Ben Zimmer of Language Log has a funny demolition of a Candace Murphy article decrying, yes, "abuses and misuses" of the English language. I'll let you enjoy the silly stuff over there; here I want to highlight one paragraph about finding new words and usages on the internet:
That's where [Oxford lexicographer Erin] McKean has found words like farb (not authentic, badly done), nomenklatura (non-literally; by analogy), drabble (a short story of 100 words or fewer), haxie (a hack for the Macintosh operating system) and swancho (a combination poncho/sweater).Farb, drabble, haxie, and swancho were new to me, and their definitions plausible; nomenklatura was an old friend (being a Russian term for the Soviet system in which the Communist Party would make appointments to government posts), but I just couldn't see how it could be used to mean 'non-literally; by analogy' or how it would get there. "I don't mean that literally, I mean it nomenklatura, dude!" Nope, didn't work for me. So I wrote Erin to get some clarification, and she explained that she had been talking about a nonliteral use of the word nomenklatura itself, "that is, one that referred to people that weren't Russians, but were metaphorically similar to the Russian nomenklatura." Ah, all was clear! But I fear readers of "Inside Bay Area" may be misled into trying to use it as an adverb, and it will all end in tears and Safire.
Last night my wife raised the question of how old brand names are (I guessed nineteenth-century, but if anyone has any good links on the subject, please share); in the course of looking up the word brand in the OED, I noticed the headword bratticing. When I told my wife it meant 'the furnishing of the ramparts of a castle with temporary parapets or breastworks,' she immediately said "Temporary breastworks? That would be a good word for a brassiere." For the millionth time, I was glad I'd married her.
Today I looked at the definition again and saw the note "From the preceding illiterate Sc. spelling bertisene, Sir Walter Scott appears to have evolved the grandiose BARTIZAN, vaguely used by him for bretising or bratticing, and accepted by later writers as a genuine historical term"; sure enough, the etymology for bartizan is:
[In no dictionary before 1800; not in Todd 1818, nor Craig 1847. Apparently first used by Sir Walter Scott, and due to a misconception of a 17th c. illiterate Sc. spelling, bertisene, for bertising, i.e. bretising, BRATTICING, f. bretasce (BRATTICE), a. OF. bretesche, ‘battlemented parapet, originally of wood and temporary.’ Bartizan is thus merely a spurious ‘modern antique,’ which had no existence in the times to which it is attributed.]Fie, Sir Walter! But at least his misunderstanding was less embarrassing than poor Browning's.
Frequent commenter zaelic, whose intimate knowledge of all sorts of byways of Eastern European, Jewish, Romany, and musical lore is the envy of everyone who values such things, especially me, was kind enough to send me a kucsma (pronounced KOOCH-ma) he'd picked up at the Black Lake peasant fair in Romania from a family of Gypsies from Tirgu Mures. What is a kucsma, you ask? Zaelic defines it as a "big furry astrakhan winter hat," adding "My favorite is the 'oversized boy scout cap' design favored by Ceausescu, Karzai, and half of Boro Park." I asked him about the etymology of the word and he said:
My guess is that it may be from Old Turkish/Chuvah/Bulgar level of loan words from the 6th - 9th century, when the Magyars/Mogurs/Someday-we-will-be-Bashkirs were learning the horse culture from proto-Chuvash types south of the Kama river. The consonant cluster "chma" or "shma" gives it away.But what I really want to talk about is the CD he included in the package, A Mazeldiker Yid, by his group Di Naye Kapelye, for which he plays violin, mandolin, koboz, cumbus, flutes, and Carpathian drum:
Di Naye Kapelye plays old time Jewish music the way we imagine it was played in eastern Europe both before and after the Holocaust. Learning from Jewish people still living in the region, and from Gypsy musicians who played for them, DNK carries on a living tradition of music.I was blown away both by the music (my feet wouldn't keep still) and by the learned and hilarious liner notes, which I'm happy to say you can read in their entirety here. I'm going to quote a bit (adding links) to illustrate the historical and geographical interest:
Northern Romania, in particular the regions of Maramures and the Bukovina, was once home to a large Jewish community unlike any other. Hasidic Jews first settled in the poorer mountain areas of the Habsburg Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries, in the aftermath of the Chmielnicki massacres and the resultant messianic confusion. Led by disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov, Hasidism's pioneering leader, these Jews coalesced into Hasidic "courts" (hoyfn) centered around rabbinic dynasties residing in Szatmár, Vizhnitz, Munkács, Sighet, Sadagora, and Shpinka (Sapinta). Free of the official oppression and pogroms suffered by Jews in the Russian Empire, they lived in a relatively healthy social atmosphere with their neighbors - Romanians, Hungarians, Hutsul Ukrainians, Slovaks, Zipser Germans, and Roma (Gypsies). Reflecting the strongly conservative nature of the region, the Jews of Maramures rejected the "Jewish Enlightenment" offered by the 1868 reorganization of the Hungarian Jewish community, and maintained an existence apart, Yiddish speaking and deeply Hasidic in character, until the Holocaust. After the war this same stubborn independence led to the rebirth of Carpathian Hasidic communities in centers such as Brooklyn, Antwerp, and Bnei Brak, where the culture remains as vibrant and quarrelsome as it did the Romanian mountains.Isn't that great stuff? Do read the song annotations; among other things, you won't want to miss the recipe for matzo balls.
Do you say "in the circumstances" or "under the circumstances"? Never mind, I wouldn't believe you if you told me—people are notoriously bad at analyzing their own language use. Arnold Zwicky has been investigating the alternatives, and has posted his results, which are surprising and interesting:
In summary: the Google data suggest that "under" is preferred to "in"See his post for the details (I've rearranged the results for clarity); it makes clear both the complexity of usage and the value of the internet for sifting it.(modestly)
with determiners "the" and "these"
(more strongly)
with determiner "which"
(very strongly)
with determiner "what"
(almost categorically)
with quantity determiner "no"but that "in" is preferred to "under"
(modestly)
with quantity determiners "all" and "some"
(strongly)
with determiner "those" in general
(strongly)
with quantity determiner "many"
(almost categorically)
when "circumstances" means 'personal situation'
(almost categorically)
with determiner "those" plus certain following relatives
(almost categorically)
with quantity determiner "a few"
I was reading an H. Allen Orr New Yorker piece on evolution and genetics when I hit the sentence "Similarly, a gene that affects pigmentation in birds like the chicken and the bananaquit also affects pigmentation in mammals like the jaguar and you." The word bananaquit struck me; I couldn't find it in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate or the American Heritage Dictionary, but it was in the New Oxford American Dictionary:
bananaquit /bəˈnanəˌkwit/ a small songbird with a curved bill, typically with a white stripe over the eye, a sooty gray back, and yellow underparts. It is common in the West Indies and Central and South America... See QUIT2.The latter entry says "[in combination] used in names of various small songbirds found in the Caribbean area, e.g. bananaquit, grassquit" and adds that the word is "probably imitative."
So I looked it up in the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage and found the pronuncation given as [ˈbʌna.nʌkwɪt] and the definition "a bird about 3 ins long, dark grey in color, with a yellow breast, a white streak over the eye, and known for its love of ripe bananas and grains of sugar, and in some places also for its warbling or making a 'cheep-cheep' sound"—gotta give them props for explaining the "banana" part. Other local names: beany bird (Jamaica), honey-creeper (St Vincent, US Virgin Is), see-see bird (Grenada), sikyé-bird (Trinidad), sugar-bird (Barbados, USVI), and yellow-breast (Antigua, Barbados, USVI). You can see some pictures here.
King Alfred, over at The Bitter Scroll, has posted a verse translation of something I didn't know existed: a Tolkien poem in Gothic called "Bagme Bloma" ['The Flower of the Trees']. There's also a webpage called The Annotated Bagme Bloma, which King Al used in doing the translation. (I have to say, the poem sounds a lot more like Tolkien than like early Germanic poetry to me.)
Forbes has a special section on "Communicating," with pieces by Arthur C. Clarke ("Join The Planetary Conversation"), Scott Woolley ("The Next 4,000 Days"), David M. Ewalt ("How To Talk To Aliens"), and others, as well as interviews with Jane Goodall, Kurt Vonnegut, Desmond Morris, Steven Pinker, etc.; there's even an interview with Uncle Noam. Check it out.
Also, sorry about the bandwidth problem. We're working on it here at Maison Languagehat.
I would like to join my colleague Geoff Pullum in celebrating Jan Freeman's superb takedown of that mangiest of stuffed owls, Strunk and White's inescapable The Elements of Style, which has just undergone its latest restuffing, this time with illustrations by Maira Kalman (it's been taxidermized more often than Lenin's corpse). A sample:
It was never a seamless creation, to be sure; the 1959 first edition merely sandwiched Strunk's 1918 handbook for his Cornell students, lightly edited, between White's introduction and his essay on prose style. But at least you knew Strunk was Strunk, vintage 1918, and White was White, circa 1958. Succeeding revisions, instead of blending the disparate parts, have left ''Elements" a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice.Ouch. I know I can't talk you Strunk-lovers out of your affection, but can you at least look on the damn book as an affectionate portrait of a crotchety former teacher and not as a guide to English, a task for which it is manifestly unsuited? Let it sit harmlessly on the mantelpiece and glare out at the unruly world with its glassy eyes.(The illustrated ''Elements" is essentially the 1999 edition, with a couple of small restorations from the 1918 original. Not quite a restoration, alas, in the case of Strunk's introduction: The proofreaders overlooked one of his ''Words Often Misspelled," so the opening sentence now promises ''to give in brief space the principle requirements of plain English style.")
Scanning the recent editions, you sometimes wonder what could possibly have been cut, given the absurdity of what remains. Don't use claim to mean ''assert"? Mark Twain did it in 1869, the year Strunk was born. Don't contact anyone? It's a ''vague and self-important" verb—or so people said in the 1920s, when it was new. Don't use they to refer to ''a distributive subject" like everybody—unless you're E.B. White: ''But somebody taught you, didn't they?" says a character in ''Charlotte's Web."
Lameen Souag at Jabal al-Lughat has a post about a language hitherto unknown to me (and almost everyone):
A tantalizingly brief note of 1931 in the Gold Coast Review describes an ethnic group called the Mpre, found only in the village of Butie in central Ghana (8° 52' N, 1° 15' W) near the confluence of the White and Black Voltas, apart from a few emigrants in Debre. According to the author's description, the Mpre people, once more widespread, were reduced to a single village in the course of comparatively recent wars with the Asante. Noting that their language was “different to that of the surrounding tribes”, he lists 106 words of Mpre. This short vocabulary appears to be the only existing record of the language, which is believed to be extinct. The gap is all the more unfortunate because Mpre turns out to be of some taxonomic significance. It is not closely related to any of its neighbors, and Heine and Nurse (2000) treat it as unclassified. A friend of mine's paper dealing partly with this will be appearing sometime soonish, but I won't spoil the surprise.You can go to Lameen's post for the details; Wikipedia has a brief article on Mpre, with citations.You might think, given all this, that it was impossible to retrieve any information on its grammar. However, you would be wrong! Fellow language geeks may find it an interesting exercise to try their hand at extracting grammar information from the wordlist, which Blench gives a copy of [actually he says they're "available from the author at r.blench@odi.org.uk"], before reading on...
A while back I asked if anyone could tell me who was responsible for "the change [in Russian punctuation] (deplorable, in my view) from an intuitive system of the kind Dostoyevsky used to the rule-based system familiar to all modern readers"; nobody answered, but I was reading about Aleksei Remizov in Georgii Adamovich's smarmy but enlightening collection of biographical/critical essays Odinochestvo i svoboda [Solitude and freedom] when the answer leaped out at me: "...убедить, что наша школьная грамматика произвольна и неосновательно-тиранична, что мы сами себя обворовали, доверившись Гроту и другим лжезаконодателям..." Grot, that was it! (Not that far from my wild guesses: "Korff? Gets? Shtumpf?") So I googled him and found a nice biography and a Russian Wikipedia article on punctuation, which I am memorializing here in case I want them again.
Back to the September issue of Poetry; this time I want to praise a poem by Mike Chasar called "Conches on Christmas," which happily for all of us is online (happily for you because you can read the whole thing, for me because it makes it a lot easier to quote). I love rhyme and meter and the whole kitbag of traditional poetic technique, but I'm aware that English poetry can no longer be constrained within those bounds (it requires a tremedous effort of will and imagination to write a good sonnet these days), so I'm especially happy when a poet is able to dance comfortably to the new music in an old pattern. I read the first stanza:
Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, thisand relaxed into pleasurable anticipation when I realized the rhymes were unobtrusive and exact, the meter irregular but confident, and the syntax complex enough to make reading further a compelling adventure:
barnacled pod so pales
next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales
that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss
except that thereand at that I simultaneously cracked up at the transition from the solemn "silently, sans the heraldry of bells" to the bathetic "swiftly, sans a multitude of feet" (which instantly brought to mind "And this was odd, because, you know,/ They hadn't any feet") and marveled at the sonic sculpture of the line "and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived"—and I gobbled up the rest of the poem with undiminished pleasure, which I now urge you to do. When you get back, you can hit the Extended Entry for a few linguistic observations.
was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells
silently, sans the heraldry of bells,
neatly, sans an astrological affair,and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—
1) Perhaps the first thing that attracted me, even before I saw the poem itself, was its title, and specifically the word "conches." I have always pronounced conch /kanch/ in my head, but ever since I learned that the "correct" pronunciation was /kank/ I've tried to say it that way, feeling that the /ch/ was some miserable bit of spelling pronunciation I should put behind me. Well, here was an actual poet (and quite a learned one, I found when I got to the poem) who clearly pronounced it the same way, since if you pronounce it /kank/ the plural has to be "conchs." Validated, I resolved to have the courage of my inner voice.
2) In the ninth stanza, I was sent to my dictionaries by the word drasty ("to my drasty stretch of shore"); having tried Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, the AHD, and the New Oxford American in vain, I went to the OED and discovered it means "Dreggy; fig. vile, worthless, ‘rubbishy’" (from drast 'dregs, lees')—and hasn't been used since the early 16th century. Unsure if this was the intended meaning, I took advantage of the miracle of the internet and asked the author, who said that it was; furthermore, it was a reminiscence of Chaucer's tale of Sir Thopas, where Chaucer is interrupted by the Host and told, "Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!"
3) This tied in neatly with my other question to him, about the proper pronunciation of his name (you all know how obsessed I am with pronunciation): it turns out Chasar is an anglicized version of Hungarian császár 'emperor' (borrowed from Slavic cěsárĭ, the origin of tsar as well) and is pronounced much like Chaucer. So the Chaucerian reference was something of an in-joke. (As an extra tidbit, I'll point out that the Hungarian word is first attested in 1405, just a few years after Chaucer's death.)
So I intend to inform the OED that the word drasty has been revived and brought into gen-u-wine contemporary use in a 2005 poem, and I want to see it in the next edition with the Chasar citation. If they're going to include Pound's undigested quotes from a century or two previous as contemporary (1934 E. POUND Eleven New Cantos xxxvii. 32 "If you will give me A pinch of your excellent Maccaboy snuff," quoting Shepherd quoting Benton quoting Van Buren; 1940 E. POUND Cantos lxx. 177 "Treasons, felonies, new praemunires," quoting a John Adams letter from, I believe, the 1770s), they can damn well include this. And I urge others to start using it too. We'll get 'em all back!
While I was at the bookstore, I picked up the September issue of Poetry magazine on the strength of several poems (like "On the Metro") by C.K. Williams, with his wonderful long lines, and a long essay about Richard Wilbur, one of my favorite living poets, by Phyllis Rose. But at the moment I'm going to quote one of the sections of Michael Hofmann's "Sing Softer: A Notebook":
I think I've probably always been drawn to the foreign in English. When I first came across the strange and lovely word "macaronics," I wanted to use it for a title. There's a kind of joyful hopscotch, a cavalierism, a dandyishness, an enrichment, about alien presences in English, which otherwise remains for me a chewed, utilitarian, mercantile language. These importations are the making of Shakespeare. They are there in Walt Whitman, that quintessentially American poet, even if Henry James (of all people!), complained about his predilection for "the other languages." They are there in Stevens, who claimed English and French were one language, and in Pound, who wrote Chinese in English, and Provençal in English, and Latin in English. I sometimes think the only Eliot I really like are the two French poems. These importations are in Lowell, even though he's as heavily monoglot as a linebacker; in one of his Montale versions in Imitations it says: "The scirocco gunned the dead stucco with sand"—neither Italianate noun in Montale's original! (Imitations was a huge act of will on the part of Lowell to internationalize and modernize himself by his bootstraps.)I don't understand the "chewed, utilitarian, mercantile" bit (what, Beowulf? after that it's all alien presences) or "monoglot as a linebacker," but I like the bit about Lowell and Montale. Anybody know which Montale poem Lowell was reworking? I don't have Imitations.
I was in Lenox this morning, happily browsing Matt Tannenbaum's The Bookstore (so old-school they don't have a website, but probably the best literary bookstore in the Berkshires), when I found a new book about the Jewish community in New York a century ago, A Fire in Their Hearts by Tony Michels (you can read part of the introduction and first chapter here in a pdf file). The introduction explained something I hadn't known about the linguistic world of the immigrants from Russia:
The origin of the Jewish labor movement can be traced to the convergence of two disparate immigrant groups in a single section of lower Manhattan. When large numbers of eastern European Jews started arriving on New York’s Lower East Side, they discovered a thriving socialist labor movement among German (mostly non-Jewish) immigrants, who constituted the majority of the area’s population into the 1880s. A number of Jews, mainly Russian-speaking intellectuals, started learning the German language so they could mix with their neighbors and read their publications. German socialists welcomed the “Russians” and encouraged them to organize Jewish workers into unions and socialist groups of their own. They provided financial assistance, publicity, organizational models, and ideological guidance. With their help, Russian Jews created their labor movement in a German image. They experienced an unusual kind of Americanization, one guided not by native-born elites but by a larger, already established immigrant group. Through socialism, Russian Jews did not become so much Americanized as German-Americanized.
The German socialist influence led to a second interesting twist in the “Americanization” of immigrant Jews, particularly regarding the Yiddish language. To organize Jewish workers, Russian-speaking intellectuals needed to employ Yiddish, the spoken language of nearly all eastern European Jewish immigrants. But many of the intellectuals either did not know Yiddish or had rejected it years earlier as a marker of cultural backwardness. They had to learn or relearn the zhargon, or Jewish vernacular, thousands of miles from Europe’s Yiddish-speaking heartland. This return to Yiddish was initially justified as a short-term concession necessary only until immigrants learned English. Yet the trend toward Yiddish gathered momentum as the number of immigrants increased. Over the next four decades, Russian-speaking intellectuals continued to adopt Yiddish so they could take part in the East Side’s political and cultural activities. Some intellectuals even began to glorify the once-scorned zhargon as the authentic voice of “the folk masses.” They advocated a full-blown cultural renaissance in Yiddish, which they hoped would serve indefinitely as the primary medium of Jewish culture in the United States. Although the movement was controversial, proponents of yidishe kultur helped animate the new socialist culture arising from the Jewish labor movement. From Russian to Yiddish via German: such was the circuitous path of Americanization on New York’s Lower East Side.Who knew? Well, you maybe, but not me. And may I remark that bookstores have been at least as much of an education to me as schools.
I was just asked about the origin of the phrase "can't hold a candle to," and now that I've looked it up I'm going to share it with you all. In the words of the OED:
to hold a candle to another: lit. to assist him by holding the candle while he works; hence, to help in a subordinate position. not to be able or fit to hold a candle to: not fit to hold even a subordinate position to, nothing to be compared to.My favorite of the citations: 1773 BYROM Poems, Others aver that he to Handel Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
I've been meaning to write about this ever since Glyn sent me the link some days ago: John Simmons, the Oxford librarian who built their Slavic collection, died Sept. 22 at the age of 90. I hadn't known of him, but the Times obituary makes him sound well worth knowing:
After war service and three more years at Birmingham, Simmons was invited to Oxford to fill the post of librarian-lecturer in charge of Slavonic books, created for him by Konovalov. His buccaneering spirit showed itself in August 1953 when he flabbergasted the director of the Lenin Library, Moscow, by turning up unannounced, armed with a list of desiderata and the catalogues of Oxford University Press, to propose a book exchange. In return for OUP publications, scientific material and two runs of Punch, Oxford received thousands of valuable, out-of-print Russian publications.Simmons’s proudest achievements were his part in building up the retrospective collections of Russian books in the Taylorian and Bodleian libraries and the creation in Bodley of the only specialised Slavonic reading room in the country. He considered, with justification, that it was these library collections, together with the remarkable group of Russian academic teachers recruited by Konovalov, Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin, that led to the establishment of Oxford as a unique centre for Slavonic studies...
At All Souls, which became his second home, he was a genial host, an inspiring guide, and a fount of knowledge on college history, Oxford’s libraries, and a host of other subjects which he gladly put at the disposal of resident and visiting Fellows. He was a regular visitor to the Codrington Library; he sometimes came in to read The Times, and would inquire of former colleagues: “Has anybody interesting died recently?” His hundreds of publications are listed in his Autobibliography (1975, with two later supplements), one of several samizdat publications composed on his typewriter and reproduced in limited editions.
Margaret Marks of Transblawg has an interesting post on "Pseudoenglisch," elements of the German vocabulary that look like English words but would not be recognized by an actual English-speaker, like Talkmaster 'moderator'; she links to the Fruchtbringendes Wörterbuch, a Wiki site that defines such terms in standard German, or tries to—as she says, far too many of the entries are actual English: "Perhaps this is the topic where the Wikipedia concept won't work, because the more confused Germans add to it, the more useless it will become!" Unfortunately, the definitions aren't always reliable, either; "Arm candy" is defined as schmückendes Beiwerk 'embellishment, accessory' when it actually means (in the words of the New Oxford American Dictionary) 'a sexually attractive companion accompanying a person, esp. a celebrity, at social events.' I think a reference site like this should definitely be maintained by people who know what they're talking about rather than by all comers. Still, a nice idea and an enjoyable site to browse despite the problems.
A strange, choppy essay by Murray Bail that's ostensibly a review of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina (and if you're going to call yourself Volokhonsky instead of Volokhonskaya, why Karenina rather than the Karenin Nabokov was so keen on? but I digress) but is really a series of thoughts on literature and translation. It's tricked out with a nutty false dichotomy between "Europe" and "English or American culture," and it comes to a stop without actually ending, but there are enough nice bits along the way it's worth a read:
It is only a matter of time in a Russian novel before a sturgeon arrives on a plate, a "fine sturgeon" or a "large sturgeon". It is like the appearance of bicycles in Irish novels, or the dog wagging its tail in every other Tom Roberts painting. The sturgeon makes its entrance on a plate held by an old footman in a greasy shirt. At other times a landlord of an inn brings the fish half cold to a filthy table. At a rundown estate a traveller is ushered into the presence of the impoverished landowner, tucking into a local sturgeon (Gogol). Russian characters have healthy appetites. They've been travelling on bad roads, in badly sprung carriages. In the 1950s, in Adelaide, reading about "black bread" sounded not tasty at all, but peasant-poor, positively wretched; in a Russian novel it coloured the domestic scene - made it extra-foreign. Where else in literature do you find a languid landowner pondering a pleasantly wasted life, while at the same time reaching out, as if for another slice of sturgeon, for some essential, life-saving truth?(Via wood s lot.)
Bill Poser at Language Log has an excellent post on an important topic, the shortage of interpreters in all branches of the government. Knowledge of foreign languages has always been in short supply in America, but it used to be encouraged; as Bill says:
The military seems to have taken language skills much more seriously during the Second World War. My father went directly from being a buck private in basic training to Master Sergeant in an intelligence position because he could speak French, Flemish, and German. The Army recognized that the ability to speak these languages was useful for interviewing civilians and interrogating enemy soldiers.Now... well, we all know the problems lack of knowledge of Arabic has been causing, and there doesn't seem to be much official interest in remedying it. Strange.
Three years ago Michelle Woods reviewed a couple of translations of The Good Soldier Švejk; it's the kind of detailed critique and comparison that isn't easily summarized, so I'll just quote a representative bit and send you over to Jacket:
In some cases, indeed, interesting avenues are opened up in their use of American slang. For instance, when Švejk is arrested for sedition and sits with other imprisoned innocents, Sadlon and Joyce use the phrase ‘how they had gotten into this mess’ (Sadlon and Joyce, 11) which may suggest to many English-language speakers connotations of Laurel and Hardy, thereby contextualizing Švejk in a domestic comic tradition:
Švejk sat down with those at the table. They were explaining to each other, for the tenth time, how they had gotten into this mess. (Sadlon and Joyce, 11)However, given Sadlon and Joyce’s claims that this is by far the closest translation, and their lack of acknowledgement that it is simply a contemporary and deliberately Americanized view of the translation, some caveats have to be issued. This is apparent from a literal translation of the Czech version of the above sentences (in the omission of material and the division of the sentence):Švejk sat down at the table in the company of conspirators, who were, already for the tenth time, retelling how they had got into this. (Švejk CZ, 20)Parrott in this instance is closer to the Czech version, keeping the ironic reference to the conspirators and using the same lexical structure:Švejk sat down at the table with the conspirators, who were recounting at least for the tenth time how they had got there. (Parrott, 16)It is a tough nut to crack. Perhaps the only way to produce a translation that serves the original well, in terms of the slang, is to keep updating it. Given the reluctance of the publishing industry to pay for new translations and new editions, perhaps the internet offers the opportunity for this (with non-copyrighted works), but there also has to be an awareness on the part of readers that this may not be, as the translators might claim, the better translation.
I have written a number of times—probably more than on any other nonlinguistic topic—about the appalling results of the search for purity in the human world, the consequences of the lust for classifying things and people, and my deep affection for the mongrel and the creole. Some of the posts that evince this are Purifying Iraq (the results of classifying Iraqis), the Purity vs. History series (on Greece and the Greeks), How the Balkans Got Balkanized ("The process of ethnic cleansing begins when cultural and especially religious homogeneity is required"), American Babel (America's native "prodigious multilingualism"), Braw and Witty with its comment thread that wound up discussing Bonnie Prince Charlie (Annie: "Yes, there were Jacobite protestants, although simplified histories paint all Jacobi[te]s as Roman Catholic. Politics was just as complicated and messy in those days as it is now"), and perhaps my all-time favorite LH thread, Peaches in Cluj (with Germans in Siebenbürgen, Dacia Porolissensis, the Klausenburger Hasidim of Brooklyn, putative Illyro-Thracian substrates, Sesut, Crimean Goths, Zipsers, Flemings, Armenians, and Székelys, not to mention Maria Benet's wonderful poetry).
Now I want to direct your attention to Indonesia. Everybody "knows" that Indonesia is Islamic except for the island of Bali, which has stubborly preserved Hindu court culture and thereby isolated itself from the surrounding culture. Well, yesterday I ran across Adrian Vickers' article "Hinduism and Islam in Indonesia: Bali and the Pasisir World" (the linked page links to a pdf of the article, and may I add that I wish all journals would adopt the policy of Indonesia: "All articles and reviews published in Indonesia prior to April 2000 are available at no cost"), which says "Most writers on Bali have used religious difference to characterize the essential distinction between Bali and the rest of Indonesia," and goes on to show why that's a misleading oversimplification that distorts both history and the current situation. He begins with the history:
In the nineteenth-century Orientalist perceptions of Bali..., Balinese religious identity, formed through opposition to Islam, led to the development of a "Museum" of Hindu Java. One of the first to articulate this view in any depth was Raffles, who was particularly interested in the literature of the Kawi or "Old-Javanese" language: "For Raffles, Old Javanese was an Asian Latin, banished to Bali by invading, Goth-like Muslims."...Vickers goes on to discuss how the Balinese saw things:Most twentieth-century Dutch administrators still maintained the idea that Balinese Hinduism was something to be "preserved" from Islam, which they associated with a lack of art or the destruction of a noble culture. This aim of preserving native culture was not unique to Dutch colonialists in Bali, but was generally the avowed goal of most imperial powers. In the case of Bali, however, the perception had a long genealogy. In 1633, for example, when the VOC sent a mission to Bali to promote an alliance between Batavia and Bali against the Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram, the premise the Dutch worked from was that "[the king] and all his folk are heathens, and therefore certain enemies of the people of Mataram, who are Moors." The Dutch were surprised when Gèlgèl, the principal kingdom on Bali, procrastinated and subsequently expressed a desire to establish friendly relations with Mataram. The Dutch could not comprehend this change, since their system of religious classification did not accord with the political practices of the Balinese ruler.
In this Balinese categorization, religious differences function like clothing styles. They are signs used to differentiate groups which have basic similarities. The signs of distinction can be translated as "cultural" differences — culture, however, not in the sense of an underlying structure of ideas or complex of meaning, but of observable behavior, especially artistic behavior. The many "cultures" are manifestations of a common "civilization." It is impossible to conceive of a different system of social organization, and so there is no absolute category of the "alien," only a distinction between people of the same island and people from overseas (sabrang). The nature of this model can be gauged from the way it accommodated the Dutch. They were seen as a group belonging with Chinese and other traders, since they were not led by kings and princes; they partook in maritime trading and lived in coastal regions; and they did not manifest the signs of belonging to a "kingdom" which the Balinese knew from their immediate neighbors and their own Majapahit background. Therefore the Dutch were fitted into the Balinese social order, at the bottom.He finishes up with a description of the cosmopolitan nature of the region:
The weight of historical research makes the picture of a cosmopolitan milieu undeniable. From early times there was a great circulation of trade goods, people, and cultural forms and objects throughout the area, which was only exacerbated by later events, such as the fall of Malaka which led to the movement of Malay princes, or the fall of Makassar with the consequent migrations of groups from South Sulawesi to as far away as Thailand. History has shown that political events in one state of this polyglot, cosmopolitan world had implications for many others. Thus it is possible to talk in terms of historical developments which characterize the region as a whole. Denys Lombard has proposed that the culture of the region, if we take culture in its narrower sense of literary and artistic forms, could be termed a "Pasisir" (Coastal) culture, utilizing the name hitherto given to the literary culture of Java's north coast.and, particularly pleasing to me, an emphasis on the importance of texts:
The major barrier to locating Bali within a "Pasisir" civilization is to think of the Pasisir world as essentially Islamic, and Bali as essentially Hindu. The picture changes dramatically when viewed from the standpoint of texts instead of religion. The texts are products of historical interaction within a civilization, and they are produced in order to pattern participation in that culture. Panji narratives like the Malat are the most widespread manifestation of Pasisir culture. By following the trail which leads from studies of individual Panji texts and related artistic forms, it is possible to use positive aspects of earlier textual scholarship to displace an Orientalist tendency to separate Bali from the rest of the archipelago.A little more googling led me to a paper by Riwanto Tirtosudarmo, "The Orang Melayu and Orang Jawa in the ‘Lands Below the Winds’" (pdf, HTML cache), which widens the net:
In the Java-Malaya nexus, Houben [in V.J.H. Houben, H.M.J. Maier and W. van der Molen (eds.), Looking in Odd Mirrors: The Java Sea]... outlined the important concept of ‘borrowing’, meaning that some specific elements of Javanese culture were borrowed to be implemented and play a role in local societies elsewhere. It should be noted, however, that the pasisir as a place of origin for influences in the tanah sabrang (outer islands, the land beyond) was far from homogenously Javanese in the period under consideration. Reid, for example, made a strong case for the ‘Chineseness’ of the Islamic ports on the north coast of Java. Other groups (Indian, Arabs, Malays) had settled there, bringing their ideas and values with them. In this respect it is striking that the Portuguese were the first to make a sharp distinction between Malays and Javanese (Jaos in Portugese), whereas the Arabs before that (and the Malays in their wake) called all the inhabitants of the Archipelago ‘Orang Jawi’, making no distinction between the Malays and the Javanese.Finally, there's the parallel case of a Hindu enclave in Java itself, as described by Robert W. Hefner in his book Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (Princeton, 1985): the Tengger society of a handful of villages on the north slopes of Mount Bromo near the eastern end of the island. Hefner had been told that the Tengger were "backward," "primitive," and generally exotic (they "throw live animals into the volcano's smoldering crater"). Intrigued, he made his way to the villages only to find they looked "much like the Javanese community from which I had set out several hours earlier" except that it was more compact and had no mosque. He briefly describes the historical background (the fall of Majapahit and the consequent Islamicization of the rest of the island) and the villagers' attitude towards it, concluding: "According to their own notions, in other words, Tengger are not an ethnic enclave of non-Javanese ways, but heirs to a tradition with deep roots in Javanese history." He adds:
The "ethnic isolation" explanation of Tengger tradition... fails to take seriously Tengger claims that their tradition is Javanese, and ignores historical evidence that clearly indicates that Tengger have long been affected by developments in larger Java. Under closer scrutiny, the ritual tradition can provide insight into the social organization of at least one popular tradition in pre-Islamic Java... Investigation of the same tradition, however, reveals how profoundly it has been affected by the challenge of Javanese Islam. Although the ritual tradition Tengger preserves is now restricted to this mountain region, the cultural conditions to which it has responded are similar to those in many areas of rural Java... From this perspective, the Tengger story is not that of an isolated ethnic group unaffected by developments in larger Java. It speaks to developments that have transformed all of Javanese society, and are reworking it still today.Or, in older words, "all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated... No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."
Second-guessing the Swedish Academy's often bizarre choices and omissions for the Nobel Prize in literature is a time-honored game; Andrei Krasnyashchikh has done a particularly good job, presenting two columns, one "Swedish Academy (without A.P. Krasnyashchikh)," the other "Swedish Academy (with A.P. Krasnyashchikh)." He gives not only names but short versions of the reasons, both the Academy's and his; on a couple of occasions he has the same laureate but changes the reason (as for Saint-John Perse). I'm afraid it's only available in Russian, but I'll present a few of his alternate selections here. There are the no-brainers: Chekhov instead of Mommsen (1902), Ibsen for Sienkiewicz (1905), Tolstoy for Eucken (1908), Rilke for Reymont (1924), Joyce for Karlfeldt (1931), Fitzgerald for Pearl Buck (1938), Akhmatova for Johannes V. Jensen (1944). He takes advantage of war years when the Academy abstained to slip in some of his favorites: Jack London in 1914, G.K. Chesterton in 1918, Celine in 1940, Musil in '41, Pound (yay!) in '42, and Erich Maria Remarque in '43. His 1973 prize goes to V.V. Nabokov instead of Patrick White, and his 2000 prize to Tom Stoppard rather than Gao Xingjian. There are some I disagree with (Salinger and Lem, for example), but on the whole it's an excellent list. And I love his reason for Borges (instead of Seifert, in '84): "Because it's high time, he's 85 already (his jubilee, by the way), and at any moment he could... Well, you understand. And that business with Pinochet is long forgotten." (Via Avva.)
Two words that have nothing in common except that they're near each other alphabetically, they're so obscure they're not even in the big Webster's, and pronouncing them is no easy matter:
Magh: "A member of the (largely Buddhist) people of Arakan, a district on the west coast of Burma (Myanmar), and Chittagong, on the Bay of Bengal." (OED, 2002 draft entry, which adds in smaller type: "Chittagong was formerly part of the kingdom of Arakan but is now in Bangladesh. The Chittagong Maghs were formerly renowned among Europeans in Calcutta as excellent cooks.") The OED's etymology is "< Bengali Mag, Magh, name of the kingdom of Arakan, the kings of Arakan and its people, esp. as coastal pirates < Sanskrit Magha a non-Aryan country." (You can read about the Bengali attitudes towards the "Magh" here and some history here.) Just looking at the word as Generic Foreign, you would pronounce it /mag/ (with the vowel of ah), and this is indeed what the OED suggests; on the other hand, it's from a Bengali word pronounced /mog/ and is so spelled in early citations, e.g. 1599 R. FITCH in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations II. 257 "The Mogen which be of the Kingdom of Recon and Rame, be stronger then the King of Tippara, so that Chatigan or porto Grande is oftentimes vnder the king of Recon" (where Recon is Rakhaing, the local name of Arakan, Tippara is Tippera or Tripura, a hill district of Bangladesh with its own language, and Chatigan is Chittagong, known in Portuguese at the time as Porto Grande; if anyone can tell me what is meant by Rame, I will be much obliged). Furthermore, the short a is pronounced in Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu), the main local language of the British Raj, as a central vowel (like the vowel in cut), which gives us the form mugg under which we find it in Hobson-Jobson, whose entry includes the following judicious observation:
It is beside the question of its origin or proper application, to say... that the Arakanese disclaim the title, and restrict it to a class held in contempt, viz. the descendants of Arakanese settlers on the frontier of Bengal by Bengali mothers. The proper names of foreign nations in any language do not require the sanction of the nation to whom they are applied, and are often not recognised by the latter. German is not the German name for the Germans, nor Welsh the Welsh name for the Welsh, nor Hindu (originally) a Hindu word, nor China a Chinese word.I presume the word was pronounced to rhyme with bug by those who actually used it in everyday speech, acquiring the current spelling pronunciation only after the fall of the Raj; this is confirmed not only by the quotes in the Hobson-Jobson entry but by the fact that the word is entered in the first edition of the OED as Mug ("The name given in Bengal to natives of Arakan and Chittagong").
Majorat: The OED draft entry from 2000 defines it as "In France, Spain, Italy, and some other countries: an entailment of an estate by primogeniture; an estate attached to the right of primogeniture" and gives the following etymology:
[< German Majorat (1775) or its etymon French majorat (1701; earlier majorasque (1679)) < major elder (cf. MAJOR a.) + -at -ATE1, after (with change of suffix) Spanish mayorazgo entailment of possessions upon the heir by primogeniture (c1370). The English word sometimes renders other loans from the Spanish word, e.g. Italian maggiorasco (1602; a1587 in form maiorasco), Russian majorat [i.e., mayorat, майорат—LH] (earlier maiorat, < German or Latin). Cf. post-classical Latin maioratus (16th cent. in this sense, prob. also after Spanish).](The etymology in the first edition was much simpler, tracing it back to French and Latin.) The draft entry gives the pronunciation as either /'madʒərət/ or /'maʒora/, U.S. /'mædʒərət/ or /'mɑʒorɑ/, all stressed on the first syllable; the first edition gave only the fully French /maʒora/. Now, the last citation in the draft entry is from that most wonderful of autobiographies, Nabokov's Speak, Memory: "The eldest was Dmitri, who inherited the Nabokov majorat in the then Tsardom of Poland." The question is, how would Vladimir Vladimirovich, that searcher-out and cherisher of obscure words, have pronounced it? The sentence in question is not in the earlier Russian version, Drugie berega, but the latter contains the phrase (near the start of the second paragraph of Chapter Three, Section 1) после облавы в майоратском бору [pósle oblávy v mayorátskom ború] 'after a battue in a pine forest inherited by majorat' (a description that has vanished in the later work, since in the interim he had discovered that the heraldic bears that had inspired it were in fact lions—"brownish and, perhaps, overshaggy beasts, but not really ursine"), so he knew the Russian version of the word (cited in the new OED etymology, perhaps on account of the newly added Nabokov quote), but surely he would not have been tempted to pronounce the English word mahyoh-RAHT, despite the fact that that is an accurate reflection of the identically spelled German word that may be the source of both the Russian and English ones. No, he would have taken pains to use the "correct" English pronunciation... but which? Since the word has never, apparently, been a natural, mother's-knee part of anyone's vocabulary, he would have consulted the only dictionary to contain it, the OED (first edition), and thus have given it the benefit of his fluent French. I just wish there existed an audio version of the book as read by its exquisitely multilingual author.
Anyone with any interest in Finnegans Wake will welcome the appearance of the website Fweet (which claims to stand for Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury and to be pronounced "thweet," but you can ignore both those pieces of possible misinformation). The Prologue explains how the compiler, Raphael Slepon, began by putting annotations to the book on his computer for easier access and how he "came up with the idea of setting up a website, allowing others to browse and search the collection." But you can ignore that too; all you really need is the search engine and the tutorial and you're good to go. Don't ignore the tutorial, though; the tour guide gets quite testy and you may end up with blood-stained fingers and a torn vest. Right, then, off you go. This way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in!
(A deep bow in pf's direction for the link.)
The new Iraqi constitution, as presented in the NY Times, says that "The Arabic language and Kurdish language are the two official languages of Iraq." As Bill Poser's Language Log post, where I learned about the language clause, says, "This is great news for Kurdish and the Kurds, whose language has never before had official status." My immediate reaction was to wonder whether this will mean the establishment of a standard language, presumably based on Sorani, and whether this might eventually create some coherence in what is now a confusing cluster of dialects. Anyway, it's a promising development, although, as Bill says, "it remains to be seen whether the Constitution will actually be implemented."
Cataloguing my books has gotten me dipping into volumes I'd forgotten all about, and yesterday it was Paul Goodman's Speaking and Language (1971), which I bought and eagerly read in 1974 (it's full of annotations) but hadn't looked at in years. Goodman was (as Edward Said said in his perceptive NY Times review) "amateurish and utopian," and here he takes a thoughtful amateur's look at language and the attempts of linguists to corral and analyze it. He makes a lot of mistakes and says some silly things (the margins are full of my penciled question marks, "Huh?"s, and corrections—it's Verner's Law, not "Werner's"), but he also had some very interesting and perhaps useful things to say, and I'll quote a couple here. From Chapter III (p. 41 in my Vintage paperback):
Most often words do not fail a speaker; rather, he wrenches the words a bit and communicates. This does not mean that the constant supra-individual code is unimportant; on the contrary, it is all the more indispensable. Unless the speakers know the code well, they do not hear the modifications. Bloomfield speaks of "the fundamental assumption of linguistics, namely: In certain communities [speech-communities] some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning." But it is how the speaker varies the code—by his style, the rhythm and tone of his feeling, his simple or convoluted syntax, his habitual vocabulary—that is his meaning, his meaning in the situation, which is all the meaning there is. This should be a platitude, except that it tends to be denied or brushed aside by linguists.And the end of Chapter VII, "Constructed Languages":
My bias as a man of letters is that it is best to do linguistics like natural history or art criticism, reasoned but a posteriori, rather than like mathematics, as is the current style. Present-day linguists and nineteenth-century philologists have made too much of a big deal of prediction, predicting the forms that will occur. It is soul-satisfying to have one's prediction confirmed, but it is not terribly important except in sciences that are applied, as physics to engineering, and where the consequences must be controlled. The chief use of humanistic studies is to explain, to understand, to appreciate. And in linguistics we want to make sense precisely of novelty, unique appropriateness, history, and even accident—they are expected factors.I miss Paul Goodman and his tough-minded humanism; we need more amateurs like him (and perhaps fewer specialists who can't communicate).Let me make a close analogy. In literary criticism it is possible to define literary genres and predict from them. But in analysis it will be found that only hack works conform to the genre. Powerful works are sui generis; they sometimes set themselves absurd conditions and carry it off—consider a really crazy work like Handel's Messiah. This does not mean that powerful works are incomprehensible; on the contrary, most (not all) excellent works are rather transparently demonstrated. But we cannot know one before it has been invented. Similarly, it is possible to take a statistical average of speech events and abstract a structure from it that has routine application. But this deceptively makes us think we understand something when we don't; examples of excellent speech may not fall in the average—and I have been arguing that they are likely not to. The most intimate speech, the most convivial speech, the most expressive speech, the most poetic speech are likely to be "deviant." But they are not deviant; they can be reasoned a posteriori.
Thus, I think that Roman Jakobson's testy remark is wrong-headed, that "idiolect is a perverse fiction . . . everything in language is socialized." The issue is not whether speakers have a private language—of course they do not—but whether good socialization (and good society) does not require spontaneity, concreteness, and invention in the intercourse of its members.
In the course of reading John Crowley's novel The Translator (how could I resist a book with a title like that?), I came to a sudden halt on page 31 at the sentence "She wondered (though the wonder never quite rose over the limn of hurt consciousness) how she would ever be able to do anything daring or good ever again." The limn of hurt consciousness? I had never seen the word used as a noun, but it's not a common word anyway, and John Crowley is clearly a learned man (he wrote a novel called Dæmonomania, with an æ ligature, for heaven's sake), so I was perfectly prepared to look it up and discover some rare and beautiful usage I could commit to memory. But the OED knows only the verb, originally 'illuminate (letters, manuscripts, books)' or 'adorn or embellish with gold or bright colour,' then 'paint (a picture or portrait); portray, depict (a subject),' which is its modern sense (insofar as it can be said to have one). I was desperately trying to imagine what a nonce nominal use might import (hurt consciousness as a gilt illumination?), when years of typo-hunting kicked in and it suddenly came to me: Crowley meant limen, 'the limit below which a given stimulus ceases to be perceptible; the minimum amount of stimulus or nerve-excitation required to produce a sensation. Also called threshold.' The sense fit perfectly: the wonder never quite rose over the threshold of hurt consciousness. Somewhere along the way an e dropped out, and the intended word was so obscure itself that everyone who looked at this bit of text thereafter must have shrugged and thought "Man, that Crowley knows a lot of words." Which he does, but in this case his vocabulary has proved fatal to his wounded word's chances of recovery.
I was alerted to an interesting divergence in culinary terminology by the discussion in this Pepys Diary thread; as Todd Bernhardt says:
In my American experience, to broil means to heat something from above as it sits on a slotted pan, so the juices can drip away. Grilling, in my experience, heats from below, and the juices drip down (usually onto the heat source).But in the UK and Australia, heating from above is called "grilling" and broil means (according to GrahamT, who appears to be British) "to cook meat in a closed container over heat, similar to the American pot-roast." So think twice about how you order your meat when you cross the Atlantic.
A story by Lester Haines in The Register describes recent attempts to crack down on widespread usage of internet slang in China:
Xia Xiurong, chair of the Education, Science, Culture and Health Committee of the Shanghai People's Congress, told the Shanghai Morning Post: "On the Web, Internet slang is convenient and satisfying, but the mainstream media have a responsibility to guide proper and standard language usage."The problem is apparently that wild youth has taken to using terms such as "PK" (literally "player killer" = "one-to-one [gaming] competition"), the abbrevation "MM" for "girl" and the delicious "konglong" (literally "dinosaur") for unattractive woman.
Phrases are taking a pasting too, with "bu yao" (don't want) reduced to the shocking "biao" in net parlance.
It all seems pretty innocent, but the media too has warmed to these neologisms which have even appeared in newspaper headlines - not a big deal except in France and now Shanghai.I know how they feel—I don't much like the corresponding abbreviations in English myself—but attempts to legislate language tend not to work very well. Better to promote good writing in other ways and hope this GG stuff is a passing fad.The Chinese take their "Putonghua" - aka Chinese Mandarin - pretty seriously. Accordingly, draft "Regulations of Shanghai on Implementing the Law on the National Use of Language and Script" are currently before the Standing Committee of the Shanghai People's Congress for scrutiny.
If passed they will restrict the civil service, public bodies and the media to using just Putonghua and Chinese characters. Furthermore, net slang will be purged from classrooms and official publications.
Xia explained: "Our nation's language needs to develop, but it also needs to be regulated. Not everyone understands these popular slang terms. When they appear in the mainstream media without explanation, many older people have a hard time understanding the true meaning."
Back in April, Nanjing launched a similar clampdown on web argot, including "PLMM" ("piao liang mei mei" = "beautiful girl") and "GG" (boy). The annual conference of the Nanjing's Working Committee of Spoken and Written Language pronounced that these abbrevations, among others would be forbidden in written schoolwork.
(Thanks for the link, Stuart!)
"Which-hunting" refers to editing which and that based on the superstition that the former should be used with a nonrestrictive clause and set off by commas; editors enslaved to this doctrine scrutinize manuscripts for relative clauses and zealously change whiches to thats or encase them in commas, with the satisfaction of someone lining up the pencils on their desk until they're all perfectly parallel. This often produces esthetically displeasing results, but rarely does it have the potential of wreaking such havoc as in a sentence (Decision 4 of the International F.A. Board to Law 12 - Fouls and Misconduct) from soccer/football's Laws of the Game:
A tackle, which endangers the safety of an opponent, must be sanctioned as serious foul play.Since other versions (e.g., French: "Un tacle qui met en danger l’intégrité physique d’un adversaire doit être sanctionné comme faute grossière") make it clear that the clause was meant to be restrictive, proper which-hunting would have turned the sentence into "A tackle that endangers..." But it's so easy to get caught up in the game of changing whiches to thats that you lose sight of the point of it all and run the risk of this sort of thing. If I were a referee, I would zealously whistle every single tackle, explaining that Decision 4 of the IFAB banned tackles altogether and handing them a card with the phone number of whoever approved this abomination. Of course the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) probably doesn't recognize the English version of the rules as definitive, but it would be fun until I got a cease-and-desist call from Zurich or was stomped to death by outraged players, whichever came first. (Via Mark Liberman's Language Log post.)
Note decisions 5 and 6 to the same Law, the former showing a similar application of the "rule" and the latter showing that who clauses escape the excrescent commas:
Decision 5
Any simulating action anywhere on the field, which is intended to deceive the referee, must be sanctioned as unsporting behaviour.Decision 6
A player who removes his jersey when celebrating a goal must be cautioned for unsporting behaviour.
Andrew Wiesner has assembled a collection of links to "Images of Orality and Literacy in Greek Iconography of the Fifth, Fourth and Third Centuries BCE." Some amazing stuff there, like the Boy seated writing. (Via wood s lot.)
Incidentally, wood s lot also reminds me that today is the birthday of the great Thelonious Monk, and WKCR is playing his music all day. Click the "live broadcast" link at the bottom, choose your stream, and enjoy.
Today is Hangul Day (한글날): on this day in 1446, King Sejong the Great promulgated the Korean alphabet, hangul. Read all about it in Bill Poser's Language Log post; I hadn't realized the purpose of the alphabet was explicitly to bring literacy to the mass of Koreans: "I have been distressed by [the fact that most people can't express their feelings in writing] and have designed twenty-eight new letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease and make convenient for their daily use." But "15th century Korea was a highly stratified society rigidly controlled by a small elite in which those who were not elite and not male had few rights."
Indeed, there was strong opposition to the introduction of Hangul on the part of King Sejong's court, so strong that they presented a memorial in opposition and debated with him verbally. The reasons they gave were in part that it was wrong to deviate from the Chinese way of doing things, and in part that such a simple writing system would lead to the loss of aristocratic privilege. Their motives may have been wrong, but they understood the effects of mass literacy all too well. After King Sejong's death, Hangul was very nearly suppressed. It took much longer to come into wide use than he had intended due to the opposition of the aristocracy.Sounds like something worth celebrating to me.
Jesse Sheidlower has a piece in the current Bookforum on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language that is well worth reading. A snippet:
The abundance and quality of the material are often overshadowed by the smattering of humorous definitions in Johnson, of which the most widely known is surely his entry for lexicographer, which begins “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” (This, its common form, is a selective quotation; the entry goes on more helpfully, “that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.”) A pension was “an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.” And oats is “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” All it takes is one or two such entries, especially when combined with the many witty comments Boswell quotes Johnson as having said, to give the impression that the whole work is a frippery. It is not. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is one of the great intellectual achievements of any age. Praised from the moment of its publication, it remains an astonishing work, not least because it is the product of a single, extraordinarily perceptive mind. Johnson had the help of a half-dozen assistants—most of whom, by the way, were Scots—but their role was chiefly to help him manage the quotations, not to write definitions.(Via Gnostical Turpitude.)Even sympathetic discussions tend to focus on the unusual—the humorous entries, the weird words (bicipitous; jobbernowl; trolmydames). These are crowd pleasing, and easy to discuss, though ultimately not very important. The trend continues: Most modern dictionaries are publicized with their hottest new words, it being impossible to interest the press in the quality of one’s etymology.
Since I know you're wondering, bicipitous means 'Having two heads or terminal extremities' (1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. III. v. 141 Bicipitous Serpents with the head at each extreme), jobbernowl is 'A blockish or stupid head; a ludicrous term for the head, usually connoting stupidity' (1599 MARSTON Sco. Villanie II. vi. 200 His guts are in his braines, huge Iobbernoule, Right Gurnets-head) or 'A stupid person, a blockhead' (1890 HALL CAINE Bondman xx. II. 242 The numbskull!.. The jobbernowl!), and trolmydames (not even in the OED!) is 'The game of nineholes.'
Mark Liberman at Language Log has an interesting and depressing post about how lawyers pick up crazy ideas about language. He quotes John W. Brewer:
... a key part of law review culture is a hyperlegalistic concern with details of style and usage, and an almost pathological fear of exercising discretionary judgment among plausible alternatives. For any style/usage issue, the notion is that there must be a rule, and you can look the rule up in an authoritative source, and once you've done that you should follow the rule strictly, both in your own writing and especially in seizing opportunities to make petty corrections to the writing of others. The so-called "Blue Book" provides most of the obsessive-compulsive detail on matters of abbreviation and the like (should the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit be abbreviated "(2d Cir.)" or "(2nd Cir.)"? For God's sake, don't guess! Look it up!). But it doesn't deal directly with many issues of prose style where people like this intuitively sense that There Must Be a Rule. For that, many law review types use as their authoritative source the Texas Law Review Manual of Usage and Style (MoUS), which I dimly recall from unhappy encounters with it circa 1990 as having a particularly obsessive and wrongheaded view of the that/which issue...While as an editor I certainly object to the idea that looking up matters of style is "obsessive-compulsive," it is unfortunate that so many style manuals take prescriptivism to absurd lengths, and apparently this is worst than most. But that's not the half of it; Mark quotes Richard Posner's "Against the Law Reviews," where I learned the horrid truth about how law reviews work:
With a few exceptions, law reviews are edited by law students rather than by professors or other professionals. The law reviews are numerous, are published bimonthly or at more frequent intervals, are edited without peer review, and are seemingly unconstrained in length. Their staffs are large, but the members, being students, are inexperienced both in law and in editing. With such abundant manpower and no reliance on peer review, law reviews do not forbid simultaneous submission or insist on brevity, and the interval between initial submission and final publication is much shorter than in other scholarly fields. The size of law review staffs enables them not only to check the author's citations but also to make many substantive comments and to engage in line-by-line copyediting...John Brewer sums up: "In my experience, the law review experience may intensify preexisting tendencies toward bogus prescriptivism among well-educated young people, with longlasting negative effects."The system was not ideal. Because the student editors spent, at most, two years as law review staffers, all part-time, they did not become experienced editors. And since no self-respecting law school could afford not to have a law review, competitive pressure among law reviews were weak. There was no fear that a review that did not perform well would be driven from the market. So law review editors could indulge their whims...
Because the students are not trained or experienced editors, the average quality of their suggested revisions is low. Many of the revisions they suggest (or impose) exacerbate the leaden, plethoric style that comes naturally to lawyers (including law professors). According to an article written by James Lindgren at Northwestern Law School in the Chicago Law Review, one law review editor "thought that many uses of the word 'the' in an article were errors. Following this bizarre rule of thumb, he took as many 'thes' out of manuscripts as he could, thus reducing many sentences to a kind of pidgin."
OK, another question for you Africanists. I have a book Munyakare: African Civilization Before the Batuuree, by Richard W. Hull. I long ago figured out that batúuree is Hausa for 'white man' (the plural is tuuraawáa), but I have never been able to decipher "munyakare" (which is not in either the index or glossary, nor is it mentioned in the introduction or any other obvious spot). I thought Google would help, but it seems every hit for the word is a reference to this book. Assuming mu- to be a prefix, I googled "nyakare" and got a few hits, but the only one that looked promising was this page, which says "Nyakare: A chiefdom created for a daughter of Ruganzu II Ndoli" (who apparently ruled the baNyarwanda in the early 16th century). I guess a muNyakare would be a person from that chiefdom, but what that has to do with anything is beyond me. Again, I welcome assistance from those who know more than I.
In the course of cataloguing my library, I'm learning a lot about my books (many of which I bought after a cursory inspection and never investigated until now) and being forced to figure out linguistic details that I could gloss over when simply sticking the books on the appropriate shelf. This is the case with Umthwakazi, by P. S. Mahlangu (Longmans 1957), which according to this site is a historical account of Mzilikazi and the founding of the amaNdebele nation and was the first book published in Ndebele. The back cover says "NDEBELE (The Owner of the State)," the parenthetical phrase being apparently a translation of the book's title; googling "umthwakazi" suggests that it consists of a prefix u- and the noun Mthwakazi, now used by Ndebele nationalists as the name of the Ndebele nation (considered as independent from Zimbabwe). The online Ndebele-English translator says "u-Mthwakazi: the nation of the Ndebele people," and a news story from earlier this year quotes Godfrey Ncube as saying "Mthwakazi means 'a nation'. That is what the Ndebele people were called."
Now, Ndebele is a Nguni language that split off from Zulu quite recently; Dalby's Dictionary of Languages says "Zulu and Ndebele are still to some extent mutually intelligible, though idioms differ and Ndebele has clearly borrowed numerous terms from the languages previously spoken in its territory" (where it arrived from what is now South Africa in the early 19th century). So I've tried to use my Zulu dictionaries to translate the subtitle and author line: "Izindaba ZamaNdebele Zemvelo. Zilotshwe ngu- P.S. Mahlangu." So far I've learned that izindaba is the plural of -daba and means 'reports, accounts,' and zemvelo seems to be a form of -velo 'nature.' If anyone can provide further enlightenment, be my guest.
Incidentally, Dalby provides a sidebar account of the complicated history of the name of the language:
Speakers call their language isiNdebele and themselves amaNdebele. The word is correctly pronounced with three short es of which the first is stressed, Ndĕ'bĕlĕ.And this site says that the name "was probably derived from the Sotho-Tswana term tebele, meaning a stranger, or one who plunders."AmaNdebele appears to have been their own version of the name given to them by the Sotho and Tswana speakers in whose land they were settled — maTebele. Early English-speaking explorers heard and adopted this Sotho form, calling the people Matabele and their northern domain Matabeleland.
Xavier Kreiss, a guest blogger at Naked Translations, has an interesting post on "The languages of Guernsey." It starts off:
My mother is a Guernseywoman, and I've known and loved Guernsey all my life. The Channel Islands have always held a particular attraction for me - I'm a half-British Frenchman, which probably explains the affinity between myself and those "pieces of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England", to quote the famous words of Victor Hugo, who spent many years in the archipelago as a political exile. He was fascinated by the local Norman-French dialect, or "djernesiais", an ancient vernacular that dates back to the days of the Norman conquest.And it continues with "a highly unofficial bit of potted history" and discussion of the patois (and its near-disappearance), the literature, the law, and the names: "Le Cheminant, Le Page, Le Patourel, Duquemin (pronounced dook-min), Mauger (prononced Major)..." Interesting stuff.
wood s lot turns five today. I don't know how Mark Woods keeps up such a dependable stream of literary, cultural, artistic, and political links, avoiding the obvious and ferreting out the unusual and unforgettable, but if you don't already have the site bookmarked, now's as good a time as any. Today he has the haunting photography of Josef Sudek, poetry by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, various links on the Situationist International, E.J. Hobsbawm, Nassim Taleb, Stirling Newberry, Robert Kelly, Jacques Derrida, and more; tomorrow he'll have completely different, equally valuable material. Congratulations, and many more!
In the course of cataloguing my language books, I hit a snag with the English-Arabic Conversational Dictionary, said in my Ungar edition (1955, 1978 paperback reprint) to be by Richard Jaschke. Now, I like to include the date of original publication in my listings, and this was clearly published long before 1955—aside from the fact that the phrases include things like "Ho there! you! boatman! put me ashore" and "three petticoats," the introduction begins "This little book, one of the best pocket guides to Arabic ever published, has been out of print for too long a time." It boggles my mind that it was considered useful in 1955, let alone now (and it's apparently still in print), but it's a lot of fun to leaf through. Anyway, I'm normally good at finding out when first editions were published, but I've drawn a blank here, and it's not helping that some sources refer to the author as "Richard Jasch," which in fact gets twice as many Google hits as the Jaschke version. (The Library of Congress doesn't recognize him under either name.) So can anyone let me know when Jasch(ke)'s original "little book" was published and what it was then called? Thanks in advance.
Anatoly, of the Russian LJ Avva, has a long and funny post about having years ago run across a book purporting to be a collection of critical essays about a newly translated play by a forgotten Spanish author; in reality everything in the book, including the professor who discovered and translated the play and edited the collection of essays, was an invention of the real author, whose name Anatoly eventually realized he had forgotten and could not retrieve. Naturally, I suspected he had invented the whole thing for the sake of the post, but he eventually did remember the true author, Herbert Samuel Lindenberger, and googling convinces me the man did exist and did write Saul's Fall, the book in question. And in the course of the googling I ran across an interesting list of books with "Fictional Footnotes and Indexes," which I thought I'd share with you all. It includes everything from Douglas Adams to Roland Barthes and Fyodor Dostoevsky ("Notes from Underground. Two: one at the beginning and one at the end."). Heterogeneous fun.
Christopher Culver has a post with some nice resources for those who love Old Irish (and it's one of those things, like Laphroaig, that you either love or hate): The Voyage of Bran and Aided Froích ('The Death of Fróech'), both in Gaelic and English, a timeline showing the development from ogham to Modern Irish and Scots Gaelic using the word for 'daughter' as an example, and a photographically reproduced text of Kuno Meyer's 1909 Irish Metrics.
While looking through my smaller Urdu-English dictionary (a mere 831 pages, as compared with Platts' 1259), trying to get some hints as to its age and provenance (my edition says only SAPHROGRAPH CORP. Published 1969, but it's clearly a reprint of an earlier dictionary, which I'm pretty sure is the Ferozsons, for which 1960 is the earliest date I've turned up), I happened on the following entry:
lāg (H) n.f. Enmity; rancour; spite; grudge; ill-feeling; cost; expenditure; a secret; spell; ratio; approach; competition; attention; affection; love; attachment; affinity; connection; relevancy; correlation.
I've bolded the definitions that struck me (although the whole congeries is somewhat reminiscent of Flann O'Brien's mock-Dineen's entry); among the phrases that follow, lāg rakhna means 'to harbor ill-will, have a grudge against,' and lāg lagnā means 'to fall in love, be enamored of.' Now, that's what I call polysemy.
(You can see Platts' even longer list of definitions here.)
Addendum. The title of this post is explained here by Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti.
A MetaFilter thread by OmieWise (whose Proust blog is well worth your time) introduced me to a nice site on Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino; it includes a grammar and some texts, mostly historical and cultural, although there's also a fragment of a poem (written in Hebrew characters as well as transliteration). Visit the MeFi thread for other good links and information, mostly provided by the learned zaelic.
It's time once again to play Is This English? I've learned over the years that a usage that seems completely wrong to me may be perfectly OK, or at least marginally acceptable, to other native speakers, and I've got one from today's NY Times I want to get opinions on. The story, by Randal C. Archibold, is about a group of James Dean fans, one of them named Rick Young, who met at the California intersection where Dean was killed in a car crash fifty years ago (the story is datelined Cholame, which is pronounced sho-LAM, like "show Lamb"); the sentence I want to bring to your attention reads as follows: "In Mr. Young's midst on this parched plain between Los Angeles and San Francisco was Scott Brimigion, a salesman from Valencia, Calif., and a dead ringer for Dean, with his red jacket, white T-shirt, blue jeans, pompadour and pouty look." I was, shall we say, taken aback by this use of "midst"; to me, the only thing it can mean is that Mr. Brimigion was inside Mr. Young, or at the very least underneath his clothing. I would have written "in Mr. Young's vicinity." But the language has been changing faster than I can keep up with it for some time now; is there anyone out there for whom this is a normal, or at least acceptable, phrase?
That's the title of a new book about Yiddish by Michael Wex; William Grimes's review in the NY Times makes it sound like a lot of fun:
..."Born to Kvetch" is much more than a greatest-hits collection of colorful Yiddish expressions. It is a thoughtful inquiry into the religious and cultural substrata of Yiddish, the underlying harmonic structure that allows the language to sing, usually in a mournful minor key.Yiddish is the language par excellence of complaint. How could it be otherwise? It took root among Jews scattered across Western Europe during the Middle Ages and evolved over centuries of persecution and transience. It is, Mr. Wex writes, "the national language of nowhere," the medium of expression for a people without a home. "Judaism is defined by exile, and exile without complaint is tourism," as Mr. Wex neatly puts it...
...The Jews who transmuted German into Yiddish were steeped in Jewish law, whose style and phraseology made their way into the developing language and put down deep roots. Yiddish thrives on argument, hairsplitting and arcane points of law and proper behavior. Half the time, Yiddish itself is the object of dispute, a language, Mr. Wex writes, "in which you can't open your mouth without finding out that, no matter what you're saying, you're saying it wrong."I remember "Such a zets I'll give you!" from my childhood immersion in the early Mad Magazine; I'm glad to know its exact place in the continuum of smiting.When you get it right, it can be a beautiful thing. Or a lethal weapon. Yiddish excels at the fine art of the insult and the curse, or klole, which Mr. Wex, in a chapter titled "You Should Grow Like an Onion," calls "the kvetch-militant." Americans generally stick to short, efficient four-letter words when doling out abuse. Yiddish has lots of those, too, and it abounds in terse put-downs like "shtik fleysh mit oygn." Applied to a stupid person, it means "a piece of meat with eyes." More often, though, Yiddish speakers, like the Elizabethans, like to exploit the full resources of the language when the occasion requires...
Yiddish is not a "have a nice day" language. "How are you?," a perfectly innocent question in English, is a provocation in Yiddish, which does not lend itself to happy talk. "How should I be?" is a fairly neutral answer to the question. Theoretically it is possible to say "gants gut" ("real good"), but this is a phrase that the author says he has never heard in his life. "As a response to a Yiddish question, it marks you as someone who knows some Yiddish words but doesn't really understand the language," he writes...
Mr. Wex has perfect pitch. He always finds the precise word, the most vivid metaphor, for his juicy Yiddishisms, and he enjoys teasing out complexities. His tour through the vocabulary of traditional punishments meted out to schoolchildren, collectively known as the "matnas yad," or "gift of the hand," may be his finest riff, a subtly differentiated taxonomy of pain that starts with the "knip" ("pinch") and proceeds to the "shnel" ("flick"), the "patsh" ("slap") the "zets" ("hard slap") and the "flem" ("resounding smack").
At the far end lies the "khmal" or "khmalye," "the all-out murder-one wallop that makes its victims 'zen kroke mit lemberik.' " It's so hard, in other words, that the student sees Krakow as his head snaps forward and Lemberg (present-day Lviv in Ukraine) on the return trip.
(Via Language Geek.)
Armeniapedia is "an online encyclopedia about Armenia that anyone can edit." It has sections on history, society, food, and so on, but of course what particularly interests me is the language section, which includes lessons in Eastern Armenian (the dialect spoken in Armenia, Russia and Iran). Armenian has such a pretty alphabet I've always wanted to pick some up; maybe this will give me the impetus. (Via Plep, who I hope is enjoying his holiday!)
