I liked floor_mice's post so much I thought I'd translate it for the non-Russophones among us:
Not long ago we discovered a neighborhood... park? Well, a well-kept area under high-voltage wires, anyway, much like similar places in Russia where dog-lovers and pets walk their leashes. The difference is that throughout the "park" winds an asphalt path, the grass is mowed, the blackberry bushes are thoughtfully trimmed into little round islands so that you can pick the berries just by strolling around, without having to push through the brambles.As you enter the park there's a plywood board with simple rules: no alcoholic beverages, no fires, don't let your dog off the leash, and be sure to pick up the... products of metabolic activity. And there's a little roll of clean new black plastic bags, and all through the park are placed bins where the bags can be deposited when full.
All this is just setting the stage; the story follows.
So today I'm walking my basset hound; she's as timid and shy as aThanks to Tatyana for the link and for her help with Russian, and to Bonnie for her help with English.gazellegirl from the Smolny Institute, so as soon as we catch sight of another dog with its master, we want to know whether they're friendly.Coming towards us is a short, elderly gentleman, in a snow-white, ironed silk shirt, pants with a sharp crease, and Italian shoes. (Those who live in the States will understand why I stress these details of his clothing.) He's walking a huge, magnificent, almost black Alsatian. Ears - THIS big! Muzzle - THIS big! Tail - Budyonny's shaggy saber.
Naturally, I want to find out from a distance whether they are friendly to sausage-dogs and other representatives of the animal kingdom, so I inquire. To which I immediately get the question: "What's your native language?" Without a moment's hesitation, I brazenly respond: "Russian, what's yours?"
"You know," the gentleman says politely, "I was born in Manchester and my wife is French, and at home we speak only French, so my dog doesn't understand English words."
"Oh, how well I understand," I say. "My dog doesn't have a clue about English, but in Russian she even gets the intonation."
"What city in Russia would you be from?"
"I'd be from Leningrad," I answer.
"Ah, so you too are from Europe!"
"Yes," I say intelligently, "we're practically neighbors on the map of Europe."
"Do you know the word nostalgie?" he suddenly asks me.
"Yes."
"And do you like America? - you can say what you think, it won't offend me either way."
"I'm quite comfortable here, thanks," I say.
"You know, I don't care for it. I've lived here 45 years. Before it was all right, but now I'm always dreaming about Manchester. Nostalgie...
"Maybe it's not America? Maybe you're longing for the time when you were young?"
"You know," he says, "my children have grown up here and graduated from college, I have a nice house, a beautiful car, money... but my wife speaks French in her dreams... she's French, you know... and I dream of Manchester, I play children's games there..."
"Nostalgie," I say.
"Yes, my dog doesn't understand a word of English," he says, and his eyes swim away to Manchester.
"Mine too," I say.
"Language is our nostalgie," he says.
He takes my hand and presses it in his weak old-man's handshake, like the touch of a child, and says something to his dog in French, and they go out by the path along which we'd just arrived.
"Well, let's go home," I tell my little sausage in Russian, and we leave the park without looking back.
This has been around for almost nine years, but I'd somehow missed it until now.
Third, there is NO evidence that transitional languages ever existed. What use is half a language? A noun without verbs conveys no meaning! Sure, there is middle and old- English. But these are ENGLISH! A complete nontransitional language. We do not deny that micro-linguistics can happen, but this process can create only DIALECTS. There is NO EVIDENCE that a series of random micro-linguistic events can create a WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE. I'll believe in Macro-linguistics when I see a video tape of a child growing up in an Eskimo village suddenly become fluent in Armenian!Heh. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
One of my favorite correspondents (thanks, Carol!) has sent me a NY Times story by Nicholas Wade about "a new way of linking languages, which [linguists] say has allowed them to reconstruct a network of the languages spoken in islands near New Guinea."
The new method is designed for languages so old that little trace of their common vocabulary remains. It forges connections between languages through grammatical features, which change less quickly than words.I know nothing about the Papuan languages, so I can't evaluate the conclusions they come to, but it bothers me that the scientist quoted praising the approach and saying it will be "widely emulated" is a biologist, not a linguist. None of my fellow linguabloggers has discussed the story, so consider this a call for comment: anybody have an informed opinion on whether this is valuable or just another bit of linguistic cold fusion?With the new tool, historians may be able to peer considerably further back in time than the 5,000 to 7,000 years or so that many linguists see as the limit beyond which no sure connections can be made between languages.
The authors of the new method say the relationships they can construct may be 10,000 years or older.
The researchers, who were led by Michael Dunn, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Holland, have published their work in the current issue of Science.
People keep e-mailing me articles based on a new book called The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World, by Adam Jacot De Boinod. (The publisher must have one hell of a PR person.) I didn't really feel like going into the "weird furrin words" thing again, so I'm glad to report that Benjamin Zimmer has done a good job in Language Log. He's a little too polite for my taste, calling it "unfair to prejudge de Boinod's book based solely on early press accounts" (if you can't be unfair about fake language mavens, who can you be unfair about?), but he demolishes the Malay material with gusto. And he provides this delightful anecdote:
As an aside, the reliance on sketchy online dictionaries and wordlists can yield unintentionally humorous results. Take, for instance, the Maserati Kubang. Unveiled in 2003, this "concept car" is supposedly named after "a wind over Java." (Maserati has a tradition of naming cars after exotic-sounding winds.) Close, but no cigar — the actual word is kumbang, not kubang. Angin kumbang literally means "bumblebee wind" in Javanese and Indonesian, and it refers to a very dry south or southwesterly wind that blows into the port of Cirebon on the north coast of Java. But this got mangled on various websites listing winds of the world..., and kumbang was changed to kubang. What does kubang mean in Indonesian? "Mudhole, mud puddle, quagmire." Probably not the image Maserati was going for!The Maserati Mudhole—has a ring to it, doesn't it?
That's the title of Volume 2, number 2 (summer 2003) of EnterText, an "interdisciplinary e-journal for cultural and historical studies and creative work" out of Brunel University. The issue has sections on Postcolonial Translation (e.g., John Gilmore on "Parrots, Poets and Philosophers: Language and Empire in the Eighteenth Century"), Transcreation (J. Gill Holland, "Teasing out an English Translation from a Classical Chinese Poem: with a translation from T'ao Ch'ien"; Debjani Chatterjee, "An Introduction to the Ghazal"), and Languages of the Americas (César Itier, "Quechua, Aymara and other Andean Languages: Historical, Linguistic and Socio-linguistic Aspects"; Paul Goulder, "The Languages of Peru: their Past, Present and Future Survival"). Lots of interesting-sounding stuff; I should warn you that the papers themselves are pdf files. (Via wood s lot.)
By the way, my apologies for the extended downtime; I'm buying more bandwidth from my hosting company, so the problem should not reoccur any time soon.
Michele Berdy, the Moscow Times language columnist, reviews a new dictionary of Soviet-era jargon:
The dictionary, compiled and newly revised by the linguists Valery Mokiyenko and Tatyana Nikitina, is titled Толковый Словарь Языка Совдепии [Explanatory dictionary of the language of Sovdepia], a name which, like much of the language it contains, is hellishly difficult to translate. Cовдеп was the abbreviation of Cовет депутатов (in full form, the "council of worker, peasant and Red Army deputies") that came to be shorthand for the Soviet Union. Over time, it came to be used especially in the form Cовдепия as a derogatory phrase for the worst of the old regime. To convey the flavor of the original, it might be translated as "The Dictionary of the Worker's Paradise."Sounds like a useful thing to have, even if "indispensable" may be overstating it in this era when such expressions can presumably be deciphered via the magic of search engines. (My thanks to John McChesney-Young for the heads-up.)For those who have forgotten that world or never visited it, the dictionary is a gold mine of information. It deciphers all those abbreviations that once slid off the tongue and now are frustratingly opaque: КCCР? Казахская Социалистическая Советская Республика (Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic). ПГК? Партийно-государственный контроль (party-state control). БПП? Без права переписки (without the right to correspondence, part of a prison sentence that really meant execution)...
If you read the dictionary the way I did, from start to finish as if it were a novel — and with an old Bulat Okudzhava tape playing in the background — you dissolve into the Soviet past, which visually comes to life with illustrations of posters and billboards. Anyone who wants to read Bulgakov or Ilf and Petrov in the original Russian will find this dictionary indispensable.
While trying to figure out if Muskogean (the language family to which Choctaw and Chickasaw, among others, belong) is considered to be part of any larger grouping (apparently some people take it for granted it's part of the "Hokan-Siouxan" group while others treat it as independent, Wikipedia calls Hokan itself "a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families spoken in California and Mexico" and says "few linguists today expect Hokan as a whole to prove to be valid," and I'm certainly not qualified to even have a thought about the matter), I ran across an interesting paper (pdf file; unfortunately, there does not appear to be an HTML cache) by Prof. George Aaron Broadwell called "Reconstructing Proto-Muskogean Language and Prehistory: Preliminary results" that's chock-full of the kind of detailed lexical comparisons and reconstructions I so enjoy. One thing that makes it exotic from the point of view of someone trained in Indo-European (where the inherited vocabulary includes terms for 'beech,' 'birch,' 'wolf,' and 'salmon') is the list of "Reconstructable Proto-Muskogean terms," which includes words for chestnut, chicken snake, chickenhawk, chigger, chinquapin, chipmunk, civet cat (?), clam/spoon, copperhead, corn, cotton, and crawfish, to take only the c's (the full list is on pages 15-16 of the paper). But what impelled me to post about it is the point he makes about a common problem in historical linguistics:
How can we reconcile the presence of a word for corn with the generally accepted archaeological position that corn was not present in the southeast until considerably later, ca. A.D. 700?...I wish all historical linguists were so forthright about the difficulties involved in trying to correlate linguistic and archeological evidence.A common approach in dismissing linguistic evidence that does not correlate with the archaeological results is to suggest that the reference of the words has changed through time (cf. Renfrew 1988). For example, the word for corn might have originally referred to some other grain. When corn was introduced to the southeast the word for the older grain might have been applied to the new-comer.
However, it seems unlikely that speakers of all the different languages in the family would have coincidentally decided to call the new grain the same thing. Once a language has split into two mutually unintelligable daughter languages, the speakers do not consult with each other about naming new phenomena.
The unlikeliness of this hypothesis increases when we realise that we must also assume that the words for shucking corn and corn riddle originally applied other actions and objects, and that once again widely separated people have
coincidentally chosen the same words for actions and objects associated with the new grain.I therefore conclude that presence of a word for corn in Proto-Muskogean constitutes a genuine conflict between the linguistic and archaeological data.
Oh, and I learned a new word, lamb's-quarters (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, the copyeditor's bible, hyphenates it; the AHD, which I linked to, does not), the common name for Chenopodium album, a kind of goosefoot that M-W says is "sometimes used as greens" but AHD simply, and unkindly, calls a "weed"; it's taahwa in Creek and taani' in Chickasaw. You can get a USDA "plant profile" here, see some more pictures here, and get ideas about collecting and eating it here. I'd still like to know how it got its striking name, though.
BabelMap is "a Windows character map utility that allows you to find and copy any Unicode character. BabelMap always supports the latest version of Unicode (currently version 4.1.0). It is free and fully functional, and there are no disabled features or time restrictions." You can download it from the page I linked and start playing with it immediately; I will call to your attention the very useful Font Analysis Utility, which lists all Unicode blocks covered by a particular font and all fonts that cover a particular Unicode block (it's under Tools, or just hit F7): if you want to quote Glagolitic, scroll down the "Select Unicode block" menu till you get to Glagolitic, then go to the Font Analysis Utility and select the right-hand side ("List All Fonts That Cover This Unicode Block"), and it will tell you you need the Dilyana font; if you have it, the characters will display appropriately. If you need a font not supplied by your version of Windows, go to Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources page and click on Unicode fonts for Windows computers, where you should be able to find anything your heart desires. And now I can show the title of the Parnis novel I was looking for yesterday with the proper rough breathing on the article: Ὁ διορϑωτής.
(Via Abecedaria.)
While trying to find the original publication date of the novel O diorthotis by Alexis Parnis for my LibraryThing catalog (I have the translation The Proofreader, but I like to add these scholarly details), I ran across a wonderful page on "Modern Hellenic (Greek) Literature: Literature of Authors of Greek origin: Ελληνική Λογοτεχνία," just part of Michael Lahanas's wide-ranging personal site ("WHO AM I? A Hellene and European. I provide with this website some maybe interesting information about Hellas."). He has sections on Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Greece, which I confess I have not explored, because I'm so happy with the modern literature section: it's an idiosyncratic selection of writers somehow connected with Greece (including Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn, Ugo Foscolo [Ούγος Φώσκολος], and Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington), erratically supplying biographical information, personal evaluation, and outside links. It's not easy to find information on Greek authors, and such a rich trove is this that I forgave him the fact that he had nothing useful for Parnis, not even the Greek version of his name. (I did find a bookseller's site that indicated at least one edition of the book was published in 1978, so I'm provisionally using that.) Efkharisto, Mikhali!
The Vindolanda Tablets Online site presents "writing tablets excavated from the Roman fort at Vindolanda in northern England" in a rather complicated interface that takes getting used to, but once you start accessing the tablets themselves, scrupulously transcribed and translated, it becomes addictive. To help you out, the Finding Tablets in the database page says:
In order to browse or search the tablets for more specific information, for example the texts written by the same person, texts in which a certain word, term or name occurs, or that refer to a particular subject or come from the same archaeological context, follow ‘search’ or ‘browse’ from the side menu. Within ‘search’ there is also a tool for finding tablets using the alternative numbering systems by which they have been identified, the numbers used in Vindolanda Tablets I and the Vindolanda archaeological inventory numbers (see The print publication and the online edition for more details). Remember too that the scholarly introductions to the tablets can also be searched.For the Latin search you use the dictionary form (nom. sg. for nouns, 1 sg. pres. for verbs); the general search "allows you to search the English translations, commentaries, notes and cataloguing data (‘metadata’) for each tablet, via a text box." They thoughtfully provide a highlights page to get you started; the third item, tablet #164, reads:There are two main categories of search, ‘Latin text search’ and ‘General text search’, as well as a search by tablet number.
1 _nenu...[.]n. BrittonesIt's wonderful to see the actual tablet, with its Latin text inscribed by a clearly pissed-off soldier. (Via Plep.)
2 nimium multi · equites
3 gladis · non utuntur equi-
4 tes · nec residunt
5 Brittunculi · ut · iaculos
6 mittant"... the Britons are unprotected by armour (?). There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins."
A story by Peter J. Boyer about the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the latest New Yorker says "the seafood industry attracted an ethnic mix that was sharply distinct from the Mississippi norm" and gives as an example "Slavonian immigrants, dislocated by the First World War." When I read this, I thought "I'm probably one of the few readers not of Yugoslav background who knows where Slavonia is without looking it up," and then "I wonder if it's a misprint?"—my thought being that they surely wouldn't casually mention "Slavonian" without identifying it for the 99.99% of their readers who would confuse it with Slovenian and Slovakian if it registered at all. But I googled and discovered that that's exactly what they did, because articles like Aimee Schmidt's "Down Around Biloxi: Culture and Identity in the Biloxi Seafood Industry" make it clear that the Slavs in question were indeed Slavonian. So, since Slavonian is in neither Merriam-Webster's Collegiate nor even the Encyclopedia of the Peoples of the World, let me remedy the laziness of the magazine's editors and tell you that Slavonians are from Slavonia, a region of eastern Croatia well known in Zagreb and Belgrade but not, I fear, among the readership of the New Yorker. And I will add that Slavonia/Slovenia/Slovakia is at least as confusing a set of terms as Galatia/Galicia/Galicia (Halicz).
A long article by Natalie Angier in the science section of the NY Times discusses the ubiquity and primordial nature of cussing; apparently even chimps do it:
Indeed, chimpanzees engage in what appears to be a kind of cursing match as a means of venting aggression and avoiding a potentially dangerous physical clash.Guy Deutscher is quoted to the effect that "the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions," reminding me that it's high time I reported on his book. And it absolutely fascinated me that after describing the physiological arousal produced by exposure to cursing ("Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow"), the article continues:Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, said that when chimpanzees were angry "they will grunt or spit or make an abrupt, upsweeping gesture that, if a human were to do it, you'd recognize it as aggressive."
Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé.I wish I understood that overreaction, which is one of the main windmills at which I tilt.
(Thanks for the link, Bonnie!)
Geoff Pullum at Language Log has a properly outraged response to the discovery that the New Yorker's search engine, when baffled, says: "I'm sorry I couldn't find that for which you were looking." It's like a parody of "good grammar" of the sort that one would have thought long laid to rest along with unsigned articles, even at that famously prissy magazine. I won't repeat his strictures, but I will remind everyone that there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition. It is perfectly good English and always has been. See Geoff's post for the sad tale of how the myth was born, grew, and overcame the truth, thus poisoning English writing in general and the New Yorker in particular.
So I was reading a travel narrative by John Verlenden (part 3, "Hama and the Waterwheels of Death," of his ongoing series "Road to Damascus," serialized in Exquisite Corpse) when I came across the word koaga in a context that suggested it was Arabic, though it certainly doesn't look Arabic: "As a koaga - an outlander - with features that marked me as a wild beast--red hair, blue eyes--I'd become inured to snickers from Arab children." And I did what we do in this ever-changing world in which we live in (to quote the wordily wordy Paul McCartney): I googled "koaga," then added "arabic" because there's a Guarani phrase Ko'aga Roñe'eta (said to mean 'now we will speak' and used as the name of an "on-line journal of human rights and humanitarian law") that overwhelms the results, and wound up at WORDTHEQUE - Word by word multilingual library, which combines an online dictionary feature with texts in languages from Afan Oromo to Zulu in ways that bear more investigating than I've so far given it.
Because I'm still obsessed with this koaga word, which seems to exist only in the Verlenden piece. Anybody have a clue?
(Thanks for the Exquisite Corpse link, part of a translation issue, go to wood s lot.)
I happened across Nick Nicholas's thesis while looking for something else; its title is "The story of pu: The grammaticalisation in space and time of a Modern Greek complementiser," and it has five summaries ranging in length from "I am spending three years looking at the 1000-year history of one word in Mediaeval Greek" to the actual abstract:
This work is concerned with tracing the historical development of the various functions of the Modern Greek connective pu. This connective has a considerable range of functions, and there have been attempts in the literature to group together these functions in a synchronically valid framework. It is my contention that the most illuminating way of regarding the functional diffusion of pu — and of any content word — is by looking, not only at one synchronic distribution (that of Standard Modern Greek), but at the full range of synchronic distributions in the sundry diatopic variants (dialects) of Modern Greek, and that such a discussion must be informed by the diachrony of the form...An insistence on diachrony is sweet music to this Indo-Europeanist manqué. (The page I've linked is HTML, but the chapters linked from it are pdf files.)
Neal Durando, in An Abécédaire Fugitif, begins "My grammar has crossed the Atlantic four times since I began giving English lessons in western France three years ago," and goes on to list French words with associations they call up for him, often how he learned them:
FOIS /fwa/An enjoyable collection of motments. (Via wood s lot.)
time
"Cómo se dice 'vez'?" I asked my Spanish friend Oscár as we crossed the tramway tracks to eat lunch at café Les Facultés in between classes at the University of Nantes. There were no English speakers within earshot, so Spanish was how I learned about French. We were anxious about crossing the tracks as the tramway announces itself with only a slight sighing sound. "Fois" he answered without looking at me, as he had an eye out for the tram that could have put an end to us. Vez, fois, once upon a time pedestrians had to watch for streetcars everywhere in the United States, even in Chicago, the city where I was to shortly find myself.
Charlotte Brewer has created a site called Examining the OED that promises to be extremely interesting. The About page says:
The Oxford English Dictionary is everywhere recognized as a comprehensive authority on the history of English from 1150 to the present day. Both literary and linguistic scholars, as well as many others, use the dictionary in order to find out more about words and their meanings, and to study and learn from the unrivalled stores of quotation evidence provided for the individual entries (drawn from literary and non-literary sources from the earliest days of English up to the present). In particular, OED's representation of language has crucially affected literary and linguistic understanding of how English has changed and developed, and of the contribution made to this process by individuals such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other major writers.You can see in detail what's available at the site map. (Thanks go once again to aldiboronti at Wordorigins, master of linguistic truffle-hunting.)Yet we know remarkably little about the methodology and underlying editorial practices of this enormous 'engine of research' (a term first used of the dictionary by one of its publishers, Charles Cannan, in 1905). Although OED is a landmark in lexicography and provides a reference point for many sorts of language studies, it is itself comparatively little studied. By exploring and analysing OED's quotations and quotation sources, this research project seeks to illuminate the foundations of the dictionary's representation of the English language.
Oxford University Press has put online a long and fascinating interview (pdf file; HTML cache here) with J.L. Lighter, compiler of the indispensible and happily revived Historical Dictionary of American Slang (which he's been working on since he left high school). As the introduction puts it:
The best news of the year for word buffs, amateur etymologists, professional linguists, and all who respond to the incredible richness of the American language is that J. E. Lighter has found a home for his Historical Dictionary of American Slang.When Random House published the first two volumes of this dictionary, covering letters A through O, in 1994 and 1997, critics reached for such terms as definitive, absolutely outstanding, and landmark publication. Nevertheless, the publisher abandoned the project when it was only half-completed, leaving the author and his dictionary in publishing limbo—and his many fans aghast...
Not to have completed this work beyond the letter O would have been a tremendous loss to American cultural history as well as to lexicography. But now Oxford University Press has come to the rescue; a contract has just been signed to carry the project right on through Z. Fortunately, J. (for Jonathan) E. Lighter, the research associate in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, had persevered, and currently he is deep into the S’s—a big letter, one that accounts for about 10 percent of the pages in most dictionaries. Oxford expects to bring out volume three of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang in 2006.The interview is full of great nuggets about words like goon, cowpoke (which, contrary to the OED and all other sources, is not attested until the 1920s), and occupy ("During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, occupy was used so frequently as a euphemism for sexual intercourse that writers stopped using it in its primary sense"). Thanks go, as so often, to aldiboronti at Wordorigins for the link.
The name Emeneau won't mean much to non-linguists, but he was a giant in the field, and I'm glad he made it to 101. You can find out more about him here; I was reminded to post this by reading Sally Thomason's touching tribute at Language Log, and I originally got the news at Noncompositional.
The online magazine Words Without Borders is trying to promote international literature:
Few literatures have truly prospered in isolation from the world. English-speaking culture in general and American culture in particular has long benefited from cross-pollination with other worlds and languages. Thus it is an especially dangerous imbalance when, today, 50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated *from English,* but only 6% are translated *into* English.Their archives go back to July/August 2003 (Literary Border-crossings in Iran), and they've got a blog with authors from the U.S., the Netherlands, Italy, and the U.K. (Via wood s lot.)Words Without Borders undertakes to promote international communication through translation of the world's best writing—selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers, translators, and publishing professionals—and publishing and promoting these works (or excerpts) on the web. We also serve as an advocacy organization for literature in translation, producing events that feature the work of foreign writers and connecting these writers to universities and to print and broadcast media.
I had meant to post about this weeks ago, but it slipped my mind: the New Yorker ran a Talk of the Town piece about words inserted into reference books as copyright traps:
Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”
So when word leaked out that the recently published second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary contains a made-up word that starts with the letter “e,” an independent investigator set himself the task of sifting through NOAD’s thirty-one hundred and twenty-eight “e” entries in search of the phony...It turned out to be esquivalience, "the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities."
A call was placed to Erin McKean, the editor-in-chief of the second edition of NOAD. Upon being presented with the majority opinion, McKean confirmed that “esquivalience” was a fabricated word. She said that Oxford had included it in NOAD’s first edition, in 2001, to protect the copyright of the electronic version of the text that accompanied most copies of the book. “The editors figured, We’re all working really hard, so let’s put in a word that means ‘working really hard.’ Nothing materialized, so they thought, Let’s do the opposite.” An editor named Christine Lindberg came up with “esquivalience.” The word has since been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster’s New Millennium as its source. “It’s interesting for us that we can see their methodology,” McKean said. “Or lack thereof. It’s like tagging and releasing giant turtles.”(Thanks for jogging my memory, Jeremy!)
An AP story brings us word of some of the names researchers at the Cornwall Record Office have discovered as they pored over their archives:
"My all-time favorites are Abraham Thunderwolff and Freke Dorothy Fluck Lane," she [Rene Jackaman] said.There are also some great married couples (e.g., Nicholas Bone and Priscilla Skin). (Thanks, Nick!)Other discoveries included Boadicea Basher, Philadelphia Bunnyface, Faithful Cock, Susan Booze, Elizabeth Disco, Edward Evil, Fozzitt Bonds, Truth Bullock, Charity Chilly, Gentle Fudge, Obedience Ginger and Offspring Gurney.
Addendum. Trey (in the comments) has found the complete Silly Names List!
While I'm entertaining you, I recently found my all-time favorite typo in a list of Walt Whitman quotes: "Do I contradict my elf?"
I was reading an essay on Mark Aldanov in Georgii Adamovich's collection of criticism Odinochestvo i svoboda (Solitude and freedom, 1955), and in a discussion of Aldanov's novel Начало конца (1939, translated in 1943 as The Fifth Seal) he mentions a character, a "professional revolutionary," called Вислиценус [Vislitsenus]. This very odd name certainly wasn't Russian; could it be Lithuanian? Polish? I googled the transliteration and got one hit, but it provided a precious clue: "VISLITsENUS (Wislicenus)." So now I had the proper Latin-alphabet spelling, and quickly found this page, which told me everything I wanted to know about the name, which is German but of Polish origin, from the name of the town Wiślica: "Er leitet sich ab von dem Städtchen Wiślica in Polen (etwa 80 km nordöstlich von Krakau), aus dem Johannes Wislicenus I stammte." I love the internet.
For those who are interested, there's a thorough discussion of Adamovich's complicated relations with Nabokov (who nastily referred to him as "Sodomovich") here; there's another piece by Adamovich about Aldanov, a personal reminiscence, here, for those who read Russian.
Looking up the word dives, divitis 'rich' (often contracted to dis, ditis) in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, I found the etymology "Pelignian des, deti, cogn. w. DIVVS..." Pelignian was new to me; on investigation I learned that the Paeligni were an Italic people east of the Romans and that their towns were Corfinium (slated to be the new capital of Italy if the good guys had won the Social War) and Sulmo (Ovid's birthplace), but none of my print references mentioned their language. Now, the Wikipedia page has a fairly thorough discussion, saying the "dialect closely resembled the Oscan of Lucania and Samnium, though presenting some peculiarities of its own, which warrant, perhaps, the use of the name North Oscan" and quoting a number of inscriptions... but the Wiki page is based on the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, and I have a feeling more may have been learned since then. Do any of you know more about this? Is Pelignian still thought to be a dialect of Oscan? I always wanted to know more about Oscan and Umbrian (having a romantic attachment to the anti-Roman side in those wars), but it's one of those things I never got around to.
Can't think what it's called? Enter the meaning you have in mind and the OneLook Reverse Dictionary will look for the appropriate word. (Via MonkeyFilter.)
I just ran across the information that the novelist Irwin Shaw was born, in New York to Russian-Jewish parents, Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff. This immediately struck me as an odd name, and sure enough, it does not seem to exist otherwise: a normal transliteration gets no Google hits, and the Cyrillic equivalent Шамфоров gets only a few references to Shaw. Is it just an incredibly obscure name, or is it an Ellis Island deformation of some name I'm not thinking of?
Also, this morning my wife showed me a reference to an actress named Q'Orianka Kilcher. Needless to say, I was intrigued; my first guess was that it was either self-invented or Klingon, but shame on me—it turns out "her mother is descent from the Huachipaeri and Quechua tribes of South America," and the name is Quechua for 'golden eagle.' I checked my Quechua phrasebook (not yet entered in my catalog because it's in the second row—there are even more books piled on the backs of the shelves than are visible), and sure enough, the vocabulary has "gold—qori." But wait: q is a "guttural fricative similar to the 'ch' in Scottish 'loch,'" and q' is "Quechua 'q' with glottal stop." So is there a typo in the vocabulary? Because presumably her parents wouldn't have added the apostrophe just for the hell of it. But since they did, I feel obliged to point out that it's not like Irish O', and the following letter should not be capitalized, as IMDb and the newspaper had it; online sources are split, so I'm guessing she spells it Q'orianka and it gets changed by editors or computer programs. But who knows how she says it? (Ms. Kilcher, if you're reading this, please leave a comment!)
The World Academy of Rusyn Culture has a good site on the language called Rusyn by its speakers and sometimes Ruthenian in English (or "western Ukrainian" by those who do not recognize it as a separate language):
The language territory where Carpatho-Rusyn dialects are spoken coincides with the historical territory of *Carpathian Rus’, which in terms of present-day boundaries is located within southeastern Poland (the *Lemko Region), northeastern Slovakia (the *Prešov Region), most of the *Transcarpathian oblast of Ukraine (*Subcarpathian Rus’), and a small corner of north-central Romania (the *Maramureş Region). Rusyn is also spoken in a few scattered communities in northeastern Hungary and among emigrants from Carpathian Rus’ who settled in the *Vojvodina and Srem regions of present-day Yugoslavia and far eastern Croatia and in the United States and Canada...A nice find by Christopher Culver, who also posts about a projected Indogermanische Grammatik that was begun in 1968 by Kuryłowicz, "was subsequently continued by Watkins, Cowgill, and Mayrhofer, and is nowhere near completion... I wonder what the oldest perpetually unfinished project is in Indo-European linguistics." So which will appear first, this or The Last Dangerous Visions?The difficulty in classifying Carpatho-Rusyn dialects stems largely from the fact that individual dialect territories experience an overlapping of numerous isoglosses. In other words, certain linguistic features typical of one area encroach into other areas; determining where to draw a boundary between these territories in the process of defining and classifying the dialects thus becomes difficult. Another difficulty in classification is related to the fact that the dialects have in the past and continue to be influenced by numerous sociolinguistic or extralinguistic factors from the larger world in which Rusyns live, whether in Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the United States, or Canada. When attempting a synchronic description of the language system of dialects and in classifying them, researchers must consider the larger linguistic and cultural worlds in which dialects function. The structure and function of the dialects must be described in connection with the languages with which they are in contact.
[Comments are now open -- sorry about that!]
While contemplating my ever-growing LibraryThing catalog (now at 1,000 books), I was suddenly struck by the odd name Gorgoniev belonging to the author of my Cambodian-Russian dictionary. I did some googling and discovered that this guy, whose name and patronymic turn out to be Yurii Aleksandrovich, is the only Gorgoniev known to the internet (furthermore, the name is not in any of my reference books). I found some discussion of him here; he sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant fellow:
Юрий Горгониев, высокий, худой, скучный и безжизненный, говорил о том, что я не захотел год назад поехать в колхоз, что, хотя с производственной стороны отдел и не имеет ко мне претензий, мой поступок вызвал осуждение парторганизации отдела...'Yuri Gorgoniev, tall, thin, boring, and lifeless, said that I had refused a year before to go to the kolkhoz and that even though from the point of view of production the department had no claim on me, my behavior called for condemnation from the Party organization of the department...Всё тот же Горгониев, из тверских крестьян. Мне всегда казалось, что он относится к науке, как селянин к сиоей парцелле: старается никого на неё не пускать. Раз он занимается кхмерским языком — конкурентов ему не надо.
'There was Gorgoniev again, of Tver peasant stock. It always seemed to me that he had the same attitude to science that a peasant does to his plot of land: he tries not to let anybody on to it. If he's working on Cambodian, he doesn't need any competitors.'
I'm extremely happy to learn that there there is an book of unpublished poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, The Revolutionary Art of the Future: Rediscovered Poems. ReadySteadyBook has a review:
By all accounts an irascible and rather forbidding character, MacDiarmid was a titanic figure in Scottish literature and should be seen as a major poet: to discount him is to give in to the mania of the chattering classes for middlebrow lyricists rather than to rise to the challenge of his complex work...And as an accompaniment, here's "An Introduction tae Metrics and Grammetrics exemplified by The Eemis Stane by Hugh Macdiarmid" (pdf file; here's an HTML cache):Macdiarmid isn't all politics. His writing is sometimes quite lovely, unexpectedly tender - and there is a religiosity often forgotten. But the poems were primarily written in the 30s and should be understood in this context: a context in which MacDiarmid's politics had a keener resonance than perhaps they do today.
Stress: we pit mair stress on some syllables that ithers... Listen to the stress patterns in exemplary and orchestra. (We dinnae need tae concern wirsels wi maitters o primary and secondary stress. Jist stick tae a binary description o mair nor less stress than the syllables roond aboot. Sae exemplary wad be x / x / whaur x is less stressed and / is mair stressed. Orchestra wad be / x /.Yes, it's a discussion of metrics in Scots, and a fine read it is. As promised in the title, it uses a MacDiarmid lyric as an example, and concludes:
This craftsmanlike yiss o metre and syntax combines wi his rich, varied and aften mystical imagery, nae tae mention his orra vocabulary, tae mak some o his poetry fell obscure. A gey few readers hae been content tae dook in the rare soond and jist be daein wi the bittockie o meanin that got through til them but the mair ye howk in McDiarmid, the better he gets. Ye’ll find that the mair ye look at the wark o the best poets, the mair ye find. Dinnae be pit aff if a poem luiks a bittie difficult at first glisk. Tyauve on!If you need help, the Dictionary of the Scots Language is only a click away. (Both titular links via the always dependable wood s lot.)
David Ball discusses the hazards and delights of translating Alfred Jarry's notorious play Ubu roi:
Flatten the language into ordinary English and the play simply disappears. For just as the plot and characters of Ubu seem to be taken from Shakespeare—but Shakespeare all ground up and turned into sausage-meat—so the language itself is taken from French, but a French so chopped up and transformed that it becomes Jarry's (or Ubu's) own special, meaty idiolect. This, in the land of Corneille and Racine! The assault on art is, first, an assault on language; to the extent that Jarry helped to create a new form of theatre , he created a new language in this play. My class needed a new translation, and by my green candlestick I was going to give it to them. I translated Act One, and finished the job when my colleague John Hellweg wanted to direct the play in the Mendenhall Theater at Smith College. He accepted my version but made a few revisions for performance, as he inserted some contemporary references; since then, I have revised it back to the original, and beyond.The first word of Ubu roi is, famously, Merdre. Not merde, for which there is really only one translation, but merd-re. It has been translated variously as "Shee-yit," "Shite"...and it instantly unleashed pandemonium at the first public performance of the play. (After all, can anything be said in the theatre? You better believe it! says Jarry's play, and today's translator had better believe it, too.)...
What I have been arguing presupposes a theory, or at least a certain view of translation. It is, I think, what most translators practice, and what most readers expect from a good literary translation, although it is not what all translators say about their work, nor by any means what all translation theorists theorize. It begins with the notion of equivalency, and goes on to consider lexical accuracy and poetic "imitation," in something close to the Renaissance sense of the word. A translation should strive to produce, for the audience or reader in the target language, the equivalent of the effect produced by the text upon the audience or reader in the source language... Now "effect," in my view, is not limited to vague emotional response: it also depends on meaning, denotation as well as connotation. Thus it is not quite right to say, as translators sometimes do, "I wrote freely, the way X. would write if she were writing a play in English." If a French audience hears a character say something that means "I'm going to buy some plain brown soap because I can't take the perfumed stuff" the translator should not render it as "I'm going to buy some soap from Marseilles" because she neither knows nor cares that savon de Marseille is plain brown soap. Of course all translators know that rendering cultural equivalents can be trickier than this: should "having a glass of wine in a café"—an ordinary act, uninflected by class, unlike those words in the U.S.—be rendered as "having a beer in a bar"? I’d say: rarely.The essay is followed by his translation of the first act of the play, which is lively and convincing (and has a great equivalent of Merdre)—I'd love to see it staged. (Via wood s lot.)
I know you've always wanted to read a translation of H.P. Lovecraft into Basque... No? Well, how about a Basque translation of an H.P. Lovecraft story about "the barbarous Vascones"? The story is "The Very Old Folk" (1927), and it's here at après moi, le déluge, the Basque version (translated by "our friend Odei") followed by the original. Enjoy... or rather tremble in eldritch horror!
I meant to post about LibraryThing hours ago, but I just can't stop using it! A creation of Tim Spalding, it uses the Library of Congress catalog as a database of books to provide an easy means for users to catalog their own. You just enter a few words or an ISBN into the search box, hit Submit, and boom: either the book is entered automatically or a list of choices pops up. Or, of course, the system can't find anything matching it and you have to enter it manually. You'll probably want to tweak the entries in the various fields, and you'll certainly want to add tags (when I'm done, I'll be able to find out all the books I have relating to Central Asia just by clicking on that tag), but it makes cataloging (a task I always dreaded) supremely easy. You can see my catalog here; so far I've entered about 300 books, but there will be many times that before I'm done. I'm starting with the hardest sections, language and Russian, so that I'll get most of the manual entering out of the way right off the bat; by the time I get to history, literature, and so on, it should be a breeze. Try it yourself!
(Many thanks to frequent commenter Tatyana, currently enjoying the beaches of Portugal, for the link!)
Charles Kelly's Online Japanese Language Study Materials are "free-to-use online materials that I have developed to help people study Japanese." Looks like good stuff, and for you Mac users, he's got crossword puzzles too! (Via Plep, who also links to a Wolof course—but it costs money, so I didn't make a post of it.)
An article by Dan Bloom reports on a controversy over the way 'Jew' is written in Chinese:
There are many Chinese characters for 'you-tai,' or Jew, but the combination that is currently being used refers to an animal of the monkey species, and has the connotation of parsimoniousness," Chien Hsi-chieh, director of the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan, said recently...You can see the characters themselves in the Taipei Times story on the dustup. At first glance the complaint looks plausible, but Bloom quotes a correspondent, MK Shum of Hong Kong, who says:Chien said the biased Chinese characters were devised by Christian missionaries in China around 1830, when they were translating the Old Testament and New Testament into Chinese and needed a term for Jews.
"A better choice for the word 'Jews' in Chinese writing would be one that is pronounced the same, but written with a more neutral character," he said.
The well-intended new translation is more likely end up with a blunder. To name just two of the many pitfalls:So what do my Chinese-speaking readers think? Genuine problem, or a tempest in a teapot?1. The old translation of you-tai (here Y1); although this "you" means a rare species of monkey (not always a bad thing, compare the monkey king as a hero in old fairy tales), it is also used as a conjunction, like "as" or "similar to". The second meaning is by far the more common one.
2. The newly suggested you-tai (let's call it Y2) has also a "you" of double meaning. It is a surname. Since "tai" is same in both translations and means Mrs.(in modern Chinese) or "very, too much", so in this case Y2 becomes "Mrs. YOU". More seriously, it means sin, or transgression, or complain, or something like that. I don't think Jews have sinned more than any other people, even they may have complained more, which is necessarily when the world is far from desirable.
Neither Y1 nor Y2 are first-hand translations. They are translations of (perhaps English) translation. Any new initiative must respect both the Hebrew and the Chinese language. I welcome the discussion, but don't see any easy outcome.
(Thanks for the link, Nick!)
Geoff Pullum, back at Language Log after a move to Cambridge, Mass., has posted a long and detailed refutation of the myth that FOXP2 is the "language gene"; he links to "Alec MacAndrew's authoritative survey of the issue" and provides his own acerbic commentary. Unfortunately, we all know that the press will pay no heed, myths being so much more fun than facts.
A BusinessWeek Online article by Brian Grow reports on companies that market to the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants in the US, focusing on the identification card known as the matrícula consular issued by Mexican consulates. What brings it into LH territory is the following bit:
So far, Blue Cross says it may have signed up several thousand Mexicans with the matrícula, although it doesn't yet track the number. In May it extended the program to matrícula holders from Guatemala, and it's working on a video-marketing campaign for Guatemalans who speak an ancient Mayan dialect, K'anjobal, so old that it's no longer written."So old that it's no longer written"—never mind that it's not true (Ethnologue, Bible excerpt), what does it even mean? If languages somehow lost their writing systems as they aged, you'd think the Chinese, for example, would have been illiterate for many centuries. I wonder if it's an editing goof or simple absence of thought on the reporter's part.
(Thanks for the link, Kári!)
These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,
Though this is only one example.
They emerged until a tower
Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back
Into the past for swans and tapering branches,
Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.
Then you are left with an idea of yourself
And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon
Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others
Who fly by you like beacons.
The night is a sentinel.
Much of your time has been occupied by creative game
Until now, but we have all-inclusive plans for you.
We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,
To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air
To you, pressing you back into a startled dream
As sea-breezes greet a child's face.
But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.
The worst is not over, yet I know
You will be happy here. Because of the logic
Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.
Tender and insouciant by turns, you see
You have built a mountain of something,
Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
—John Ashbery, from Rivers and Mountains (1966)
(Via wood s lot.)
It turns out Eskimo doesn't mean 'eater of raw meat':
In spite of the tenacity of the belief, both among Algonquian speakers and in the anthropological and general literature [...] that Eskimo means 'raw-meat eaters', this explanation fits only the cited Ojibwa forms (containing Proto-Algonquian *ashk- 'raw' and *po- 'eat') and cannot be correct for the presumed Montagnais source of the word Eskimo itself. [...] The Montagnais word awassimew (of which ay- is a reduplication) and its unreduplicated Attikamek cognate exactly match Montagnais assimew, Ojibwa ashkime 'she nets a snowshoe', and an origin from a form meaning 'snowshoe-netter' could be considered if the original Montagnais application (presumably before Montagnais contact with Eskimos) were to Algonquians.Too late for the reputation of the English word, but good to know. (Thanks to Rusty Brooks for linking to this in his MetaFilter comment.)
Oh, and even if you prefer to avoid Eskimo, you can't just refer to everyone as Inuit. The situation is complicated. There's an interesting discussion by Steve Sailer here:
It's generally assumed among up-to-date English-speakers that an ethnic group should be called by whatever it calls itself, not what outsiders call it.Sailer continues with a great discussion of why it's ridiculous to use "San" for Bushmen, who hate the term: "It quickly became a badge among Western academics: If you say 'San' and I say 'San,' then we signal each other that we are on the fashionable side, politically. It had nothing to do with respect. I think most politically correct talk follows these dynamics."Yet, practically no one outside of the Anglosphere worries about this principle at all. For example, Inuit Eskimos call French Canadians "Uiuinaat" or "Guiguinaat," from the French word "oui" for "yes." Anglophones are known as "Qallunaat."
Considering how hard it is for English-speakers to correctly pronounce words even from other European languages that share our basic alphabet, asking Americans to accurately transliterate words from radically different phonetic structures would appear close to hopeless.
It's become common, for instance, for Western journalists to refer to the "Qu'ran" [sic; should be "Qur'an"] instead of the traditional spelling of "Koran," but virtually no American understands what sound the apostrophe in "Qu'ran" stands for. Nor could many even produce that sound properly.
Beyond the pronunciation difficulties, outsiders' names are actually often more useful than insiders' names for themselves.
Outsiders can enjoy a broader perspective that lets them see the similarities among ethnic subdivisions. In contrast, insiders can be so obsessed with small differences between themselves and their kin that they can't see the forest for the trees. That's why insiders' names — like "Inuit" — sometimes discriminate against smaller groups, such as the Yup'ik Eskimos.
Tom Alton, the editor of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks' Alaska Native Language Center, pointed out, "The name 'Eskimo' is considered derogatory in some areas of the North but is still acceptable in Alaska, mainly because Alaska includes Yup'ik people who are closely related culturally and linguistically but are not Inuit. 'Eskimo' includes Yup'ik as well as Inuit."
Further, the word "Eskimo" is less ethnocentric than is "Inuit," which implicitly draws a distinction between "the people" (the Inuit) and all those non-Inuit. Ironically, the movement to change ethnic names to those used by the groups themselves frequently restores these kind of self-glorifying terms. For example, Comanche Indians are now supposed to called the "Numunuu," which means "the people."
This Live Journal features Russian slang words and expressions, with stressed syllables helpfully indicated in red. One useful post reprints a Michele Berdy Moscow Times column about слова-паразиты, literally "parasite words."
Sometimes they are used as intensifiers, but more often they just seem to appear in your speech all by themselves. Nasty little parasites that they are, you don't notice them until they have taken over half your utterances. And then ridding your speech of them is virtually impossible.Like all speakers of Russian in Moscow, I've been infected by the parasite как бы. This is a perfectly useful phrase that means "as if." You can use it legitimately in sentences like, Как бы в шутку он сказал, что хочет жениться. А, может быть, он серьёзно? (As if in jest, he said he wanted to get married. But maybe he's serious?) According to linguists, как бы as a parasite originated in St. Petersburg, but it has swept through Moscow like a particularly virulent flu. It doesn't really mean anything and is used the way some people use "like" in English. Он как бы поехал купить хлеб. (He, like, went to buy bread.)
Another parasite is типа, which, like как бы, has a legitimate use: to express a comparison or similarity. Он купил новую машину — она типа Джипа, только меньше размером. (He bought a new car — something like a Jeep, only smaller.) As a parasite it means "kinda, sorta, like." Я, типа, хотел ей позвонить. (I kinda wanted to give her a call.) It can also be used to indicate a quote: Она, типа, не хочет пойти сегодня в клуб сегодня. (She's like: I don't wanna go to the club tonight.) This can be sometimes translated by the equally appalling "go," used in Valley Girl English to mean "say." Он, типа, хочет выпить. И ей, типа, всё равно. (He goes: I wanna drink. And she's like: Whatever.)She goes on to discuss короче, конкретно, чисто, прикинь, and понимаешь. In the comments to the LJ post, there's a joke that depends on the word типограф 'printer' being pronounced with the stress on the final syllable, so that it can be confused for типа граф 'like, a count'; I thought it was tipógraf, with the stress on the penultimate, but I guess I'm behind the times as usual. (Via digenis.org.)
People seemed to appreciate my earlier post linking to Chinese texts, so I thought I'd pass along the immense treasurehouse that is the Classical Historiography for Chinese History site compiled by Professor Benjamin A. Elman (艾 爾曼) of Princeton University. The Relevant Electronic Resources page has lists of General Resources, Databases and Electronic Texts, Dictionaries, Maps and Geography, and more; the texts section has the Analects, the I Ching, the Dao De Jing (with translations into many languages), novels, poetry... you name it. And the Reference Guide to Classical Book Titles has got to be extremely useful for sinologists. Explore and enjoy. (I should mention that I found it via an anfractuous Googlepath that began with this No-sword post about a great Kyoto University Digital Library exhibition.)
The latest New Yorker is the Food Issue, featuring Judith Thurman on tofu in Japan, John Seabrook on fruit in Umbria, Malcolm Gladwell on creating the perfect cookie, and other appetizing articles, most of which are not online (including, alas, Adam Gopnik's "Two Cooks"). But the first one, Calvin Trillin's "Speaking of Soup," is, and it describes his quest to learn a little Spanish in Cuenca, Ecuador, while gorging on as many servings of fanesca as he could fit in during Holy Week, the only time the thick ("marginally liquid") fish-and-grain soup is served.
Being able to say anything I wanted to in Spanish before the moment had passed was what I’d been daydreaming about. I was thinking of the day when my response to a particularly good fanesca (the only kind of fanesca I’ve ever experienced) would no longer be limited to “delicious” or “very tasty, thank you.” I could envision myself pushing back from the table and making a statement to the waiter that was as complex as the dish itself—something like “I can’t take leave of this glorious establishment without saying, in utmost sincerity, that the fanesca I’ve just had the honor of consuming made my heart soar, or at least go pitter-patter, and I want to emphasize that each and every bean had a valiant role to play in what was, when all is said and done, a perfectly blended and modulated work of art.” In that daydream, the waiter is so impressed by my eloquence that he offers me seconds. I decline, with a short speech that reminds him of something he once read in a story by Jorge Luis Borges.As much as I enjoy Trillin's hearty style, I was most excited about the Gopnik piece, about a British chef who specializes in every kind of meat ("nose to tail") and a French one who uses no meat whatever ("One day, I found myself regarding a carrot in a different light, and I saw the cuisine végétale ahead of me through an open door"). I can't link to it, but I can quote my favorite sentence, in which the author shows that his love affair with words is as powerful as Fergus Henderson's with meat:
This is not to say that he doesn't think that tails and heads and spleens are good to eat—he does think that, absolutely—but he also thinks that the idea that noses and tails and feet and spleens might be good to eat would be interesting even if they weren't as good to eat as they are.The careful repetition-with-variation of "tails and heads and spleens" vs "noses and tails and feet and spleens," "he doesn't think that" vs "he does think that" (with two different thats), "are good to eat" vs "might be good to eat" vs "weren't as good to eat," the balancing of the first two clauses (before and between the dashes) against the longer final clause—the whole thing is like a little meal in itself, whetting your appetite and satisfying it in one long-drawn-out lexicoculinary gesture. (Alain Passard, the French chef, said on a television program that "a single gesture on a plate was the right direction for the future of cooking"; I'm dubious about that, but a single gesture is definitely the right size for a sentence.)
The Germanic Lexicon Project is the new incarnation of what was the Indo-European Language Resources page.
The goal of this project is to create comprehensive online coverage of the lexicons of the early Germanic languages. All of the data is available free of charge and free of copyright or other intellectual property encumbrance...Cleasby-Vigfusson, Zoëga, Bosworth-Toller, Wright's Grammar of the Gothic Language... it's all here! The internet just keeps getting better and better. (Via the new incarnation of Glosses.net, regarding which I will permit myself a quiet "Calloo, callay!")The Texts page contains numerous copyright-expired dictionaries and grammars of the older Germanic languages. These are in various stages of being digitized. Some are available only as scanned page images. Others are available as online text, sometimes corrected and sometimes not.
The Search page allows you to search some of the texts in the collection.
The Messages board is a message board where you can discuss the early Germanic languages and digitizing historical linguistic materials. You can use it like an ordinary chat board. The message board system has an extra feature: you can make editorial comments "in the margins" of the online dictionaries. If you comment on a dictionary entry, your comment is available when that entry is displayed in the search system.