A great anecdote from Geoff Pullum at Language Log makes me nostalgic for New York City and its immense Greek community (I once wandered into a restaurant that was officially closed for a christening party—but was invited in to join the proceedings and share the delicious meal):
I'm in New York for the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Division meetings, and I'm having breakfast at the Art Cafe on Broadway, at 52nd Street. It's all bustling efficiency, staff zooming hither and thither. Two eggs up with bacon and wheat toast arrive within a couple of minutes. Suddenly there's a shattering crash from behind the counter, and the Greek proprietor is looking down mournfully at the coffee cup he dropped on the tile floor to smash into a thousand pieces. Four or five nearby waitresses turn in shock. For two seconds of silence they stare at the scene of the accident. And then one of the waitresses yells excitedly: "Opa!" — the traditional Greek cry of encouragement to dancers and musicians and drinkers at those wild parties where they smash plates on the floor as they dance just to show what a great time is being had. And then the entire staff cracks up, and they all resume working at high speed, but now laughing till tears come to their eyes — the boss included. It's only breakfast time in New York, but already, thanks to one well-chosen interjection, it's like a party.Lift a coffee cup in my direction, Geoff! And if you're ever in Astoria, try Opa! Tony's Souvlaki, right under the 30th Ave. station on the N line; the gyros and super-garlicky skordalia are delicious.
A correspondent sent me a link to the Project Gutenberg online edition of The German Element in Brazil by Benjamin Franklin Schappelle, first published in 1917 (Americana Germanica Press, Philadelphia). It starts off with a history of German immigration (going back to the mid-16th century) and a description of the German colonies in the various states, then gets down to business:
The settlers, largely drawn from the agricultural class, naturally brought with them from Europe a variety of German dialects. These were more or less preserved depending on the relative isolation of the colonies. In cases where a considerable and constant influx of settlers either by direct or indirect immigration was kept up after the first years of the history of any particular colony the original dialect largely gave way to a modified form of High German, due primarily to the normalizing influence of the German school and church. Such is the case in the 'Stadtplätze' of Dona Francisca, Blumenau, Santa Cruz and Săo Lourenço.It explains how German words were changed (including family names: "Emmich became M'. The Portuguese could not pronounce the '-ich' and consequently it dropped off, resulting in the formation of what is probably one of the shortest family names in existence") and provides sample texts and a glossary; apparently so many Brazilian Portuguese words were borrowed that the dialect could be incomprehensible to visitors from German-speaking parts of Europe.The preceding statements are intended to present, as it were, the background or basis on which the new dialect was developed. We now come to the most potent influence in the formation of that dialect. It is the Brazilian Portuguese, a language which has no connection with the Germanic group. In this point, therefore, our case differs radically from that of the student of the German dialects which have been developed in North America.
(Thanks, Dirk!)
Jeremy Osner sent me a nonsense poem by Ogden Nash, "Geddondillo," that he'd run across on Kiyo's bilingual (English and Japanese) Mythos and Poetry site; the actual Nash page at the site is oddly laid out and the Japanese characters don't render properly, but for some reason the Google cache looks great. The poem itself is only three stanzas (I'll put it in the Extended Entry), but Kiyo's annotations are well worth perusing.
While googling for references to Nash's poem, I ran across an amazing find: The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition online, complete and gratis! (In the words of the Library of Congress: "This edition combines the notes of Gardner's 1960 The annotated Alice with his 1990 update, More annotated Alice, as well as additional discoveries and updates drawn from Gardner's encyclopedic knowledge of the texts.") Anyone who loves both the Alice books and Gardner's idiosyncratic, wide-ranging annotations will be as glad of this as I am.
Geddondillo
The sharrot scudders nights in the quastron now,
The dorlim slinks undeceded in the grost,
Appetency lights the corb of the guzzard now,
The ancient beveldric is otley lost.
Treduty flees like a darbit along the drace now,
Collody lollops belutedly over the slawn.
The bloodbound bitterlitch bays the ostrous moon now,
For yesterday's bayable majicity is flunky gone.
Make way, make way, the preluge is scarly nonce now,
Make way, I say, the gronderous Demiburge comes,
His blidless veins shall ye joicily rejugulate now,
And gollify him from 'twixt his protecherous gums.
—Ogden Nash
Joel of Far Outliers has a post quoting the late University of Hawai‘i professor Donald M. Topping at length on linguists and endangered languages; Topping makes disturbing and important points:
Surprisingly, a major obstacle to the success of the Micronesian linguistics project is one that was unanticipated, and may be fairly assigned to the linguists themselves. That is the problems presented by the “new” orthographies. Mr. Leo Pugram, Coordinator for Curriculum and Instruction in Yap, made the following statement, “When the new orthography was established, it was a time for problems, confusion, and hatred for the new orthography. This still exists today on Yap.”Joel has a follow-up post quoting another University of Hawai‘i linguist, Kenneth L. Rehg, on the same subject:Obviously, the linguists left their mark: the “new orthography.” The complaint articulated so bluntly by Mr. Pugram was echoed by nearly every other Micronesian educator who attended the Guam conference...
Where then, are the linguists? Have they played a role? Do they now? Each of the three languages in question was described and lexified by nonnative linguists during the 1950s and early sixties. At the time of their work these linguists issued the call of alarm about the precarious status of the languages. Their calls, however, appeared to fall on deaf ears, for there was little response. It took the coming of another generation of young people who were not afforded the opportunity to learn their heritage language at home before the threat of total language loss became real.
...we set out to promote literacy in the Micronesian languages, but some of our efforts had just the opposite effect. Disputes over orthographies, unrealistic expectations concerning standards, an insufficient understanding of the literacy needs of these communities, and reliance on external funding all hindered progress toward that goal. Consequently, I have come to believe that if the linguistic community is serious about documenting and supporting the threatened languages of the world, we must move such endeavors into the mainstream of our discipline.Incidentally, Joel recently made his 1,000th post: congratulations!
First of all, I'd like to thank all of you who have written comments or e-mails about my father's passing; it means a great deal to me. One such e-mail also contained a welcome distraction: a link to a pdf file of James A. Matisoff's Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction. I don't quite grasp how they can put a 792-page book that retails for $95.00 online for free, but I'm certainly glad; ever since a dear friend introduced me to Shafer's work on Sino-Tibetan over 30 years ago, I've been curious to get an up-to-date take on the field, and this looks to provide it, at least for the Tibeto-Burman branch:
This 800-page volume is a clear and readable presentation of the current state of research on the history of the Tibeto-Burman (TB) language family, a typologically diverse group of over 250 languages spoken in Southern China, the Himalayas, NE India, and peninsular Southeast Asia. The TB languages are the only proven relatives of Chinese, with which they form the great Sino-Tibetan family.Thanks, Carlos! And while I'm on the subject of Tibeto-Burman, let me pass on a request from Julia Yeates, who is about to become the owner of a Tibetan terrier ("he's male, black and white and very hairy...") and would like "a Tibetan name for the puppy that means 'blessing' or 'good fortune' or something similar and something that we can call when he disappears in the woods." Alas, Tibetan is not one of my languages, but I'm sure somebody out there can help; you can leave a comment or write her directly at julia_yeates AT yahoo.co.uk.The exposition is systematic, treating the reconstruction of all the elements of the TB proto-syllable in turn, including initial consonants (Ch. III), prefixes (Ch. IV), monophthongal and diphthongal rhymes (Ch. V), final nasals (Ch. VII), final stops (Ch. VIII), final liquids (Ch. IX), root-final *-s (Ch. X), suffixes (Ch. XI). Particular attention is paid to variational phenomena at all historical levels (e.g. Ch. XII "Allofamic variation in rhymes").
This Handbook builds on the best previous scholarship, and adds up-to-date material that has accumulated over the past 30 years. It contains reconstructions of over a thousand Tibeto-Burman roots, as well as suggested comparisons with several hundred Chinese etyma. It is liberally indexed and cross-referenced for maximum accessibility and internal consistency.
I apologize for bringing a moment of sadness into the holiday season, but I want to take this occasion to commemorate my father, who died this morning at the age of 90. He had broken his hip and badly fractured his elbow in a fall last month and never really recovered. Fortunately, he was able to spend his final weeks in a place where he was cared for both lovingly and professionally; he was in no pain, we were able to say our farewells while he could still take them in, and at the end he drifted into a final nap. There are worse ways to go.
Dad grew up in small towns in eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas; his father was a schoolteacher, and they moved around a fair amount. It was a large family by today's standards, and he and a brother slept out on the porch because the indoor bedrooms went to the older brothers and sisters. The Depression hit while he was in high school, and he had to work hard to put himself through college. He had thought of going into journalism but wound up going to grad school in agricultural economics, where he met my mother (who was a department secretary—her family was also large, and they could only afford to send the boys to college, so she went to work). After his service in World War Two, he got a position on a commission supervising elections in Greece (a country he always remembered fondly) and then, through the good offices of a friend, was invited to join the occupation staff in Tokyo, where my mother joined him and I was born.
He had a good career in the Foreign Service and could have had an ambassadorship if he'd wanted it, but he didn't enjoy the kind of socializing that would involve. He gave his three sons not only a fine education but exposure to life in several countries in Asia and South America, a rare opportunity to see the world with a wider perspective than most people get (and doubtless the impetus for my love of languages). As much as he enjoyed traveling, I'm afraid he often didn't enjoy life very much. He was given to depression and insisted on peace and quiet when he was home, which could be hard for three opinionated boys to live with; he had the psychology typical to men of his generation, with their strong-but-silent ideal, and was never comfortable with intimacies. Only towards the end of his life did he learn to say "I love you" to his sons and begin to talk freely about his past. But he was a good and generous man, and he never tried to impose his ideas of how life should be lived on his children. No matter how many times I went off in directions incomprehensible to him, dropping mathematics for linguistics and that for poetry, quitting grad school for a feckless life earning minimum wage in bookstores, no matter how many Christmases I brought home entirely new women for him to accept as a temporary part of the family, he was tolerant and good-humored about it. He let me feel that life was a good thing to be taken as it came, and that is perhaps the greatest gift a father can give.
I'm playing Benny Goodman in his honor, and "After You've Gone" has just come on. Listen to the joyous sweep of that clarinet! He may not have been able to articulate it, but he was drawn to the abandon of that music, and Mom always said he was a wonderful dancer. I like to think of them dancing in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, still young and as carefree as you could be in those wartorn times, looking forward to a life of unpredictable adventures. I hope he was pleased with how it all turned out. I'll miss you, Dad.
Some of our neighbors exhibit the same variety of laziness as Geoff Pullum's:
Some of the more antisocial neighbours near where we live did not bother to bestir themselves with a snow shovel the way we did after the big early snowfall that hit the Boston area on December 9. Their laziness, plus some partial meltings and re-freezings, has turned parts of the sidewalks between our Inman Square apartment and the Harvard/Radcliffe area into a treacherous glacier.He goes on to provide a lesson in the various forms of the verbs lie and lay, in the process quoting one of my favorite carols (understandably, since my given name is Stephen):
Good King Wenceslas looked outThe feast of Stephen, otherwise known as Boxing Day in some quarters, is tomorrow; for today, let me wish all my readers a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah (which begins today), or whichever other greetings may be applicable or welcome.
On the feast of Stephen
When the snow lay all about
Deep and crisp and even
(For the origins of Christmas words, see here, and here's the parallel page for Hanukkah.)
My learned and musical friend zaelic made one of his typically informative comments on Thursday's post about ROMLEX, the Romani database, in the course of which he documented the Romani "terms for different kinds of fart. One for loud messy ones, and one for silent-but-deadlies." In Lovari, for instance, they are khaj (noiseless) and ril (audible). Since this has already been picked up by BatesLine ("A commenter to the entry notes that Romani has two words denoting different kinds of flatulence"), I thought I'd point out that this is an ancient Indo-European inheritance (the distinction, not the words themselves): Proto-Indo-European had *pezd- 'fart silently' and *perd- 'fart audibly.' Russian has preserved these beautifully, as бздеть/набздеть [bzdet'/nabzdét'] and пердеть/пёр(д)нуть [perdét'/pyór(d)nut'] respectively (the former is from the zero grade of the verb, without the -e-, so *pzd- got assimilated to bzd-). I don't have to provide a complete list of forms, because Angelo of sauvage noble has kindly done so already. An ill wind blows down the millennia...
William Annis's Aoidoi.org, "dedicated to the study of ancient Greek poetry from the Epics to Anacreontics," has a page on Classical Greek Haiku, which presents, yes, haiku in Greek, with extensive discussion of technical details ("Also, I've used a genitive absolute phrase for the second line. The unspecific relationship between the main clause and the absolute phrase is quite suited to haiku."). He even has a Greek version of Basho's famous frog poem. And I learned from him that Woodhouse's English-Greek dictionary is online!
ROMLEX is a project to document the major Romani ("Gypsy") languages of Europe.
ROMLEX is not a Romani dictionary in the usual sense. ROMLEX is a lexical database. It contains data that are representative of the variation in the lexicon of all Romani dialects, and offers almost complete coverage of the basic lexicon of the Romani language. At present, data are available online covering 25 different Romani dialects. These are accompanied by translations into English and, depending on the Romani dialect, into other European languages as well. By providing an electronic resource of the highest quality, which can constantly be updated, the ROMLEX database can serve as a foundation for future dissemination of Romani literary resources and Romani language literacy itself.You can access the database itself here; if you want some information about the various dialects, it's here; and here is a discussion of the Roma, Sinti, and Calé and where they and their language came from:
Roma means all groups residing in central and eastern Europe, or respectively, those who in the 19th and 20th century emigrated from central and eastern Europe to western Europe and overseas. The term Sinti comprises those subgroups which entered the German speaking cultural area at a relatively early point in time and who for the most part live in western Europe today (Germany, France, Italy, Austria, etc.). Calé defines, among others, groups who have been living for a long time on the Iberian Peninsular (Spain, Portugal)...
Proto-Romani is believed to have split from subcontinental Indo-Aryan during the transition period from Middle to New Indo-Aryan. It retains some conservative features especially in the verb inflection, but also in nominal inflection. Phonology and lexicon point to an ancient affinity with the so-called Central Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi. On the other hand, there are morphological and arguably some phonological parallels with the languages of the extreme Northwest, such as Kashmiri. It is therefore assumed that Proto-Romani split off from the Central branch, then underwent a shared areal development with the North-western languages, before leaving India. A similar profile is shared by Domari, the language of the Near Eastern Dom. The linguistic history of both groups thus points to successive migrations of the speaker populations, leading ultimately to their present locations.Thanks for the tip, peacay, and I expect the omniscient zaelic to show up at any minute and provide his own Romaphilic insights.Proto-Romani must have been spoken in Asia Minor by the eleventh or twelfth centuries. It absorbed Iranian and Armenian influences. The strongest impact however was Greek, which has made a significant contribution not only to the Romani lexicon but also to derivational and inflectional morphology and to the syntactic typology of Romani. Features such as the preposed definite article, Verb-Object word order, and the split between factual and non-factual complementisers can be attributed to Greek influence, while the emergence of prepositions, the reduction and ultimate loss of the infinitive, and the structure of relative and adverbial clauses may have been triggered already by Iranian influence...
Joel of Far Outliers has a good post on how Koreans chose their new names when forced to do so by the Japanese occupation; one possibility was:
Retain all or part of the Chinese character, but use its native Japanese readingThere were also names based on geographical origins, homonyms, and symbolic names. He adds that "just three surnames, Kim (= Gim), Lee (= Yi, Ri, Rhee, etc.), and Park (= Pak, Bak, etc.) account for 45% of family surnames in South Korea."* Kim 金 – Keep ‘gold’ but use its Japanese pronunciation, as in 金國 Kanekuni ‘gold country’, 金澤 Kanezawa ‘gold pond’, 金城 Kaneshiro ‘gold castle’, 金田 ‘gold paddy’
* Ch’oe 崔 – Keep the ‘mountain’ radical on top, as in 山本 Yamamoto ‘mountain base’
* Pak 朴 – Keep the ‘tree’ radical, as in 木戸 Kido ‘wood door’, 正木 Masaki ‘upright tree’
* Yi 李 – Keep the ‘tree’ radical, as in 木元 Kimoto ‘tree base’
Suzanne of Abecedaria has an interesting post on the history of the abbreviations ΧΡ and Χ for Χριστος 'Christ'; her speculations on the history of omitting the final ς make sense to me:
Χριστος has been represented by Χρς, or Χς, and by ΧΡ in art and other representation. I have not found the ΧΡ in manuscripts and would not expect it since the manuscript form always includes the grammatical ending.I've always been amused by people who find Xmas a disrespectful abbreviation; all they're doing is showing their own ignorance of history.A quick glance at some facsimiles of Greek manuscripts shows that the words ιησους, χριστος, θεος, ανθρωπος, πατερ, ματερ, πνευμα and some other words were represented by their initial and final one or two letters which represent the grammatical ending. This could be ς,υ,ν,οι, ι &c.
For this reason, I am assuming that the transition from Χς to Χ happened with the beginning of the use of the vernacular languages in Europe, when the ending was no longer relevant. There would be no reason to retain the last letter and X alone came to represent Christ. There is also no reason to see a sign of disrespect in the transition from Χς to Χ. And so Xmas first appeared in English texts in the 16th century.
Portals: a journal in comparative literature is published annually by the Comparative Literature Student Association of San Francisco State University. It contains the usual jargon-laden exercises in academese ("The goal of this paper is to investigate a theory of hybridity that I find implicit in these two novels. I will argue that what is at stake is a critique of epistemologies of identity that are grounded upon dichotomic ways of thinking..."), but Maksim Hanukai's article on Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet is perfectly comprehensible (and made me think I should give R-G a try, since Nabokov respected him so highly); furthermore, translations of poetry include the original text, as here from the Italian of Italo Testa and Roberto Bartoli, here from the Serbocroatian of Amir Brka, and here from the Chinese of Qiu Jin (a feminist who was executed by the Manchu government as a revolutionary in 1907), the last with extensive annotation. I'll quote one of the Testa poems, with the translation by Benjamin Morris and Ari Messer of the University of Edinburgh:
gloria e i gelsi(Via wood s lot.)ma le foglie di gelso premono alle finestre
e la tua gola bianca, sul banco, offerta,
Gloria di un giorno, la luce nell'aula
leva dall'ombra l'insidia degli occhi:noi, saremo presto invasi dalle foglie,
tu, crescerai paziente nell'aperto dei giorniGloria and the Mulberries
but the mulberry leaves press against the windows
and your white throat, on the desk, a gift,
Gloria of the morning, the light in the room
lifts from the shadows the snare of your eyes:we, we will soon be invaded by the leaves,
you, you will grow calm in the flowering of the days.
Those are the two loves of Natalie, who tries to combine them in her blog edits. From October, a sterling example of the kind of thing you have to be a lawyer to enjoy:
A sentence like this is comforting because I feel that its absurd complexity relieves me of any obligation to understand it.And from last Friday, a hymn to the English language:And during the period of twenty-one years from my death if the said Lilian Aspinall shall live so long to accumulate the surplus if any of such income at compound interest by investing the same and the resulting income thereof in any of the investments aforesaid by way of addition to the capital of such fund as aforesaid and so as to be subject to the same trusts as are hereby declared concerning the same and during the remainder of the life of the said Lilian Aspinall in case she shall survive the said period of twenty-one years to pay or apply such surplus income (if any) to the person or persons or for the purposes to whom and for which the same would for the time being be payable or applicable if the said Lilian Aspinall were then dead.
In Re Smith, England, 1928
The English language is mine, and not mine. The English language is the shifting ground, the complex mess and soup and great wave over and around. The English language exists solely for my pleasure and my pleasure rests in its complexity. My pleasure grounds the English idioms. My pleasure starts with sound. My pleasure is all of a tongue. And words curling up my throat a growling purring hum. The English words work up through my body. And I take pleasure in resolve as well. A sharp snap in the sentence. A tight turn. Small details, small particular lettered sound. Pattern. Rhyme and rhythm and repeated phrases. Parcels.[...]
I just finished "Brokeback Mountain" (cached version; apparently the New Yorker has taken the story offline) and can't believe I never read Proulx before: she's a superb writer, and this is a great story. I just thought I'd mention that I learned several new words from my reading: grullo 'mouse-dun horse' (pronounced GROO-yo), krummholz 'stunted forest characteristic of timberline' (apparently pronounced KROOM-holts, with the "oo" of book, though that sounds impossibly pretentious to my ears; anybody know if people who talk about it in real life say "kroom" or "crumb"?), duff 'partly decayed organic matter on the forest floor' (from a dialect form of dough!), and spurge 'any of a family of widely distributed herbs, shrubs, and trees often with a bitter milky juice' (via French from Latin expurgare 'expurgate,' because of the action of the juice). Oh, and if you didn't know, Proulx is pronounced PROO.
Thanks for the book, Eric, and I can't wait to see the movie!
The folks over at Language Log have had a number of posts about the difficulty of fitting negations into sentences so that they make sense (see Why are negations so easy to fail to miss? and the list at the bottom of this post), and I've just run across a splendid specimen. In today's Berkshire Eagle, there's a column by Leonard Quart called "Brooklyn Changing" that compares today's Brooklyn to the sedater borough described lovingly by James Agee in a 1939 essay; about two thirds of the way through, a section on the neighborhood known as Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) concludes:
But the painter who said to me that he liked the fact that Dumbo is relatively undeveloped also knows that it will soon go the way of SoHo.The italics are in the original, giving a nice highlight to the negation that breaks the sentence's back. (It's possible, of course, that Quant is deliberately playing with the cliche and intended the sentence to read as it does, but in that case I have no idea what he's trying to say.)Dumbo will ultimately become so dominated by boutiques and condos that young painters like himself will no longer be unable to afford to live there.
As lagniappe, here's a most enjoyable poem by Gerard Nolst Trenité foregrounding the absurdities of English orthography (sent me by John Emerson of Idiocentrism):
Dearest creature in creationThere's another, more attractively laid out, version of the poem here, along with an introduction giving the history of the poem and its Dutch author, who wrote it as an appendix to a 1920 book on learning to pronunce English correctly and kept adding to it over the years. I strongly disagree, however, with the footnote insisting that the word does in line 193 ("Shoes, goes, does. Now first say: finger") is the plural of doe; if that were the case, it would duplicate the vowel sound of the preceding word goes and add nothing to the line. It has to be the third singular present of the verb do, providing yet another variant (the central vowel ʌ).
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear...
Michael Manske's The Glory of Carniola has a remarkable post called "The Diabolicalness of Dialects" about the diversity of Slovenian dialects in general and a northwestern dialect called Resian in particular. Val Resia is a mountainous region in northeastern Italy near the Slovenian border, and the isolation of its inhabitants has produced a dialect that is apparently incomprehensible to most speakers of the standard language (though, judging from the comments on Michael's post, not to Slovenes from the western part of the country). Michael links to an audio clip and says "If you're a fool, like me, who is learning the language, it's enough to make you want to slit your wrists and let eternal sleep take you to a better place. I mean, imagine learning an insanely difficult language and then going 50 kilometers away and discovering it doesn't work anymore." He also links to a great map of Slovenian dialects (with a legend that, fortunately, expands when you click on it). If you're interested in the dialect, there's a website devoted to it, with texts, a dictionary, and other goodies.
Incidentally, Michael's a New Yorker who moved to Slovenia after marrying a Slovenian gal, and his blog FAQ has a hilarious riff on the language:
6. Speaking of which: How is your Slovene?He gives an example, citing ten different ways to say 'Did you eat anything?' depending on gender and number of addressees.Catastrophic. Learning Slovene is a long, hard road into Hell. And it's made worse by the fact that Slovenes rarely appreciate how difficult it is. They'll tell you things like: "Yeah, it's hard, huh? Pronouncing the ž and č and everything. That's tough."
No, no, my friend, saying "ch" is the least of my problems. I'll tell you what's tough: six cases, endless gender declensions, formal and informal divisions, the dual grammatical form—all of it spoken in 32 dialects that are further divided into 76 sub-groups. That's my definition of tough.
Thanks for the tip, Jonathan!
A Metrolingua post links to some useful online German dictionaries (as well as some English stuff and advent calendars).
Chamorro is a Malayo-Polynesian language of Guam and the Northern Marianas; for a language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, it's got an impressive web presence. There's Chamorro.com, with forums, a library of texts related to Chamorro history, recipes, and of course a language section, which has the following charming disclaimer:
About the spelling—well, we're at a loss about this one! Hopefully some day the Chamorus of Guam and the Chamorros of the Northern Marianas will agree on a single standard for spelling Chamorru words and we can all breathe a big sigh of relief. Until then, we'll just take the middle road and use whatever spelling we feel like at the particuliar moment of writing—this way, no matter what school of spelling you subscribe to, you'll at least find some words spelled correctly and everyone should be at least partially happy! Oh yeah, about the pronunciation—you may recognize it as the "Pre-War Tamuning" dialect, or you may not. As Herman says, "I could say it just fine until I started thinking about it!"Offisland.com has a Chamorro language site with "short and easy lessons on the Chamorro language." And the Chamorro Bible site has scanned copies of bilingual Bibles, along with audio files read by a woman with a clear, pleasant voice—try the start of the gospel of John (you can choose mp3 or RealAudio, for streaming or download).
You know, I've had a copy of Donald Topping's Chamorro Reference Grammar
A very interesting post at The Lesser of Two Weevils, discussing a discrepancy I'd noticed myself but never looked into:
This passage caught my eye last night. We heard it twice; the first reading from Isaiah 40:3,The blogger, Talmida, gives the Hebrew with a word-for-word translation and quotes a bunch of versions with different readings; commenters add the Vulgate (vox clamantis in deserto parate viam Domini) and Septuagint (φωνη βοωντος εν τη ερημω ετοιμασατε την οδον κυριου), both ambiguous.A voice cries out:...and again in the Gospel of Mark 1:3 (both passages NRSV),
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God."the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:There is a clear difference in meaning here. Was the voice crying in the wilderness? Or was the way prepared in the wilderness?
"Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,"
Update. See now the discussion of the Hebrew at Sauvage Noble.
Eric S. Raymond has an interesting essay, "SF Words and Prototype Worlds," about the implications of the use of jargon like "monopole mines" or "groundcar" in science fiction stories.
The very experienced SF reader, at the fifth level, can see entire worlds in a grain of jargon. When he sees "groundcar" he associates to not only technical questions about flyer propulsion but socio-symbolic ones but about why the culture still uses groundcars at all (and he has a reportoire of possible answers ready to check against the author's reporting). He is automatically aware of a huge range of consequences in areas as apparently far afield as (to name two at random) the architectural style of private buildings, and the ecological consequences of accelerated exploitation of wilderness areas not readily accessible by ground transport.Raymond is also collecting jargon words (glossary here); compare Jesse Sheidlower's OED project, described at LH here.The better an SF writer is, the more subtly and effectively he will play off against the experienced reader's analytical skills. At the highest levels, SFnal exposition takes on the nature of a delicate, powerful intellectual dance or game between writer and reader, requiring much from both and rewarding both very richly.
Indeed, to true aficionados of the genre this game is the whole point of SF, the unique quality which elevates it above other fictional forms. This attitude explains much about the genre that outsiders find obscure and annoying—the intimacy between fans and writers; the indifference or outright hostility to conventional "literary values"; the pervasive SF-fan complaint that outsiders "just don't get it" and (when they deign to approve of SF at all) like all the wrong books for all the wrong reasons.
The Desital Library of Modern Japanese Language (do they mean "Digital"?) presents works like Liggins, J. Familiar Phrases in English and Romanized Japanese (1860), Brown, S.R. Colloquial Japanese (1863), and letters A-D of Hepburn's Japanese and English Dictionary (1867)—one hopes they'll get around to the other letters eventually. (Via No-sword.)
I just discovered that the Russian-American poet Irina Mashinskaya (she emigrated in '91, lives near New York City, and teaches mathematics) has a web page that links to the complete texts of each of her books (under КНИГИ, in the right-hand sidebar). I have her 1996 collection После эпиграфа [Posle epigrafa, 'After the epigraph'], but it's rather cheaply printed; the poems actually look nicer in the online edition. I wonder why more poets don't do this? They can't be making money off the few printed books sold; the poetry is more likely to be read if it's freely available online, and I imagine if people liked what they saw they'd be likely to buy a book or two.
I'm taking this story with a liberal dose of salt, but even if it's only half true, it's still pretty amazing:
Four-year-old Tanish Shelar passes a surprised look at his six-year-old cousin when he pronounces Belgium as ‘Bel-jim’. He corrects his cousin promptly, “It’s ‘Belgium’.”Via Chris's Linguistics Blog.Shelar, a junior kindergarten student at St Jude’s in Panvel, can speak in seven languages — Sanskrit, German, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi and English. It all started when Tanish was eight-months-old when his mother, Dr Vedika Shelar, then living in Sholapur with her in-laws, heard through a friend about Siddha Samadhi Yoga (SSY). Founded by Rushi Prabhakar Guruji, their Infant Siddha Programme helps the overall development of a child. The programme specified that a child can be taught up to 20 languages by the age of six.
“I started speaking to him in English when he was just eight months. Then I proceeded to read and identify words with him in various languages,” says the dentist who has a clinic at Khandeshwar.
I don't usually post random collections of links, but they're piling up and I'm afraid of losing them, so here you go:
Project Professor Professor "is a prodigious international effort to identify and list all active research professors whose first and last names are identical. The first two professors celebrated by Project Professor-Professor are Abraham Abraham and Warren Warren... If you know of other professors who should be part of this listing, please send pertinent info (including a URL, if possible) to: PROJECT PROFESSOR-PROFESSOR c/o marca@chem2.harvard.edu ."
Continuing on the name front, here is a list of Russian-Israeli names (thanks, Tatyana!). If you know Russian, I guarantee much laughter. (How would you like to be named Mikhail Klurglur?)
This post prompted a reader (thanks, Pat!) to send me a link to George Szirtes' TS Eliot Lecture "Thin Ice and The Midnight Skaters," a long discussion of many things connected with poetry and language. A snippet:
When our own family of four arrived in England as refugees in the December of 1956 only my father spoke any English, and he spoke it reasonably enough to act as interpreter to groups of other refugees. After a few days stop at an army camp we moved to Westgate on the Kent coast and found signifieds for which we had signifiers but of which we had no direct experience. There was the sea for a start. None of us had seen one of those, though we did have the word tenger, that meant 'sea'. Tenger was a word from tales and fabulous stories, from other people's talk, from films: it had a set of meanings that we had not experienced at first hand. The transfer of our old vocabulary to a new set of experiences naturally took time: so English tea meant not quite tea, so English bread meant not quite kenyér. For what we received as tea and bread was not what we had been used to. George Steiner talks about this in After Babel, about how even transactional language is inadequate to experience: brot and pain are not innocent blank counters. It is not just that you will get different kinds of bread in Germany and France but that these breads come with a complex baggage of history, culture and association.And continuing with language and translation, a LibraryThing review by Ramage of Adair's Georges Perec translation A Void sent me to Ian Monk's "The Restrictive Muse. (Writings for the Oulipo)", which has (among other amazing things) a stern e-less review of Adair's e-less translation of Perec's e-less novel. And while I'm on the subject of Ramage, the latest post features the Chesme Church (aka Church of Saint John at Chesme Palace), architect Yuri Felten (George Velten), and says "I cannot believe it has never figured in a work of literature. An exhaustive ten-minute search in Google has, however, failed to turn up any citations." I couldn't find any searching in Russian, either; of course, the church is well south of the central city, but still, you'd think such a striking building would get mentioned somewhere. If my Russian-speaking readers know of any literary mentions, please leave a comment!
From the University of California's eScholarship Editions (have I really not posted about that amazing collection of online books, many of them freely accessible to all comers?), this looks extremely interesting: Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970, by Sumathi Ramaswamy. From Chapter 2:
The putative unity suggested by the name “Tamil” notwithstanding, there is no monolithic presence which reigns in the regimes of Tamil devotion that so assiduously transform the language over time into an object of adulation, reverence, and allegiance. Instead, it is imagined in different ways in different contexts by different devotees. In four such regimes of imagination—the “religious,” the “classicist,” the “Indianist,” and the “Dravidianist”—Tamil is variously conceived as a divine tongue, favored by the gods themselves; as a classical language, the harbinger of “civilization” as a mother tongue that enables participation in the Indian nation; and as a mother/tongue that is the essence of a nation of Tamil speakers in and of themselves. Tamiḻppaṟṟu is thus not a static monolith, but evolves and shifts over time, entangled as it is in local, national, and global networks of notions and practices about language, culture, and community.(Via the indispensable wood s lot.)What follows in this chapter, then, is a discursive history of Tamil from the 1890s to the 1960s. By “discursive history” I mean the history of the discourses that gathered around Tamil as it became the focus of talk and practice...
One benefit of copyediting specialized material is that you learn new words. Taking my first glance at a new article about coelomic effusion in frogs (exciting, I know), I immediately wanted to know what coelomic meant. It certainly looked like it came ultimately from Greek κοιλος [koilos] 'hollow,' but that was pretty vague. So I went to the dictionary. It's the adjective of coelom (SEE-lum), which Merriam-Webster said is "the usually epithelium-lined space between the body wall and the digestive tract of metazoans above the lower worms," which told me basically nothing. The New Oxford American Dictionary said "the body cavity in metazoans, located between the intestinal canal and the body wall," which was better, except that I had no idea what a metazoan was. M-W: "any of a group (Metazoa) that comprises all animals having the body composed of cells differentiated into tissues and organs and usually a digestive cavity lined with specialized cells." No good whatever. NOAD: "Metazoa a major division of the animal kingdom that comprises all animals other than protozoans and sponges." Much better; everybody and his dog is a metazoan. We see the virtues of NOAD's "core sense" system—M-W's definitions are absolutely accurate but sometimes make no sense to the average user, whereas NOAD's are written with the nonspecialist in mind; if more specifics are needed, they are given after the core sense (here, "they are multicellular animals with differentiated tissues").
I decided to see how other major dictionaries handle coelom. The OED says "The body-cavity of a cślomate animal," which is both good ("body cavity" is clear) and bad (what's a "cślomate animal"? why, it's one "having a cślome or body-cavity distinct from the intestinal cavity; belonging to the Cślomata"—gee, thanks a heap!). But the American Heritage hits the jackpot:
The cavity within the body of all animals higher than the coelenterates and certain primitive worms, formed by the splitting of the embryonic mesoderm into two layers. In mammals it forms the peritoneal, pleural, and pericardial cavities. Also called body cavity.It uses some fancy words, but the meaning is clear: it's the body cavity in higher animals. Well done, AHD!
And now, back to the frogs...
George Szirtes discusses three translations of the poetry of Attila József (József Attila to the Hungarians, who put the family name first), who committed suicide at the age of 32 in 1937. As regular LH readers know, I love detailed comparisons like this:
For the third of the fourth verses: "Ám egyre több lágy buggya nás. / Vérboý eper a homokon, / bóbiskol, zizzen a kalász. / Vihar gubbaszt a lombokon", Bátki offers: "More and more soft stirrings. / Blood-red berries on the sand. / Ears of wheat nodding and rustling. / A storm is perched above the land".This has a syntactic clarity (four short individual sentences) and conveys simple images in direct language. It even presents us with a rhyme in lines 2 and 4. (The original has an abab structure.) But the berries and the wheat have lost their pressing lushness, and the wonderfully threatening storm is lightened to sparrow-weight. These are not incidental details—they constitute the emotional mass and texture of the poem, without which "kaszaél", the scythe-blade of the last line, loses much of its force...
To do it credit, however, as with Radnóti, the Mystic Formalist method [used by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner] yields results in precisely the areas neglected by Bátki: poetic texture, music, echo. Keeping with the same poem, "Summer", the third verse as rendered by Ozsváth/Turner reads: "Still more, still yet, the welling grows. / Strawberries blood-rich on the loam / drowse in the warm, the eared wheat blows. / Crouched in the boughs, a thunderstorm." For sheer sound as music and emotion this is way beyond Bátki. Certainly there are liberties taken, but liberties may be earned. We can accommodate the tautologous "Still more, still yet" and its echo in "welling grows" because the Keatsian sumptuousness assumes real emotional power. The storm that crouches in Turner is infinitely more threatening than the storm that perches in Bátki. There is a wholesale commitment to romantic density in Turner that corresponds to József’s troubled sensuality. The problem occurs when this has to be cast aside. The plain-spokenness of the last verse ("Ily gyorsan betelik nyaram! / Ördögszekéren jár a szél— / csattan a menny és megvillan, / elvtársaim: a kaszaél") is wholly missed in "So swift my summer is fulfilled! / On flying witch-balls rides the gale— / sky claps and flashes, sudden, chilled, / with fairy light from winter’s pale." The first line has taken on some of the grandiloquence of the essay and the last misses the point by a clear mile. Where are the comrades (elvtársaim) and the scythe-blade of the last line? József the man, the political creature whose fate was in the balance, is lost. Instead we have a mystico-romantic sensibility with fairy light. The poem is drunk on its own rhetoric and music and cannot change gear. Bátki’s last verse is at least accurate and human.You can read several of the Ozsváth/Turner translations here (also from The Hungarian Quarterly, which looks like an interesting journal). I wish I thought my Hungarian would ever be good enough to read him in the original. (Via wood s lot.)For all that there is no doubt that most of the time Turner and Ozsváth offer more than Bátki can. Turner is a more accomplished poet, albeit of a specific sort, and his music, though sometimes rather fusty, does catch the force of József’s passion even while realizing it in a different context.
Towards the end of Nabokov's Истребление тиранов ("Tyrants destroyed," mentioned previously here) the protagonist, who has been agonizing over how to rid his country—and, more importantly, himself—of the dictator he had known as a young man, hears a procession in the street celebrating the tyrant's fiftieth birthday. It has been established that the evil ruler is extremely fond of turnips (at one point, praising a 70-pound turnip an old woman has grown in her garden, he says "Вот это поэзия, вот бы у кого господам поэтам учиться" ["Now, that's poetry, the poets should learn from it"] and "angrily" orders a bronze cast to be made from it), and one of the stanzas of the poem (by "our best poet") resounding from all the radios of the city goes like this:
Вообразите, ни реп нет,The ruler's jubilee song self-presented as a root vegetable: how that must have warmed his cold, cold heart! At any rate, the word брюква [bryúkva] 'rutabaga' has always struck me as humorous, though that may partly be carryover from rutabaga itself. I'm not the only one who sees the American term (and consequently the vegetable itself) as hilarious, because the OED—which informs us the word is from "Swed. dial. (W. Götland) rotabagge"—includes among the citations these:
Ни баклажанов, ни брюкв...
Так и песня, что днесь у нас крепнет,
Задыхалась в луковках букв.Imagine, [without our ruler] there are neither turnips,
nor eggplants, nor rutabagas...
Thus even the song which now burgeons among us
was stifled in bulbs of letters.
But I digress. I went to Dahl to see if there were any quaint Russian sayings employing the word брюква, and discovered it had almost two dozen dialectal synonyms: брюкла, буква, бухма, бушма, бушня, калива, калига, голань, галанка, ланка, ландушка, немка, бакланка, баклага, грухва, грыжа, грыза, желтуха, землянуха, дикуша, рыганка, синюха. (Interesting that the second of these is буква, which in standard Russian means 'letter (of the alphabet)' as used in the quatrain above.) It must have been much more of a staple in nineteenth-century Russia than it has been since in English-speaking lands (the entire entry in Waverley Root's wonderful compendium Food reads: "rutabaga, or swede turnip, a root more admired a century or two ago than it is now"); no wonder that the sole saying given by Dahl is Надоел ты мне, что брюква: 'I'm as sick of you as of rutabaga.'
The site Minority languages of Russia on the Net is a treasure trove of information if you read Russian, and even if you don't there are some useful links, like articles from The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire (e.g., The Nivkhs). Via Christopher Culver's site Безѹмниѥ.
The Grand dictionnaire terminologique, part of the site of the Office québécois de la langue française, is a great resource. As mj klein of Metrolingua (where I found the link) says:
You can look up French definitions, meanings between French and English..., and between French and Latin (which somebody out there must need). Sometimes if you look up a word, they will give you categories to choose from so that you can get a more appropriate and specific meaning, and they can also give you several synonyms.Just for the heck of it, I looked up québécois, and I learned something about the history of usage:
Le nom Québécois, attesté pour la premičre fois en 1754, a d'abord été utilisé pour désigner les habitants de la ville de Québec (dans ce sens, on le trouvait aussi orthographié Québecquois), alors que les habitants de la province étaient appelés Canadiens français. C'est ŕ partir de la Révolution tranquille, dans les années 1960, que Québécois fut employé pour désigner ŕ la fois les habitants de la province et ceux de la ville de Québec.(To summarize, the word was used only for inhabitants of the city until the '60s, when it was extended to the entire province.)
Another pair of unrelated links:
1) The Roguish Chrestomath q_pheevr has posted a brilliant essay related to certain ongoing manifestations of know-nothingism; it begins:
Linguists here in Canada have been following closely, with a mixture of amusement, bemusement, and, it must be admitted, a little trepidation, the deliberations of our neighbours to the south, who are currently considering, in a courtroom in Pennsylvania, whether "Wrathful Dispersion Theory," as it is called, should be taught in the public schools alongside evolutionary theories of historical linguistics. It is an emotionally charged question, for linguistics is widely and justifiably seen as the centrepiece of the high-school science curriculum—a hard science, but not a difficult one to do in the classroom; an area of study that teaches students the essentials of scientific reasoning, but that at the same time touches on the spiritual essence of what it means to be human, for it is of course language that separates us from our cousins the apes.Go, read, enjoy. (Via Mark Liberman at Language Log.)The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom...
2) Richard Nunley, for many years professor of English at Berkshire Community College and now retired to Portland, Oregon, has a nice piece in my local paper, the Berkshire Eagle, on the expression "There you go"; he begins by describing a conversation with a man "shoveling nice black mulch into a wheelbarrow":
Between shovelfuls he gave me a friendly nod as I passed by.He ends with the following rumination:"That's a good way to work off the pumpkin pie," it emboldened me to reply.
"There you go!" he said with a chuckle.
There you go.
I have been ruminating ever since on that idiom of genial agreement. It is one of those useful phrases that oil social conversation. I am intrigued by its difference from "There you go." That means something different — "all done," "all set," "transaction completed," "be on your way now."
"There you go" is one of a family of phrases — "Right you are," "You said it," "You've got it," "You're telling me" — all meaning some shade of "You're right," "I agree." Each phrase, though, is slightly different in what it conveys — an echo of an earlier decade or level of gentility.
To a sensitive ear, they are not interchangeable. "Tell me about it," though superficially expressing agreement, gives voice to a decidedly different mood. It carries a weary sense of grievance, a flavor of bitterness — "Why presume to tell me what I already know more about than you do?"
And though the words were almost the same, Ronald Reagan's famous "There you go again" in one of the presidential debates, meant something entirely different from what the mulcher meant...
I like the phrase "There you go" in the sense that the mulcher meant it. I think I shall adopt it — if I can remember it in time in the quick shifts of live conversation. (I'm a slow thinker.) To my ear, "There you go" conveys an inviting friendliness, a good-humored openness, sunny acceptance, undoctrinaire inclusiveness — indispensable attitudes for the shopping season.That kind of expression has to be one of the hardest for a foreign learner to come to terms with; seemingly simple, it shifts meanings according to context and intonation.
(Thanks for the link, Martin!)
Two things that have nothing to do with one another; I figure those who don't know Russian can enjoy the strange bird name.
1) I visited OEDILF (The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form, previously discussed here), and the Random Limerick happened to feature the word aberdevine:
When naming the aberdevine,(The excellent limerick is by Tim Alborn, who's done over a thousand of them.) Of course I looked it up in the OED, and found that the etymology was "unascertained," which is annoying but unsurprising. What struck me was the definition: "A bird-fanciers' name of the siskin." Why don't bird-fanciers call the siskin a siskin? But it does sound grander, and perhaps this citation gives a clue:
It's siskin that birders assign.
I think the word finch
Might suffice in a pinch,
And I've heard even bird would be fine.
2) I just started reading Nabokov's 1938 story Истребление тиранов [Istreblenie tiranov, "Tyrants destroyed"], and one of the first words that sent me to the dictionaries was застречка in "и уже нельзя было представить себе... что под эту губу можно залезть пальцем, чтобы выковырнуть застречку пищи из-за гнилого резца" ['and you could no longer imagine... the possibility of a finger's slipping beneath that lip to winkle out a zastrechka of food from behind a rotting incisor']. It's not actually in the dictionaries, but it's an obvious diminutive of it could be related to zastrékha, which Oxford defines as a dialect form of стреха [strekhá] 'eaves.' So far, so good (a very Nabokovian image, a bit of food envisioned as a tiny eaves projecting from the roof of a tooth), but out of habit I looked up eaves in the English-Russian volume, where I found it defined as карниз [karniz], which means 'cornice'! I checked Katzner, who gave стреха as the definition, and sighed with satisfaction. But then I made the fatal decision to look it up in a third source, the Penguin Russian Dictionary, which defined it as свес крыши [sves kryshi], 'overhang of a roof'! I can only assume that strekhá is not in common use (Ozhegov says it's used of a wooden house or izba), and that the normal way to talk about that part of a roof is as Penguin says. But, as always, I'd appreciate input from actual Russian speakers.
Addendum. In the comments, artm says the word sounds weird but might mean 'something that is stuck' (застряло [zastryalo]). Also, I realized that the diminutive of застреха should be застрешка (which is in fact in Dahl). But Dahl has застрека [zástreka] in the sense of 'gutter (under the eaves),' whose diminutive would be застречка... but the sense doesn't work here. If anyone has the Collected Stories, could you please check the translation there? And while you're at it, what's the translation of плесницах in the first sentence of part 3: "When the gods took earthly form and... walked with muscular legs in not yet dusty плесницах [plesnitsakh]"? It seems to be some sort of ecclesiastical footwear, but I'd dearly love to know what Nabokov had in mind, and I presume he supervised the translation pretty closely.
As part of his online Grammar of the Polish Language, Grzegorz Jagodziński has a list of Polish etymologies, a table of numerals in some of the main IE languages, and a detailed discussion of the etymology of the Polish (and other IE) numerals, the last-named perhaps the most interesting; here's one of the shorter sections:
Pięć (5)Lots of fun for anyone interested in Slavic and Indo-European. (The numeral etymology page via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)PS †pętь;, originally a numeral substantive *penkʷtis (Skr. paŋktiṣ; ‘the number five’) from the proper numeral *penkʷe (Slavic languages have preserved only the numerals 1-4, cf. Gr. pénte, dial. pémpe, Lat. quīnque <*kʷenkʷe with assimilation; the contrary assimilation can be observed in Goth. fimf < *pempe, and surely in Gr. pémptos < *penkʷtos, because *kʷ before a consonant developed into k in this language under normal conditions). In the collective form pięcioro the formant -er- is present. If it is transferred from czworo, it must have happened as early as in Balto-Slavic, cf. Lith. penkerě.
The numeral pięć is connected to the substantive pięść < †pęstь;, cf. Germ. Faust, Engl. fist < †funxsti- < *pn̥kʷ-sti- (originally ‘hand’; the Slavic form can, even if need not, come from the root with full vocalism), cf. also Engl. finger < *pn̥kʷ-r-. From the same stem, piądź, piędź < *penkʷ-dhi- ‘span, inch of ground’ seems to originate, or we can have the related stem *pendh- here. Connections with Gr. pygmḗ; and Lat. pugnus ‘fist’ (<*pug- < ? *pogʷ-) would also be possible, at least in the distant past.
An interesting problem is caused by Lith. kůmštis, Prus. kuntis ‘fist’ < *kumpstis < *punkstis (metathesis) < *pn̥kʷ-sti-. however we can see further connection also to Ltv. kŕmpt ‘grab, catch’, and yet further to Lat. capere ‘catch’ (probably from there Engl. keep) and PG †xabē- (cf. Engl. have). Perhaps the same stem, but with irregular phonetic changes, is present in Lat. habēre ‘have’ < *ghəbh- ~ *kəp-, cf. also modern Pol. nagabywać ‘to ply, to molest, to importune’ and OPol. gabać ‘to attack’, Lith. góbti ‘to take possession of sth.’ < *ghōbh-. An obstacle for a reconstruction of Proto-IE stems of different words meaning ‘5’, ‘hand’, ‘catch’, ‘take’ and ‘have’ is the difference of the velar kʷ ~ k (gh). We must not forget, however, that we may talk about a very distant relationship only, and during thousands of years many irregular changes might have occurred.
A few weeks ago I posted Silesians, linking to an article on the history and current situation of that minority and their dialect; I have just gotten an e-mail from Tomasz Kamusella, the author of the article, linking to his paper on "The Szlonzoks and their Language: Between Germany, Poland and Szlonzokian Nationalism" (pdf, accessible from this page) and his "small book on the political underpinnings of the triple classification of the Slavic languages" (pdf, accessible from here). There's a lot of interesting material there, and I was particularly struck by the fact that he had a hard time getting his dissertation accepted because it "presented an incorrect picture of the Upper Silesian past": being a Pole, he "should have emphasized 'the continual and primordial Polishness of Upper Silesia.'" Oh, how I hate that kind of proudly ignorant nationalism! At any rate, he writes:
I am finishing my Habilitationsschrift (a kind of 2nd PhD dissertation, like dokotorskaia in Russia) on language politics and nationalisms in Central Europe during the 19th and 20th cc. It focuses on Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak nationalisms and languages. And I need help most with this work, namely some specialist to read through the chapters to see if I did not commit some glaring errors, plus help with streamling my non-native English usage. To let you or some other person who might see if she/he could help, what my work is about I could send you one or two chapters... I will be correcting the manuscript at least until mid-2006 before proposing it to some publishers.If anyone's interested in helping further what sounds like a worthy project, write Tomasz at tomek672 @ poczta.onet.pl — I'm sure he'll put you in the acknowledgments!
