Lameen Souag of Jabal al-Lughat doesn't post freqently, but when he does, it's always interesting. His latest entry discusses "the oldest dictionary of an African language." He rejects the claim of Carradori's Dictionary of 17th Century Kenzi Nubian, and says:
The oldest arguable dictionary of an African language that I am aware of so far is the Greek-Coptic Glossary of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, which apparently dates back to the 6th century. Ibn al-'Assal's Arabic-Coptic sullam muqaffa, written in the 1200s, can quite unhesitatingly be described as a dictionary; following a then-current Arabic tradition, it was arranged alphabetically from the last letter of the word backwards (so, for instance, "apple" would be close to "people" but far from "apricot".) This arrangement was meant to aid in the composition of rhymed prose and verse...Anybody have any contributions?After Coptic, the next oldest is an Arabic-Berber lexicon written in 1145, containing some two thousand words... What other African dictionaries predate Carradori's? I don't know, but I can hazard some guesses—Geez, Swahili, Kanuri, and Nubian itself would certainly be worth checking.
A few months ago I issued a preliminary report on Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language; prompted by a request from C. Max Magee of The Millions to name my favorite language books of the year (he's posted them here), I decided it was high time I gave a final assessment. I enjoyed the book a great deal and hope a lot of people read it; it gives a good sense of how language changes and what it is historical linguists study, and it's written very engagingly, with digressions and interpolated dialogues à la Hofstadter.
But I have one major gripe with it, which is that the latter part of the book is increasingly taken up with Deutscher's own theories about the origin of the Semitic verbal system, with its fixed grid of consonants and changing vowel patterns. It's a very interesting topic to a linguist, but to include it in a book for the general reader is a bad idea: the reader is not in a position to judge the theory, and is likely to accept it simply because the book is enjoyable and the rest of the information seems reliable. It's like sticking an untried medicine in with the Halloween candy. I would have advised Deutscher to save the Semitic verbs for a specialized journal and use the space saved with more examples of undoubted linguistic facts to dazzle and educate the lay reader.
But that's water under the bridge. The book is as it is, and it's a fine read anyway. Go forth, Unfolding, and spread enlightenment!
A new blog, amidaworld, focuses on Japanese and life in Japan, and there's already a lot of interesting material; a couple of entries particularly relevant here:
New Japanese Word describes his discovery of the Wikipedia page for Mt. Fuji, "where I learned a great new Japanese phrase: 'Fujiyama geisha,' the Japan that is misunderstood by the West. I never heard it used in Japan, though there were many instances where it could have been: 'Kill Bill? That movie was so full of Fujiyama geisha nonsense!'" (As the Wiki page makes clear, the Japanese phrase 富士山 is read Fuji-san, not "Fujiyama," by native speakers.)
Lost in Translation in Translation quotes a Confucius saying so gnomic nobody's known what it means for the last couple of millennia:
The Analects of Confucius Book 3 number 5:Amida's proposed translation: "The Master said, 'The Yi and the Di with rulers are not like the states of Xia without them,'" accompanied by "a big fat footnote," which seems to me the ideal solution. The comment thread has a fascinating discussion of whether the impossibility of knowing the author's intent in such cases is a good or a bad thing. (In my younger days I would have felt the same frustration as Azuma, but I've come to terms with the unknowability of the past and can now share Amida's pleasure in the fact that "the openness of the text has created space for all sorts of readings."
子曰：夷狄之有君，不如諸夏之亡也D.C. Lau's translation:
"The Master said, 'Barbarian tribes with their rulers are inferior to Chinese states without them.'"Arthur Waley's translation of the same passage:
"The Master said, 'The barbarians of the East and North have retained their princes. They are not in such a state of decay as we in China.'"So which is it—is China better or are the barbarians? We don't need to feel bad. Looking at commentaries from the Han Dynasty onward, we can see Chinese people of different eras were just as lost as we are, and also needed a "translation." They had to explain the text in more understandable language.
Many commentators read 亡 (Waley's "decay") as being 無 (Lau's "without"), and then there's the matter of what you want to do with the 不如, "not like." Both Lau- and Waley-style interpretations can be found.
There's a follow-up post by Matt of No-sword comparing translations of an almost equally difficult passage (傳不習乎 in Analects 1:4), "which character-by-character is 'transmit not practise (question)'"; in the comments, Amida provides an even more cryptic example:
Maybe you know the example of Confucius' summarizing the entire Shijing with one line from it, 思無邪. That's often thought of as meaning "Think no evil," but in the days of the Shijing 思 was just an exclamatory particle, and 邪 meant straying or deviating from a line (as in a team of horses pulling something) so it should be "Ah—no straying." What did Confucius mean? Was he playing on words? Did everybody get him wrong? Who knows—but it makes for good debate in commentaries.
John Ross presses the claims of disappearing languages in When a Language Dies:
Because just a few people speak most of the world's languages—4% of the world's people speak 96% of its languages—most linguistic systems are extremely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life and death.Of course it's not necessarily a huge tragedy every time a language dies, but it is a shame if you enjoy diversity, and if it can be prevented or delayed by helping people record and pass on their own languages, I'm all for it. And I do enjoy rants on the subject. People should be passionate about language! (Yes, even the people who are wrong-headedly passionate about changes in English; I deplore their ignorance but admire their passion.)Linguistic diversity flourishes in the south—half of the world's languages are concentrated in just eight countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Australia, India, Nigeria, Cameroon, Brazil, and Mexico. Mexico's Oaxaca state, smaller than Portugal, is host to 16 distinct ethnic groups and speaks more languages than all of Europe.
"Cuando muere una lengua
todo lo que hay en el mundo,
mares y rios,
animales y plantas,
ni se piensen, ni se pronuncian
con atisbos, con sonidos,
que no existan ya.""When a language dies,
all that there is in this world,
oceans and rivers,
animals and plants,
do not think of them,
do not pronounce their names,
they do not exist now."If each language was a room than Mexico would be a great mansion of 62 rooms, linguist/poet/historian Carlos Montemayor reflected at a recent presentation of a newly translated volume of Mexican indigenous poetry. "These languages are not dialects but rather complete linguistic systems. Purepecha is as complete as Greek, Maya as complete as Italian. There are no superior language systems. All have grammar and syntax and vocabulary and etymology. It is an expression of cultural racism to consider indigenous languages to be dialects."
Via wood s lot.
The Classical Language Instruction Project "contains samples of Greek and Latin prose and poetry texts, read by various scholars and in different styles. It is designed to help students of the classical languages to acquaint themselves with the sound of Greek and Latin and to practice their own reading skills." (Via wood s lot.)
This is fun for those of us who spend our time poring over books like Compendium of the World's Languages: list all the living languages you can without looking them up. I've come up with 242 (I had provisionally put down my pencil when it suddenly occurred to me I'd completely forgotten about Balto-Slavic); as I said in the post at Tenser, said the Tensor, where I found this pastime (you probably shouldn't click on the "post" link if you're going to try it yourself, since he provides his own list therein), "it's very frustrating when you know there's a language in a particular spot but you can't remember the name. (For instance, I could only remember three of the four main Dravidian languages, and there's two Siberian languages with very similar names that are staying stubbornly on the tip of my tongue...)."
If you like Borges, you'll probably enjoy Ahua, the Water Language by "N. Aalberg" (actually Richard Kennaway). It's my favorite kind of constructed language, the purely conceptual; if I want details of morphology, I'll go to one of the many slow-cooked varieties proffered by actual languages that have been in use for centuries. Sample bits from the description:
As in France, so in Ahua: to speak the local language is at once compulsory and forbidden. Speaking in one's own language one will be indifferently tolerated; speaking in Ahuan one will be even more indifferently tolerated. Either way, the Ahuans' conviction that outsiders are forever barred from Ahuan culture by their inferior understanding is upheld. The Ahuans believe that no-one can learn the Ahuan language, and they do everything possible to ensure that this is the case.I enjoy very much the idea of such a dictionary, although an attempt to produce one in English would probably exhaust its interest after a quick perusal. (Via Plep.)In Ahuan, everything not absolutely essential to the meaning is omitted. That which remains is referred to obliquely, by allusion, again with the minimum of detail. The sentence "One thing is not another" may, according to context, mean almost anything; yet to an Ahuan, the precise meaning in any particular context will always be crystal clear...
The Ahuans look with mild amusement on our efforts to speak Ahua. An outsider invariably falls into certain faults which instantly mark him out, to an Ahuan, as having only a childish grasp of the language. He will attach fixed meanings to the words, and he will memorise stereotyped expressions. Ahuans take pride in the fact that their language is always changing. An Ahuan will never use the same word twice with the same meaning. There is a constant striving for unfashionability—indeed, no fashion of speaking can ever assert itself, for when an Ahuan notices that some word, or phrase, or any other feature of speech is beginning to be used with any consistency, he deliberately flouts that incipient rigidification. For this reason, no bilingual dictionary can ever be made of the language. Curiously, there are Ahuan dictionaries. They are considered to be among the greatest works of Ahuan literature. They partake of the elliptical and allusive style of the everyday language, and are more like poetic meditations on the words of Ahua than definitions. Needless to say, they are completely useless for the foreign learner of Ahua.
Addendum. Leafing through Mandelshtam's Разговор о Данте [Conversation about Dante], I came across the following passage, which could be taken as a poetic analog of the Borscht Belt Borges essay above:
Когда мы произносим, например, "солнце", мы не выбрасываем из себя готового смысла—это был бы семантический выкидыш,—но переживаем своеобразный цикл.For more on the word sun in Mandelshtam, see this LH post.Любое слово является пучком, и смысл торчит из него в разные стороны. Произнося "солнце", мы совершаем как бы огромное путешествие, к которому настолько привыкли, что едем во сне. Поэзия тем и отличается от автоматической речи, что будит нас и встряхивает на середине слова. Тогда оно оказывается гораздо длиннее, чем мы думали, и мы припоминаем, что говорить—значит всегда находиться в дороге.
[When we pronounce the word sun, for example, we do not toss out a prepared meaning—that would be a semantic miscarriage—instead, we experience a distinctive cycle.
Any word is a bundle, and meaning sticks out of it in various directions, rather than being concentrated on an official point. Pronouncing the word sun, it is as if we accomplish an immense journey, to which we are so accustomed that we do it in our sleep. Poetry differs from automatic speech in that it awakens us and shakes us in the middle of a word. Then the word proves to be much longer than we had thought, and we remember that to speak means always to find ourselves on the road.]
Maciej of Idle Words is translating Ilf and Petrov's Золотой теленок [Zolotoi telyonok, The Golden Calf] and has had the brilliant idea of creating a LiveJournal, baconmeteor, where he can ask questions about difficult points and get answers from the entire online universe of Russian speakers. For instance, in this post he asks about "this overheard bit of Soviet speak: На ваше РКК примкамера есть, примкамера! What is РКК, and what is a примкамера?" It turns out РКК is рабоче-крестьянский контроль ('workers' and peasants' [financial] inspectorate') and примкамера is примирительная камера, in Maciej's words "like what the Brits call an industrial tribunal." It would have taken a lot of digging through reference works and histories and a certain amount of luck to get that information (internet sources were of no help). If more translators did this rather than fudging or omitting difficult passages, there would be better translations.
Oh, and one of the comment threads introduced me to sokr.ru, a splendid site for Russian abbreviations and acronyms that got instantly bookmarked. (Thanks for the tip, Tatyana!)
Anyone interested in the Classical Japanese verbal system should hie themselves to this post at IbaDaiRon Blog and the subsequent lengthy analysis at No-sword (1, 2). I can grasp only the basics myself, but here's a summary of current thinking (at least on Matt's part):
A CJ verb consists of stem + ending. There are three main types of verbs:Those of you who know what's going on will definitely enjoy the discussion and perhaps want to contribute. Doozo!* C-type verbs are consonant-stem (sC) (e.g. omoh.u).
* V-type verbs are vowel stem (sV) (e.g. mi.ru, ke.ru).
* D-type verbs have a consonant stem (sC) and a vowel stem (sV) (e.g. sug.u/sugi, at.u/ate) The vowel stem is used whenever "available" (usually for MZ, RY and MR) and the consonant stem otherwise, but for some reason the RT and IZ consonant stems always take the post-vowel allomorphs.
I have received an e-mail from a firm of solicitors alleging "extremely serious defamatory allegations and innuendoes posted on your web site" by a commenter; they add: "The impact of these scurrilous allegations on our clients has been compounded by your endorsement of the allegations in the final paragraph of the posting" (i.e., in my next comment, which basically said "Thanks for the information"). They go on:
We demand that you immediately remove these outrageous defamatory allegations from your web site forthwith and agree to publish a full retraction and apology in terms to be first agreed with us. We also require your proposals for compensating our clients for the serious damage caused to their reputation.Needless to say, I hate to remove a blog post just because somebody with access to lawyers was offended by it, but I also have no desire to be forced to defend myself against a lawsuit: even if it's thrown out in the end, I can't afford the costs. So: anyone know what a safe and appropriate response would be? (Obviously, I am not asking for technical legal advice, but I'm hoping some of you will have experience with this sort of thing and have some useful suggestions. "Tell them to go to hell," while appreciated as an expression of solidarity, is alas not useful advice without a convincing reason why that would not wind up costing me money.) If you want further details, e-mail me at languagehat at gmail dot com. Thanks!We await hearing from you within the next seven days, failing which we have instructions to institute legal proceedings against you without further notice.
Those of you who like both mystery novels and word puzzles should check out a post at Suzanne E. McCarthy's Abecedaria:
This novel is set in Thule Bay in northern Greenland. This could only be Qaanaaq, a settlement whose name is a palindrome. Several clues point to the use of the palindrome in deciphering the two 'keywords' of the story, the words written on the scroll placed in the golem's mouth...I particularly enjoyed this tidbit:The first keyword is the 'word of creation' which brings the golem to life; and the second keyword, a reverse of the first, will destroy him...
Next, I switched to researching the legend of the golem in history. I found out that one of the original 'words of creation' was 'emeth' (truth) written on the golem's forehead. With the erasure of the 'e' altering 'emeth' to read 'meth' (death), the golem was destroyed.Language is powerful stuff!
The Unbound Bible allows you to view any section of the Bible in four languages at the same time (in parallel colums). Right now I'm looking at the gospel of John in English, Russian, Georgian, and Greek (of which you get seven choices for the New Testament and four for the old). I meant to post this months ago when Joe Tomei sent me the link (thanks, Joe!), but it somehow slipped through the cracks. Better late than never!
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
В начале было Слово, и Слово было у Бога, и Слово было Бог.
პირველითგან იყო სიტყუაჲ, და სიტყუაჲ იგი იყო ღმრთისა თანა, და ღმერთი იყო სიტყუაჲ იგი.
εν αρχη ην ο λογος και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον και θεος ην ο λογος
So MetaFilter member acoutu mentioned in an AskMeFi thread that her family name, Coutu, was traditionally pronounced "Koo-chee." Her explanation for this was that
...my great-great-grandfather worked on the railroads with a bunch of Italians. Being an Italian in North America at that time was not exactly a great thing, but it was a heck of a lot better than being a French Canadian. So, when Coutu was pronounced lightly as "Cootchyu", some of the railroad guys thought it was "[C]ucci". And my great-great-grandfather just went along with that. This makes sense to me because of the discrimination against French Canadians.I absolutely love that story and had to share it at once.As late as the 40s or 50s, my grandfather was mistaken for being Italian—something he gladly accepted. One day, a guy asked him something about Italians and my grandfather said he was actually French Canadian. The guy said, "Me too!" And my grandfather said, "Since when is McCready a French Canadian name?" And the other guy said, "It's Mercredi. You think I'm going to say something if they think I'm Scottish?!"
Last week's New Yorker (which arrived a week late, so I'm still working my way through it) has an essay by Wyatt Mason on the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who sounds like a writer I'd enjoy reading; this certainly appeals to me:
Over the years, Marías has translated a vast range of American and English writing, including poetry by John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Frank O’Hara, and Wallace Stevens; and fiction by Anthony Burgess, Raymond Carver, Thomas Hardy, J. D. Salinger, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Updike...But what brings me to post about it is a reminiscence about his mother:This work has had an impact on Marías as a writer. On the most basic level, Marías has made all his narrators in some sense translators; whether they happen to teach translation theory or work as interpreters, ghostwriters, or opera singers, each is giving voice to other people’s stories.
[My mother] published an anthology titled “España como preocupación” (“Spain as a Preoccupation”), with the subtitle “Literary Anthology.” Her name was Dolores Franco—her surname, which is rather common, being the same as the dictator’s. Dolores... in Spanish means literally pain, or pains. The censorship argued that “Spain as a Preoccupation,” plus Dolores Franco, meaning “pains Franco,” wouldn’t be accepted.It seems inevitable that the more power you acquire over others, the more you fear retribution (since power over others is always, in a basic sense, undeserved), and fear makes people do foolish things. This particular bit of folly is essentially comic, but the fear and folly of power, it hardly needs saying, often have more serious consequences. The novelist's father "was denounced by a former friend, who accused him, falsely, of writing for Pravda and of consorting with Communist leaders"; he was jailed and lost his job, which in the context of his time and place, made him a lucky man. The stories are very different, but share this quality: it is difficult for those who haven't experienced life under a dictatorship to fully credit them. How can men run a country who have so little sense?
Addendum. No sooner did I finish the Mason essay and turn the page than I found a brief review of Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939
That's how I'd transliterate the Yiddish title, אין מױל אַרײַן, of a delightful blog I just ran across, using the Lithuanian pronunciation I'm familiar with, but the URL uses the spelling inmolaraan, which leads me to suspect the blogger, the chocolate lady, uses the Polish dialect. At any rate, the name means 'into the mouth,' and the blog features עסן און װערטער [esn un verter] 'eating and words': what could be better? Don't be alarmed if you follow the link and see a sea of Yiddish; just scroll down and you'll find English entries as well, of which this is a fine sample:
A sakh zmires un veynik lokshn (Lots of hymns and just a little pasta) is a Yiddish expression meaning great effort expended for a disappointing result—a long run for a short slide. Zmires are the para-liturgical hymns sung at festive meals, and lokshn (noodles) are especially associated with the Sabbath in Ashkenazic tradition.For much more on lokshn in the Yiddish language and Jewish life see the hilarious dialogue “Lokshn” [pdf file] by the eternally amazing Noyekh Prilutski. Yet more on lokshn, including a Romanized version of Prilutski’s “Lokshn” can be found in The Mendele Review Special Lokshn Issue, parts one and two. Have a look at A. Almi’s poem about Prilutski while you're there...
I've taken some of the sidebar titles from John Evelyn’s Acetaria: a discourse of sallets. I really like that he has a chapter called “Of composts, and stercoration, repastination, dressing and stirring of the earth and mould of a garden” (all punctuation is in the original), so I’ve used this for my compost entry, even though I have no immediate plans to write any further about compost. For the Yiddish title of this category I used the saying “emes vakst fun der erd aroys” “The truth grows out of the earth.”
I had to look up stercoration (the action or act of manuring with dung) and repastination (the action or process of digging over again).I think that blessing is appropriate also for the experience of first encountering this tasty new blog.In Jewish practice, when you first taste a new kind of fruit or vegetable, or taste it again for the first time in a new season, the blessing “Shehekheyonu ve kiyemonu” (“who has kept us alive and sustained us”) expresses thanksgiving for having remained alive to experience this time. Think of those first crunchy apples in the fall. These words, along with John Evelyn’s “A garden deriv'd and defin'd; its dignity, distinction and sorts” are the titles for the category of posts about the delights and curiosities of the plant world.
In a comment to an earlier post, Keira Ballantyne mentioned work she'd done on Yapese, including interlinear translations, and I liked the site so much I thought I'd give it its own post.
This corpus is split into two parts. The first, the Honolulu Corpus of Written Yapese, was collected at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in the spring of 2001. The source materials for the corpus come from various upper elementary school readers first published in the late seventies by the Yap State Education Department... The second part of the corpus, the Colonia Corpus of Spoken Yapese, was collected in Yap in late 2002. It consists of three interviews... Keira Gebbie Ballantyne edited the translations and prepared the interlinearized version of the texts.Keira says: "I'm currently looking for an application which I can use to generate concordances from the xml files on the web. If you know of something that will do that, I'd love to hear from you." So drop her a line, and once again: isn't the internet great?
Exciting news from Greece:
Archeologists in Crete have found an important trove of archeological treasures containing some of the earliest known examples of Greek writing.It pleases me that the discoveries were made at Khania, a city of which I have fond memories; you can read more about the archeological digs in this interview with Maria Andreadaki-Vlasiki. (Via ilani ilani.)The culture ministry said the finds were excavated at a long-abandoned site on a hill overlooking the port of Chania in Western Crete, which has been identified with the Minoan city of Kydonia.
Among the discoveries was an amphora containing an intact text written in linear B, the language of the court at Mycenae where the legendary Agamemnon ruled.
Also found were two terracotta tablets containing texts in Linear A, an even older alphabet—used around 1,700 years before the common era—which has not yet been deciphered...
I ran across a scanned image of a Russian schoolbook page and started to read it when I was stopped cold by the second line:
2. Запишите 2-ой абзац текста, подчёркивая все орфограммы.
[2. Write out the second paragraph of the text, underlining all orfogrammy.]
What the hell is an orfogramma? It wasn't in my Oxford dictionary, so I went to the big gun, the three-volume New Great Russian-English Dictionary, and there it was... defined as "orthogram." This sort of thing really bothers me (I've posted about a similar situation here). There is no such word in English as "orthogram." It's not in the OED, it's not in the big Webster's, it's not online—if you google it, you get a bunch of French pages (for some reason) and a stray Egyptological page claiming that an orthogram is "a sign in the script which is to indicate a dual or plural form." That may or may not be a technical term in Egyptology, but it's clearly not relevant here. So I went to my handy Russkii yazyk: entsyklopediya [Russian language: encyclopedia] and found a whole article about орфограммы, which I will summarize for you thus: an orfogramma is a point of uncertainty in the spelling of a word, a place where you can't tell from the sound alone how to write it. Classic examples are final consonants (since all final consonants are devoiced: pyad' 'span' and pyat' 'five' sound the same) and unstressed vowels (golova 'head' could equally well be written galava to represent the standard pronunciation); writing words with small or capital letters would also fall under this rubric. So the line I quoted means 'underline all letters whose spelling requires the application of orthographic rules.' I sympathize with bilingual lexicographers; it's not easy to deal with a situation like this. But it's a dereliction of duty to say "орфограмма? orthogram!" and go on to the next word, not bothering your head about whether your "definition" is of any help to the users of the dictionary.
Update. Andrew Dunbar posted a request at Wiktionary, and already there's an article with the following definitions:
1. A spelling that is in accordance with orthographic rules, usually etymological or historical rather than phonetic.
2. A consistently reproducible way to represent phonomorphological features of a given language in writing, such -ого for the Russian masculine genitive singular of adjectives, instead of the phonetic spelling -ава: нового (nóvəvə).
I hesitate to dispute a native speaker about the definition of a word I was unacquainted with until the other day, but "a spelling" to me implies the spelling of an entire word, whereas (if I understand correctly) an орфограмма is a particular point in a word where the spelling requires the application of special rules. I will be happy to be corrected.
Just a couple of words whose etymology I found interesting:
1) Elver 'a young eel' is a variant of eelfare 'the passage of young eels up a river; a brood of young eels'; the first OED citation shows nicely the phonetic development:
1533 Act 25 Hen. VIII, c. vii, Any frye, spaume, or brode of yeles, called yele fares, or Ell vares.
2) Album is from Latin album 'a white tablet or notice-board, esp. that on which was inscribed the edict of the praetor' (the definition of the Oxford Latin Dictionary, more up-to-date than the OED's 'blank tablet') which is itself the neuter singular form of the adjective albus 'white' (from Proto-Indo-European *albho- and thus perhaps related to both elf and oaf). I'm sure I had read this etymology before, but it had slipped right out of my mind; perhaps thinking of the Beatles' White Album will help keep it there.
Ready Steady Book has a very fetching interview with Charlotte Mandell, a translator of French poetry and philosophy. Apparently it's her first interview, and she burbles happily: "Translators never get asked anything, so when someone listens to us we tend to rabbit on. I could give you an entire Proustean list of things (favorite number: 4; favorite color: burgundy; favorite flower: yellow sea poppy; favorite movie: tie between Cocteau’s Orphée and Renoir’s Rules of the Game…) but I won’t." (I will interject here that Rules of the Game is my favorite movie as well.) She has interesting things to say about Maurice Blanchot:
Reading Blanchot is a little like watching someone think. You have to have patience, since his essays move by nuance and suggestion, and come to focus slowly. English readers – Americans especially – are used to being fed information; in the case of an essay, they’re used to the conventional statement-exposition-conclusion format. The nice thing about Blanchot (and the thing a lot of people find exasperating about him) is that he doesn’t follow that formula, or any formula for that matter. Often no conclusion is reached. The subject is examined, and questioned, and looked at from different angles, but never really resolved. I like that a lot – it’s sort of like reading poetry.She provides a list of Books That Changed My Life that ends:
When I was 17: Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. I fell madly in love with Julien Sorel. Also The Charterhouse of Parma and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Dead.Reader, she married him!When I was 18: William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems. Also Rilke’s Duino Elegies and EM Forster’s Howards End.
When I was 20: Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I fell madly in love with Prince Andrei. Also Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. And also Robert Kelly’s Not This Island Music. I fell madly in love with Robert Kelly.
(Via wood s lot.)
I love bilingual texts that have both morpheme-by-morpheme interlinears and prose translations, and there are several of them at this Project Gutenberg reproduction of the Smithsonian Institution's Illustration Of the Method of Recording Indian Languages by J.O. Dorsey, A.S. Gatschet, and S.R. Riggs (from the First annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80, published 1881): "How the Rabbit Caught the Sun in a Trap" in Omaha, "Details of a Conjuror's Practice," "The Relapse," and "Sweat-Lodges" in the "Klamath Lake dialect" (not sure what language that is—Klamath-Modoc?), and "A Dog's Revenge" in Dakota. (Via wood s lot.)
Just when I thought I knew all the minorities of Europe, along comes another one. An article by Tomasz Kamusella describes the situation of the Silesians:
The Silesians began agitating for recognition after World War I, when the status of Germany’s Upper Silesia became uncertain. A turning point in their story came in 1922, when Upper Silesia was divided between Germany and Poland, disregarding the yearning of many of the area's 2.3 million inhabitants for an Upper Silesian nation-state with German and Polish as its official languages (the interwar Union of Upper Silesians, the main proponent of independence put its membership at half a million). Until then, the multilingual but homogenously Catholic Silesians had used German in school and for official business, and Polish in their dealings with the Church. At home, both prior to and after the division of their homeland between Poland and Germany, they continued to speak their local Slavic dialect interlaced with numerous Germanic loanwords and grammatical structures, which they termed “speaking in our own way” (po naschimu) or “the Silesian language.”I don't know to what extent there is a genuinely distinct Silesian dialect—R.G.A. de Bray's Guide to the Slavonic Languages (1951), the only reference book I have that mentions it, says only that such dialects "are chiefly characterized by the pronunciation of true nasals in all positions"—or whether there is a widespread sense of micronationalism among the Silesians, but I thought I'd pass along the information. (Thanks to John Emerson for the link.)Neither Berlin nor Warsaw would stand for that. For Berlin, the Silesians became "in-between people" and, for Warsaw, a "nationally labile population." Policies of enforced Germanization and Polonization took hold on either side of the borders of Upper Silesia. During World War II, the entire region was reincorporated in Germany, which nullified the achievements of Polonization. After 1945, the process was reversed, with all of Upper Silesia being granted to postwar Poland along with other formerly German territories. Millions of what Polish authorities called “indubitable Germans” were expelled, but those Silesians referred to as “autochthons” or “ethnic Poles insufficiently aware of their Polishness" were allowed to stay on, after being were sifted out from “indubitable Germans” by a process of “national verification” that was not, in truth, too rigorous: to qualify, it was enough to speak some of the Upper Silesian Slavic dialect, or just to have a Slavic-sounding surname...
NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin recently responded to what he describes as "a regular flow of comments and observations about language" from listeners; my response after reading it is to wish he'd stick to journalism and ethics and leave language alone. My esteemed copyediting colleague fev at Headsuptheblog has done a wonderful demolition job, of which my favorite bit is a response to this gem:
Mr. Everest also raised a question about when to use the plural possessive on the radio.Sez fev:For example: should we say "John Roberts' confirmation" or "John Roberts's confirmation?" Mr. Everest is advocating the latter.
In print this is a constant issue. My esteemed colleague Ian Mayes is the readers' editor (aka, the Ombudsman) at the Guardian in London. He has referred to this inappropriate use of the apostrophe as a dropping by that mythic creature, the *"Apostrofly."
One's ears are tempted to steam.I'm tempted to quote more, but it's all good; just drop by the copy desk and let the man bend your ear. (And no, I don't know what that asterisk is doing in *"Apostrofly.")
* First off, the apostrofly Ian describes is a cousin of the "greengrocer's apostrophe": random use of the apostrophe to create plurals, for example, as in "The Smith's are coming." It is not used to mark possession.
* Second, you don't pronounce punctuation. "Roberts' confirmation" is not an "inappropriate use" of the apostrophe. It isn't any righter or wronger than "Rehnquist's confirmation" because the apostrophe isn't a sound. The complainant isn't "technically right," no matter what the NPR reference librarian thinks. Mr. Everest (along with Strunk & White and the NYT) favors one way of forming the possessive of singular proper nouns ending in "s"; the AP uses another.
* Which brings us to the most painfully obvious point: "Roberts'" is not a plural possessive because "Roberts" is not a forgodsake plural noun. Obviously, there are exceptions—"my 4400 class has two Roberts, three Staycees and a Lucifer"—but this is not any of them. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.
Use the plural possessive on the radio exactly as you do in real life, in other words: To make possessive nouns plural. Thank you.
Jabal al-Lughat has a very interesting post called " A comparative linguist of the 10th century"; it begins:
Yehudah ibn Quraysh was a rabbi of the late ninth/early tenth century from Tahert (modern Tiaret, in Algeria.) Shocked to hear that the Jews of Fez in Morocco were neglecting the study of the Targum (an Aramaic translation of the Bible), he wrote a letter to them intended to establish that they could not and should not get by on the Hebrew alone - because other languages, especially Aramaic and Arabic, are essential in elucidating the Hebrew. In the process, he casually noted most of the correct sound correspondences between Hebrew and Arabic, and ended up writing what amounts to an extensive comparative dictionary of the three languages, even throwing in 9 Berber comparisons and 5 Latin ones at the end. He definitely hedges his bets on the cause of this obvious similarity between the three languages, but seems to come surprisingly close to the correct explanation - common descent - at times... something to bear in mind next time you read about Sir William Jones having founded comparative linguistics in 1798.The post goes on to provide a quote from Yehudah, in both translation and Arabic transcription (it was originally in the Hebrew alphabet).
An earlier post, equally interesting, is on demonstratives in Semitic (are Hebrew ha- and Arabic al- really cognate?).
Amidaworld has a post called "The Lazy Man's Guide to Classic Asian Literature" that moves from the discovery of Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases (provided for many books) to the insight that they can serve as a handy thumbnail sketch of the book itself:
But let's use this to save some time and read some massive works in, say, 10 seconds or so. I love this one: The Tale of Genji's SIPs: saffron flower. Yep, that's it. "Evocative," no?How about those massive Chinese novels? Journey to the West (vol. 2—1 was unavailable): hooped rod, two little fiends, auspicious luminosity, poled the luggage, travel rescript certified, vast magic powers, his muckrake, brazen ape, white jade steps, cloudy luminosity, subdue the fiend, his iron rod, great snow fall, ginseng fruits, bronze mallet, various fiends, iguana dragon, preparatory mass, steel crop, immaculate vase, our rescript, treasure staff, gloomy complexion, testimonial poem, reverted cinnabar. Could you give a better summary in 4 lines or so?...
Sum up Confucian thought as portrayed in the Analects in 10 words: accordance with the rites, ceremonial cap, benevolent man, loving learning. Thanks, Amazon!I was going to try it on The Man Without Qualities, but alas, no SIPs were provided.
I just heard a radio news announcer say "In Beijing... uh, Beizhing..." My wife gets nervous when I swear at the radio, so I'll say it here: there is no /zh/ sound in Mandarin Chinese! Why on earth do people insist on looking at a pinyin j, which is pronounced pretty much exactly like an English j, and reading it as if it were French? Stop it, all of you, just stop it!
This has been a public service announcement, brought to you by Hatters for Better Language Use.
The Interactive Irish Lessons site has a series of lessons based on Mícheál Ó Siadhail's excellent book Learning Irish; you can read about Ó Siadhail (a fine poet as well as linguist) here and in this LH thread. I may as well point out that Ó Siadhail is pronounced as if it were written O'Shiel, which it often is in Ulster; according to this site, elsewhere "it is usually anglicized as Shields, Sheils, Shiels or Sheilds." (Via Plep.)
OK, there's not actually an exclamation mark after the name of Mel Gibson's new movie, but it sounds so apocalyptic! that way. As you may have heard, it will be filmed in "a Mayan dialect"; now Ben Zimmer reveals that the language in question is Yucatec Maya (Wikipedia article, brief introduction: "My favorite Spanish loan word is chinga'an, which means broken and came about from the Spanish overlords saying 'chinga' when something broke"). Go to Ben's post for a good analysis of the linguistic situation; go here for some interesting speculation on the possible apocalyptic content of the film. I'm just going to point out that Gibson's "translation" of the Greek word ἀποκαλύπτω as "new beginning" (I assume it's Gibson's) is ridiculous. As you can see from the Liddell-Scott link, it's a verb meaning 'uncover; disclose, reveal'; the last book of the New Testament is called Αποκάλυψις Ιωάννου 'John's revelation,' and the over-the-top nature of the things he revealed about the future (beasts with ten horns and seven heads, blood to the height of the horses' girdles, etc.) gave rise to the modern meaning of apocalyptic, which I expect will be fully exemplified in the sanguinary Mr. Gibson's film.
How did I miss this? This is what I get for skipping the book review section. Some months ago HarperCollins published Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler, and John Derbyshire's review makes it sound like a must-read:
Nicholas Ostler is a professional linguist and currently chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. His loving fascination with languages is plain on every page of Empires of the Word, and in the many careful transcriptions — each with a brief pronunciation guide and a translation — of passages from Nahuatl, Chinese, Akkadian, and a host of other tongues. Ostler actually has a feel for languages that, he has convinced me, goes into something beyond the merely subjective...
The story he tells — the story of the languages of human civilization — is illustrated with dozens of maps, as a book of this sort ought to be, as well as a scattering of drawings and photographs. After a brief introductory section, the narrative divides into three parts. The first describes the spread of languages, mainly by land, from the remotest past up to the Middle Ages. The second covers the last half-millennium, when European languages planted themselves all over the world, carried mainly by sea (Russian being the chief exception here). In a short final section, Ostler surveys the current language map, and offers some speculations about the future.And here's an interview with Ostler, who sure had a better experience with Sanskrit than I did. (Thanks for the link, Joan!)The first section is the longest and contains much material likely to be unfamiliar to the average reader. It begins with the story of the Semitic languages, from Akkadian through Aramaic and Phoenician to Hebrew and Arabic. The main points of interest here are the odd lingering prestige of Sumerian long after Sumer as a political force had ceased to exist; the replacement of Akkadian, a firmly established bureaucratic-imperial language, by Aramaic, a nomad dialect from the desert fringes; and the dramatically different fortunes of sister-languages Phoenician and Hebrew. From the second of those points, Ostler extracts the surprising but true principle that “the life and death of languages are in principle detached from the political fortunes of their associated states.” He confronts, and refutes, the theory that Aramaic won out over Akkadian because of its superior, alphabetic, writing system, assigning the true cause to Assyrian population policy.
I'm afraid my delay in reading last week's New Yorker means that it's no longer on newsstands (and the article isn't online), but if you can find a copy, the November 7 issue has an article by David Remnick called "The Translation Wars" that discusses the history of English translations of Russian literature, beginning with the sainted/damned Constance Garnett ("She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn't make sense of she would skip it and move on") and focusing on the husband-and-wife team of Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (she provides him with detailed trots, he turns them into literary English). The saga of how they got their first translation (The Brothers Karamazov) published is depressing at first (Random House responded: "No, thanks. Garnett lives forever. Why do we need a new one?") but turned out happily, and they're now well off and working on War and Peace (and keeping the French in French, hurrah!). Aside from a pointless rehash of the many-times-rehashed Nabokov-Wilson spat ("Your translation of Onegin sucks!" "No way, it's your Russian that sucks!"), it's well worth reading.
But since you probably can't read the Remnick piece, I'll share a nice bit of Georgii Adamovich I just ran across in his essay on Remizov: Разговорный язык слагался у нас, как впрочем и везде, в стороне от грамматических насилий, под различными перекрестными влияниями, одно отбрасывая, другое усваивая, и как всякий подлинно живой организм переваривая, претворяя в свое то, что было чужим. [Conversational language among us, as everywhere, has been formed apart from grammar's violence, under various reciprocal influences, rejecting one thing while adopting another, and like every genuinely living organism digesting and making its own that which had been another's.]
Musil is one of those Great Authors I've always looked forward to reading one day but haven't gotten around to; many of the writers I love most deeply come from that early part of the twentieth century and I have a fascination with the Austro-Hungarian Empire (all those languages!), so I expect to enjoy him when I finally read The Man Without Qualities (no, I'm not going to try reading him in German: life is too short). In the meantime, I'm happy to have Jerry van Beers' Musil site; he's been putting online everything he can find about and by Musil since 1997 (at first in Dutch, but he quickly added an English version), and it's a real treasure trove. I got the link from wood s lot, who put up lots of Musil-related items yesterday (11.06.2005); my favorite snippet is:
"Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write in short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes and in writing, it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.
—Musil, from 'The Paintspreader' in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, 1936
A very handy page lists the various sets of terms used for the sizes of books and the paper they're made from. Who can resist words like pott (OED: "originally bearing the watermark of a pot"), columbier ("F. colombier dove-cote, used in same sense"), demy, double elephant? Oddly, the OED entry for pott includes a citation from Frederick T. Day's An introduction to paper: its manufacture and use (1962) that reads "Sizes of paper in the United Kingdom centre round fifteen designs: Foolscap, Demy, Medium,.. Pott, Elephant,.. Eagle and Columbier," and yet there is no corresponding definition under eagle (nor is the word in the list of sizes). I both love and hate loose ends like that.
I must also say that like Matt of No-sword, from whom I got the link, I prefer the resonant older names like sexagesimo-quarto to the oafish new-style sixty-fourmo and its fellows.
An affecting poem by Maurice Leiter:
Lacking languages I stumbleSo learn those languages, folks; you don't want to wind up, like the poet, saying "Too late I see my life’s great error"! (Via wood s lot.)
in the darkness of translation
finding satisfaction second-handHere is Cavafy soft-spoken subtle
speaking free of affectation
or so it seems in this translation
said to be exemplary by manyBut the curtain of my ignorance
keeps me from truly knowing him
nor is his work the sole example...
So I've been reading a book by James G. Cowan called The Elements of the Aborigine Tradition, and I've been putting up with balderdash like "This suggests that science has no way of answering problems posed by the spirit, however much it might claim to have identified the structure of DNA and the principles of life in the laboratory. The Rainbow Snake as an expression of world creation resolves that problem..." because he has a lot of interesting things to say about Aboriginal culture, but this, this is too much:
The etymology of the word 'rite' more properly suggests the origin of Aboriginal ceremony than does its obvious association with religious ritual. This, of course, is never far away, as most ceremonies are in one way or another religious. But the earlier etymological meaning, deriving from the Latin word recte meaning 'in a straight line, perpendicularity [sic], uprightly' goes nearer to the heart of what Aboriginal ritual means to them.The etymological fallacy—using a word's etymology as a guide to its current meaning—is bad enough, but at least it can get people to learn etymologies. This alleged etymology is just plain wrong. The word rite is from Latin ritus 'ceremony,' which has nothing to do with rectus 'straight.' Don't publishers fact-check any more? (That's a rhetorical question; I know they don't.)
The erratic swings of my mental searchlight have focused once again on the native cultures of Australia, something that has fascinated me off and on ever since I learned about the complex grammar of the languages and especially since I bought Wally Caruana's Aboriginal Art and fell in love with the stylized imagery, intimately linked with the tales of the Dreaming. Well, I just ran across the following entry in my Australian Oxford Paperback Dictionary:
Koori /kuu-ree, koor-ree/ n. an Aborigine. (Awabakal gurri 'an Aboriginal person'.)Now, it's clearly impossible for anyone but a specialist to know all these terms; my question to Australian readers is, do average non-Aboriginal Aussies tend to know the term for their own region, or is even that a matter of special knowledge? In other words, are these terms normal (like Inuit in Canada) or are they the province of the politically correct? (Note: I'm not making any judgments one way or the other, and I hope this doesn't turn into a heated discussion of "political correctness"—I'm just trying to get a sense of actual usage.)Usage Many Aborigines understandably dislike the use of 'Aborigine' or 'Aboriginal' since these terms have been foisted on them and can carry pejorative overtones: they prefer to use the word for 'person' from a local language. Because of the wide variety of Aboriginal languages, however, Koori has not gained Australia-wide acceptance, being confined to most of NSW and to Vic. Other terms are preferred in other regions: Murri over most of south and central Qld, Bama in north Qld, Nunga in southern SA, Yura in SA, Nyoongah around Perth, Mulba in the Pilbara region, Wongi in the Kalgoorlie region, Yammagi in the Murchison River region, Yolngu in Arnhem Land, Anangu in central Australia, and Yuin on the south coast of NSW.
Also, if anybody has any good books on Aboriginal culture to recommend, I'll be grateful; I have Chatwin's Songlines but haven't yet read it.
I ran across Bernard Nežmah's wonderful "Fuck this Article: The Yugoslav lexicon of swear words" (translated from "Ne vrediš ni pola pizde vode!" in Mladina) shortly after it came out late in 2000 and e-mailed the link to everybody I knew; now that I've been reminded of it by aldi at Wordorigins, I'm sharing it with you all. It's a report on an international conference about Serbian swear words in Novi Sad, with many, many pertinent examples. A few excerpts:
Another participant, entomologist Dr Biljana Sikmić, is researching gradation units. The same gradations are found in the Slovene and Serbian lexicons of obscenities. She showed that the gradation is the same when the Slovenes say Ni vreden pol kurca! (you ain't worth half a cock) and the Serbs say Ne vrediš ni pola pizde vode (you ain't worth ha[lf] a cunt of water)...I'm not sure I believe this, though: "When Vojvodinan Slovaks, Rusyns and Hungarians swear, they only swear in Serbian, saving their own languages for more noble expression." Hungarians, at least, have some powerful swear words of their own.Prof Dr Nedeljko Bogdanović, the doyen of Serbian swear-word studies, explained the difference between curses and swearing: the first merely degrades, while the second is malicious. So someone curses you with a blow to your favorite tree in your garden, throwing out: "May it never grow plums!" while someone swears at you to belittle your greatest pride: "Fuck you AND your plums!"
There is an old political joke: Do you know where the border between Serbia and Montenegro is?—It is where you stop fucking mothers and start fucking fathers!
I know you'll all be as excited as I am to learn that the International Phonetic Association has approved the adoption of the first new symbol in twelve years into the International Phonetic Alphabet:
The symbol proposed by SIL represents the labiodental flap, a speech sound found in central and southeastern Africa. The IPA is the organization that sets the standards for the transcription of speech sounds in the world’s languages.You can see an image of the new symbol on the left side of the linked page. Note, by the way, that the Wikipedia page on Mono refers to a "bilabial flap." Tsk, tsk. (Via Tenser, said the Tensor.)Dr. Kenneth Olson, SIL’s Associate International Linguistics Coordinator, proposed the new labiodental flap symbol, which is technically referred to as “a right hook ‘v’.” After review of Dr Olson’s proposal for the addition of the labiodental flap symbol, the IPA Council voted in favor of the addition. Linguists now have an agreed-upon standard for writing this sound when doing phonetic transcription—a very practical outcome of Olson’s research.
Dr. Olson encountered this speech sound when he was living among the Mono people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo... The labiodental flap sound is produced by drawing the lower lip back into the mouth well behind the upper teeth and then bringing it forward rapidly, striking the upper teeth briefly in passing. A few languages have an alternative pronunciation, called a "bilabial flap", in which the lower lip strikes the upper lip rather than the upper teeth.
Songdog sent me a number of old Fried comics, and this one demanded to be posted at LH. On the right, we have the coiner of "no-assed": "Sloppy, indifferent work is called half-assed. Your work, however, was thoughtful and well researched. In other words, it has no ass whatsoever." On the left: "Half-assed is obviously just a contemporary, vulgarized variation on half-hearted. In this context, more ass is better, just as whole-hearted is better than half-hearted. Dr. Jaffe, let me congratulate you on a full-assed job, a term I just coined." Read the opposing arguments and decide for yourself!
