words and names harder to transcribe accurately," but according to an impassioned plea for its use (by E. Pchelov and V. Chumakov), it confuses Russians too, so that some say Chebyshev for the correct Chebyshov (Чебышёв) and routinely mispronounce foreign names. One statement in their article struck me: is it true that Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard," known to Russians these days as Вишнёвый сад [vishnyóvyi sad], should actually be Вишневый сад [víshnyevyi sad]? Perhaps Avva, a proponent and user of the letter, will know. (Thanks for the tip, Adam!)

YAN TAN TETHERA.

I just got an Amazon package with some books I've wanted for a long time (thanks, Prentiss!), including Basil Bunting's Complete Poems (mentioned here). I already had his Collected Poems, Bunting's own selection, but this adds forty pages of uncollected work, including such fine poems as his little elegy for Lorine Niedecker:

To abate what swells
use ice for scalpel.
It melts in its wound
and no one can tell
what the surgeon used.
Clear lymph, no scar,
no swathe from a cheek's bloom.

But what I'm here to discuss is the last of the "Uncollected Odes":

      Dentdale conversation

Yan tan tethera pethera pimp
nothing to waste but nothing to skimp.
Lambs and gimmers and wethers and ewes
what do you want with political views?
Keep the glass in your windows clear
where nothing whatever's bitter but beer.

Catchy first line, no? Ponder it for a while and guess what it means; then go below the fold and I'll tell you.

It's the numbers from one to five in the old sheep-counting sequence of north England. It's clearly from a Celtic source closely related to Welsh, in which the numbers are un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump; this page has a collection of twenty such sequences (and if you know of others, Mr. John Whitehead of Clitheroe would like to hear from you). There's a discussion in this Crooked Timber thread, and Harrison Birtwistle wrote an opera called " Yan Tan Tethera."

Dentdale is the valley of the Dent in Cumbria in northwest England, just southwest of Bunting's native Northumbria; Brigflatts (the Quaker meeting house where Bunting is buried, to be distinguished from Briggflatts the poem, with an extra g) is at its west end, just southwest of Sedbergh (with a silent g). A gimmer (with a hard g) is 'a ewe between the first and second shearing.'

DOLA AND MAX, OR THE MAKING OF ISRAELI.

A comment by Ghil'ad Zuckermann on my post about his views on Israeli (Hebrew) sent me looking for more information about Dola Wittmann, the oldest native Israeli-speaker (in April 2000; I'm afraid she's probably passed on by now). I found a very interesting column by Sam Orbaum, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, called "Daughter of the mother tongue":

Dola learned the language from her father [Eliezer Ben-Yehuda], who reinvented it... During my first of numerous chats with Dola, about 15 years ago, our hours-long interview was interjected by occasional "harumphs." Every time she dipped into another language for a bon mot, her husband Max voiced his displeasure. "You can say that very well in Hebrew too," he grumbled.

Max, who passed away a few years ago, was actually more stalwart a devotee of Ben-Yehuda than even Dola. Worldly and cosmopolitan, Dola readily spoke other languages as well. Max adamantly refused.

When Max asked for Ben-Yehuda's permission to marry his daughter, his answer, she recalled, was: "I will grant permission dependent on your answer to two questions: Will you live in Eretz Yisrael, and will you only speak Hebrew?" Max promised to do both—and true yekke that he was, never, ever compromised his promise.

It did not even concern Ben-Yehuda that Max was Christian—and German to boot. He pointedly did not ask Max to convert (he never did). "Speaking Hebrew, and speaking it here, was all that mattered," Dola explained.

"Since then, I never left the country for any reason," Max said proudly, "and never spoke anything but Hebrew."

Max devoted his life to the study, advancement and usage of pure Ben-Yehuda Hebrew, and he was certainly one of the world's top authorities on the subject. Whereas Dola would merge foreign elements into her speech, and adapted, to an extent, to the language's evolution, Max would not. A telefon was still a sach-rachok, just as Ben-Yehuda decided it should be.

Dola lit up when I asked her if Ben-Yehuda had a sense of humor when he created the modern language. "Oh, yes, definitely! There are many examples of whimsy in his choice of words." For example? She laughed. "Clitoris. He decided on dagdegan, from the root l'dagdeg, to tickle."...

Some of Ben-Yehuda's coinages never became popular, consigned to linguistic curiosity (and to the vocabulary of Max). Only the Ben-Yehuda family ever used the word badura for tomato; milav, for "sport," was taken from the Arabic, but swiftly became defunct. The oddly foreign-sounding petrozilia prevailed over Ben-Yehuda's netz halav for parsley. The delightful chen-chen (thank you) was perhaps too genteel for the clamorous nation-in-the-making, but it survived among a few "old-fashioned" speakers, by now winning some popularity as a hip colloquialism—an ironic revival.

Max was able to recount Dola's childhood just as vividly as she could, because as a member of the Ben-Yehuda "language army," even as a little girl, she was responsible for helping entrench Hebrew as the local lingo. Dola's early years, and the language's, were one and the same.

"Ben-Yehuda would gather the children each evening, and tell them all the new words he had created, or rediscovered. The children were required to pass them on." Max, a tall, white-haired, coolly Teutonic gentleman, warmed only when speaking about Ben-Yehuda and his language. "Dola was younger, so this was already more established by the time she learned to speak. A child would be sent to the grocer to buy rice. He would ask for orez, and the [Yiddish-speaking] grocer would say 'vus?' (what?) The child would then point to the rice and repeat 'orez'—that's how the language, word by word, was first spread."

A charming story, and I like the fact that the creator of the modern language was unable to impose words the people didn't want to use.

CACOPHONY?

I don't agree with shkrobius, who says "human speech is a cacophony of mingled sounds," but it's said so vividly I have to pass it along:

The first time I heard English I thought: how can people bark like that? Why can't they talk in a melodious, cadenced way the Russians do? It took many years of practicing English to appreciate its harmony and beauty. It is not that Germanic languages are different. Other Slavic languages are equally unpleasant on my ears. No amount of persuasion will convince me that, say, the Swedish, Serbian, Zulu, Turkish, or Hungarian are great languages. All human languages equally stink. We are used to those few that we speak or hear regularly. We can no longer recognize how awful they sound. The universal appeal of music is our unconscious acceptance of this brutal truth.

The post goes on to an appreciation of the animal kingdom: "people of all races, tongues, and traditions have the instinctive appreciation of the beauty in animals and plants. A horse, a cow, a bird, a rose—they all look right to us." And who can argue with that? (Thanks for the link, Tatyana!)

THE RECENCY ILLUSION.

Arnold Zwicky in Language Log discusses the much-condemned phrase "between you and I" in terms of the claim, made by more than one supposed expert, that it "seems to have emerged only in the last twenty or so years." This is absurd; Shakespeare has Antonio write to Bassanio (in The Merchant of Venice, Act III Scene II) "all debts are cleared between you and I." William Congreve used it in 1694, Byron in 1805, Mark Twain in 1856; in short, it goes back a long way. Zwicky says:

The facts look complex, but it's safe to say that the rise of "between you and I" in Late Modern English goes back at least 150 or 160 years, not 20; earlier uses go back about 400 years. There's no way it can be blamed on modern education, as John Simon suggested in 1980 (see MWDEU), unless Simon was just playing with different senses of "modern".

In any case, we have here another instance of the Recency Illusion, the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again—retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc.—the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think. It's not just Kids These Days.

He has more examples, and discusses the Frequency Illusion as well ("once you've noticed a phenomenon, you think it happens a whole lot, even 'all the time'").

By the way, looking up between in the OED I discovered it was two words in Old English, and the object regularly came in between: Beowulf has be sæm tweonum 'between the seas' (literally 'by seas twain'), the 10th-century Blickling Homilies has be us tweonum 'between us,' and so on; "thence through constructions like fridh freondum bi twéon ‘peace friends between,’ bi twéonum, bi twéon coalesced into prepositions. (Cf. the history of to (us)-ward, to-ward, toward.)"

HISTORICAL GRAMMAR OF LITHUANIAN.

I can't improve on Christopher Culver's description at Безѹмниѥ, where I found this link, so I'll just quote it:

Cyril Babaev... has written a historical grammar of Lithuanian with some interesting comments on Lithuanian’s evolution from Proto-Indo-European. Babaev’s Indo-European Database contains links to other grammars. It is probably the most useful site ever hosted at a Bizland.com address.

I find by googling that Babaev, who is not a linguist by profession, has also done a similar grammar of Old English. I should add that Bridget in Christopher's comments says "I’m not sure I trust the IE Database site. I was just looking at Hittite & Lycian and noticed 3 or 4 things that are either just plain wrong or disputed at best." Since it's a hobby for Babaev, I guess that's only to be expected.

DUEMER ON CARRUTH.

Hayden Carruth, as I've said before, is one of my favorite American poets, so I'm looking forward to the weekly series on him Joseph Duemer is planning: "For the next year I will discuss a particular poem or essay of Carruth’s, reproducing as much as is practical & legal." (Via wood s lot.)

HEBREW OR ISRAELI?

A pair of interviews (1, 2, both RealAudio) with Israeli linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann on Jill Kitson's weekly Radio National show about language, Lingua Franca (previously mentioned here), discuss Zuckermann's controversial thesis that "Israeli is a hybrid language, both Semitic and Indo-European... Thus, the term Israeli is far more appropriate than ‘Israeli Hebrew’, a fortiori ‘Modern Hebrew’ or ‘Hebrew’ tout court." The quote is from his paper "A New Vision for ‘Modern Hebrew’: Theoretical, Cultural and Practical Implications of Analysing Israeli as a Semito-European Mixed Language" [pdf file; HTML cache here]); it might help to read the paper before listening to the interviews, since that way you'll be familiar with the details of the argument and can concentrate on the off-the-cuff remarks: that if it had been Moroccan Jews who'd arrived in Palestine and founded modern Israel, the language would be "very Semitic" instead of the hybrid he says it is today; that the Hebrew Bible should be translated into Israeli; that "a language which is a mishmash is nothing to be ashamed of." I particularly liked his insistence that "a native speaker does not need grammar books."

Here's a bit of the paper to get you started:

The Mutual Intelligibility Assumption posits that Israeli is Hebrew because an Israeli speaker can understand Hebrew. Edward Ullendorff (pc) has claimed that the biblical Isaiah could have understood Israeli. I am not convinced that this would have been the case. The reason Israelis can be expected to understand the book of Isaiah – albeit still with difficulties – is surely because they study the Old Testament at school for eleven years, rather than because it is familiar to them from their daily conversation. Furthermore, Israelis read the bible as if it were Israeli and often therefore misunderstand it. When an Israeli reads yéled sha‘ashu‘ím in Jeremiah 31:19 (King James 20), s/he does not understand it as ‘pleasant child’ but rather as ‘playboy’. Ba’u banim ‘ad mashber in Isaiah 37:3 is interpreted by Israelis as ‘children arrived at a crisis’ rather than as ‘children arrived at the mouth of the womb, to be born’. The available examples are not only lexical: much more importantly, Israelis are often incapable of recognizing moods, aspects and tenses in the Bible.

Yet, Israeli children are told that the Old Testament was written in their mother tongue. In other words, in Israeli primary schools, Hebrew and Israeli are, axiomatically, the very same. One cannot therefore expect Israelis easily to accept the idea that the two languages might be genetically different. In English terms, it is as if someone were to try to tell a native English-speaker that his/her mother tongue is not the same as Shakespeare’s. The difference is that between Shakespeare and the current native speaker of English there has been a continuous chain of native speakers. Between the biblical Isaiah and contemporary Israelis there has been no such chain, while the Jews have had many mother tongues other than Hebrew...

Israeli educators and politicians, as well as laymen, often argue that Israelis ‘slaughter’ or ‘rape’ their language by ‘lazily’ speaking slovenly, ‘bad Hebrew’, full of ‘mistakes’ (e.g. http://www.lashon.exe. co.il). Most Israelis say bekitá bet rather than the puristic bekhitá bet ‘in the second grade’ (note the spirantization of the /k/ in the latter); éser shékel rather than asar-á shkal-ím ‘ten shekels’ (the latter having a polarity-of-gender agreement – with a feminine numeral and a masculine plural noun); aní yaví rather than aní aví ‘I will bring’. Issues of language are so sensitive in Israel that politicians are often involved. In a session at the Israeli Parliament on 4 January 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rebuked Israelis for using the etymologically Arabo-English hybrid expression yàla báy, lit. ‘let’s bye’, i.e. ‘goodbye’, instead of ‘the most beautiful word’ shalóm ‘peace, hello, goodbye’. In an article in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz (21 June 2004), the prominent politician Yossi Sarid attacked the common language of éser shékel etc. as inarticulate and monstrous, and urged civilians to fight it and protect ‘Hebrew’.

But what such public figures are doing is trying to impose Hebrew grammar on Israeli speech, ignoring the fact that Israeli has its own grammar, which is very different from that of Hebrew. For example, whereas the Hebrew phrase for ‘my grandfather’ was sav-í ‘grandfather + 1st person singular possessive’, in Israeli it is sába shel-ì ‘grandfather of me’. Similarly, whilst Hebrew often used smikhút (construct-state), in Israeli it is much less common. In a construct-state, two nouns are combined, the first being modified by the second. Compare the Hebrew construct-state ‘em ha-yéled ‘mother the-child’ with the Israeli phrase ha-íma shel ha-yéled ‘the mother of the child’, both meaning ‘the child’s mother’. Similarly, note the position of the definite article ha in the Israeli construct-state ha-òrekh dín ‘the lawyer’ (lit. ‘the arranger of law’), as opposed to the Hebrew construct-state ‘orékh ha-dín ‘id.’. Most Israeli pupils say la-bet séfer ‘to the school’ (lit. ‘to the house book’), rather than the puristic le-vét ha-séfer. Thus, Israeli is far more analytic than Hebrew...

The linguist Menahem Zevi Kaddari has criticized the young Israeli author Etgar Keret for using a ‘thin language’ – as opposed to Shmuel Yosef Agnon. When Agnon wrote ishtó méta aláv, lit. ‘his wife died (/dies) on him’, he meant ‘he became a widower’ (1944, cf. 1977: 13). When Keret says so, he means ‘his wife loves him very much’. Kaddari compares Keret to Agnon as if they wrote in two different registers of the same language. In the proposed study, I wish to test my hypothesis that Keret is, in fact, writing in a different language. Whilst Agnon attempts to write in (Mishnaic) Hebrew, which is obviously not his mother tongue (Yiddish), Keret writes authentically in his native Israeli. Israelis are not less intelligent than their ancestors. Their language is not thin and their vocabulary not poor, just different. Educators imposing Hebrew grammar on Israeli speech ignore the fact that Israeli has its own internal logic.

One can see in Kaddari’s rebuke the common phenomenon of a conservative older generation unhappy with ‘reckless’ changes to the language – cf. Aitchison (2001) and Hill (1998). However, prescriptivism in Israeli contradicts the usual model, where there is an attempt to enforce the grammar and pronunciation of an elite social group. The late linguist Haim Blanc once took his young daughter to see an Israeli production of My Fair Lady. In this version, Professor Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle how to pronounce /r/ ‘properly’, i.e. as the Hebrew alveolar trill [r] (characteristic of Sephardic Jews, who happen to have been socially disadvantaged) rather than as the Israeli unique lax uvular approximant [®′] (characteristic of Ashkenazic Jews, who have usually controlled key positions in society). ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ is translated as barád yarád bidróm sfarád haérev ‘Hail fell in southern Spain this evening’. At the end of the performance, Blanc’s daughter tellingly asked, ‘Daddy, why was Professor Higgins trying to teach Eliza to speak like our cleaning lady?’

Whether or not one accepts his claim that Israeli is a completely different (even genetically different) language, I'm certainly convinced that the differences are greater than I had realized, and I always enjoy a good overturning of applecarts. (Thanks for the radio links, Anthony!)

Addendum. Guy Deutscher will be featured on Wordsmith Chat on August 20, 2005, 11 AM Pacific [GMT -7]. They've had quite a lineup of word people, the last three being Erin McKean, Michael Quinion, and Jesse Sheidlower; it should be an interesting chat.

FISHBASE AND AVIBASE.

I just stumbled on FishBase (German mirror), a website specializing in, well, fish. What makes it of interest here is the attention given to language: not only is the search page available and searchable in many languages, but there is a page dedicated to the issue:

Claiming that the common names of fish are one of their most important attributes is an understatement. In fact, common names are all that most people know about most fish as shown by the fact that most people accessing FishBase on the Internet do so by common name.

Hence, FishBase would not be complete without common names. This fact has been considered very early in the design of FishBase (Froese 1990) and has resulted in the compilation of over 107,000 common names, probably the largest collection of its kind. It has taken us a long time, to realize, however, that each pair of ‘country’ and ‘language’ fields uniquely define a culture, and that a large fraction of what the people belonging to a certain cultue know about fishes (i.e., local knowledge) can therefore be captured through the COMMON NAMES table including these fields...

The most obvious use of the COMMON NAMES table is to identify the scientific name of a fish. Note, however, that non-standardized common names may point to more than one species. Other, less obvious, uses include:

• preserving and making widely accessible ethnoichthyological knowledge from endangered cultures (Palomares and Pauly 1993; Palomares et al. 1993; Pauly et al. 1993);

• testing qualitative or quantitative hypotheses about traditional classification schemes (see e.g., Hunn 1980; Berlin 1992; Palomares and Pauly 1993);

• enabling mutual verification of facts from ethnoichthyology and its scientific counterpart (as in Johannes 1981); and

• following the evolution of the linguistic subset represented by fish names, in space and through history, and test related hypotheses.

They have "over 200 languages in alphabetic order ranging from Adangme to Zande." My kind of site, even if I don't like fish.

Addendum. Thanks to Chris Waigl in the comments, I can now add the equally excellent Avibase, for birds.

WORLD ATLAS OF LANGUAGE STRUCTURES.

The World Atlas of Language Structures is a very interesting project which "is in preparation under the editorship of Bernard Comrie, Matthew Dryer, David Gil, and Martin Haspelmath."

This Atlas will show structural features of languages in much the same way as linguistic data are displayed in dialect atlases. It will, so to speak, show us the isoglosses of the dialects of Human Language. We envisage an Atlas with about 100 structural features, each shown on a two-page global map and accompanied by a two-page description and discussion of the feature. To make areal patterns visible, each feature needs to be mapped for at least 150 languages, and ideally more than 200. In addition to the printed version, we envisage a fully searchable CD-ROM version.

A Guardian article about it doesn't actually provide much information but does have this amusing quote:

Roland Kriessling, a linguist specialising in African languages, said: "In Namibia, there are many languages which sound completely bizarre to the western ear.

"!Xoop, for example, has different clicking sounds, including the tut, the horse's hoof sound and the kiss. The phonetic complexity of !Xoop could put it into the Guinness Book of Records."

Thanks for the link, Pat!

Addendum. One of the contributors to the Atlas wrote me as follows:

Somebody who commented on your post spoke of sparsity of data, and my honest opinion is that that is not a fair assessment. We all got a list of a core sample of 100 languages we were expected to investigate, plus another 100 we were strongly urged to investigate. For the chapters I worked on, I looked at every single of those 200 languages, plus over 100 more. We had access to experts on most of the 200 languages to make up for gaps in written documentation. I have seen a few chapters that indeed fall short of current standards in linguistic typology (there simply were too few languages in the sample), but most chapters are based on sufficient data, in my opinion. Of course you can always say that the picture isn't nearly complete (it would take a large team and tons of money to investigate anything close to all of the Earth´s languages even for a single feature), but both in terms of topics and languages covered, I don't think "sparsity" is a valid characterization.

VERBAL PRIVILEGE.

That's the title of a promising new blog whose proposed ambit is "language, literature, politics, poetry, cinema, music, food, art, heterotopia"; it takes its name from an Adrienne Rich poem, "North American Time," whose second section I find as memorable as does Elizabeth (the blogger):

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege.

You can read the whole thing here, and if you happen to like lentil soup she has what looks to be a tasty Turkish version.

GUAMAN POMA.

A MetaFilter post alerted me to the existence of an amazing document written in the early 17th century by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a native speaker of Quechua who had learned Spanish and served as an interpreter; he came to regret his collaboration with the invaders and began trying to support Andean traditions and culture, and as a part of this effort he wrote an immense letter in Quechua-based Spanish, the Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), to King Philip II of Spain, who as far as we know never read it. It turned up at the Royal Library of Copenhagen in 1908 (nobody knows how it got there) and was slowly recognized as the unique source that it is. This introduction by Rolena Adorno, one of the scholars investigating it today, says:

With the discovery of the Nueva coronica, a whole new perspective on Andean culture came into being. Here was a document that offered an indigenous Andean perspective on conquest and colonization and, more importantly, a knowledge of Andean and Inca society that most European chroniclers, and even some famous Peruvian-born writers like El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, could not duplicate. As John V. Murra observed nearly twenty years ago, the Nueva coronica y buen gobierno is a "source of basic information about Andean institutions available nowhere else."

The Royal Library has made the entire document available online in facsimile and annotated translation; so far it's only in Spanish, but you can get a few selections in English here (with a brief introduction by David Frye, who explains that "Guaman Poma" represents Quechua Waman Puma, "Hawk Puma"), and there are many English articles in the Royal Library site's resources page. The document is placed in a cross-cultural perspective by Mary Louise Pratt in her article Arts of the Contact Zone, which says:

Guaman Poma's New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed to call an autoethnographic text, by which I mean a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them... Autoethnographic representation often involves concrete collaborations between people, as between literate ex-slaves and abolitionist intellectuals, or between Guaman Poma and the Inca elders who were his informants. Often, as in Guaman Poma, it involves more than one language. In recent decades autoethnography, critique, and resistance have reconnected with writing in a contemporary creation of the contact zone, the testimonio...

To grasp the import of Guaman Poma's project, one needs to keep in mind that the Incas had no system of writing. Their huge empire is said to be the only known instance of a full-blown bureaucratic state society built and administered without writing. Guaman Poma constructs his text by appropriating and adapting pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders. He does not simply imitate or reproduce it; he selects and adapts it along Andean lines to express (bilingually, mind you) Andean interests and aspirations...

In sum, Guaman Poma's text is truly a product of the contact zone. If one thinks of cultures, or literatures, as discrete, coherently structured, monolingual edifices, Guaman Poma's text, and indeed any autoethnographic work appears anomalous or chaotic—as it apparently did to the European scholars Pietschmann spoke to in 1912. If one does not think of cultures this way, then Guaman Poma's text is simply heterogeneous, as the Andean region was itself and remains today. Such a text is heterogeneous on the reception end as well as the production end: it will read very differently to people in different positions in the contact zone. Because it deploys European and Andean systems of meaning making, the letter necessarily means differently to bilingual Spanish-Quechua speakers and to monolingual speakers in either language; the drawings mean differently to monocultural readers, Spanish or Andean, and to bicultural readers responding to the Andean symbolic structures embodied in European genres.

In the Andes in the early 1600s there existed a literate public with considerable intercultural competence and degrees of bilingualism. Unfortunately, such a community did not exist in the Spanish court with which Guaman Poma was trying to make contact. It is interesting to note that in the same year Guaman Poma sent off his letter, a text by another Peruvian was adopted in official circles in Spain as the canonical Christian mediation between the Spanish conquest and Inca history. It was another huge encyclopedic work, titled the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, written, tellingly, by a mestizo, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Like the mestizo half brother who taught Guaman Poma to read and write, Inca Garcilaso was the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish official, and had lived in Spain since he was seventeen. Though he too spoke Quechua, his book is written in eloquent, standard Spanish, without illustrations. While Guaman Poma's life's work sat somewhere unread, the Royal Commentaries was edited and reedited in Spain and the New World, a mediation that coded the Andean past and present in ways thought unthreatening to colonial hierarchy. The textual hierarchy persists; the Royal Commentaries today remains a staple item on Ph.D. reading lists in Spanish, while the New Chronicle and Good Government, despite the ready availability of several fine editions, is not. However, though Guaman Poma's text did not reach its destination, the transcultural currents of expression it exemplifies continued to evolve in the Andes, as they still do, less in writing than in storytelling, ritual, song, dance-drama, painting and sculpture, dress, textile art, forms of governance, religious belief, and many other vernacular art forms. All express the effects of long-term contact and intractable, unequal conflict.

You can see a dialogue in Quechua in this drawing ("Cayllata acullicuy, pana" ['Chew this coca, sister'] / "Apomoy, tura." ['Hand it to me, brother'] and a cross-linguistic encounter here: "Cay curitacho micunqui?" ['Do you eat this gold?'] / "Este oro comemos." ['We eat this gold']. The margins and interstices of official history are where all the interesting stuff is.