STORYTELLING.

A lively NY Times story by Marlise Simons, "Keeping a Moroccan Tradition Alive, One Tale at a Time," describes the ancient Arab storytelling tradition still hanging on in Jemaa el Fna, the main square of Marrakesh. (Its name is said to mean 'assembly of the dead' but it strikes me as deeply suspicious that there's an Arabic word finā' 'courtyard; open space in front of or at either side of a house'; perhaps Lameen can enlighten us.) Simons says:

Mr. Jabiri, 71, is one of eight bards still performing publicly in the Marrakesh region of southern Morocco. But most, like him, fear that their generation may be the last in a line that is as old as this medieval city.

These men descend from the era — long before radio and television, movie theaters and telephones — when itinerant narrators brought news and entertainment to country fairs and village squares...

Juan Goytisolo is a rare European expatriate who speaks Morocco's Arabic dialect and understands the storytellers. A prominent Spanish writer who has lived here since the 1970's, he is devoted to Jemaa el Fna and its artists. They inspired his novel "Makbara," he said.

In a cafe overlooking the square, he spoke admiringly about the "old masters" he has known, their improvisations and pranks, and the tricks they use to capture and hold their audience. Some may start a fake fight to attract listeners. He recalled that "Sarouh, a very strong man who is dead now, would lift a donkey up into the air. As it started braying, people would come running. 'You fools,' he would yell at the crowd. 'When I speak about the Koran nobody listens, but all of you rush to listen to a donkey.'"...

Mr. Goytisolo has been the driving force behind a movement to protect the square, which he calls a "great and rich cultural space, that is in danger of being drowned by commerce, by the pressure to develop." The group has in recent years managed to block projects like a tall glass tower and an underground garage. Cars have now been banned altogether.

(Thanks for the link, Bonnie!)

Anyone interested in such storytelling should find a copy of Bridget Connelly's Arab Folk Epic and Identity, a wonderful book that starts off describing the general tradition and goes on to present a detailed account of one of the most widespread of the siyar (plural of sira 'biography; hero story, epic folktale'), the epic of the Bani Hilal, complete with lengthy bilingual quotes, musical notation, and photographs. She places the Arab epic tradition firmly among the world's classics, with astute remarks on why it hasn't gotten the respect it deserves: "By and large, the literarily adept recoiled from anything that departed from the Classical canon. Ibn Khaldun, virtually alone among medieval Arab scholars, ...defended 'the poems of the Arab Bedouins' as 'true poetry,' and denounced pedantic scholars and philologists who recoil from oral, vernacular poetry, disdaining it for its lack of case endings."

READING OLD ENGLISH ALOUD.

There's a great deal of useful information at the pronunciation page of Syd Allan's Beowulf site, which itself looks quite valuable:

These pages present work done by translators of Old English, and Beowulf scholars. I am a Beowulf hobbyist (how nerdy can you get!) and not an expert on Anglo-Saxon literature or translation. But I do own about 140 books on Beowulf and related topics, and I have tried to present information that will help others to get started in their studying of the poem...

I currently have 93 translations of Beowulf, and links on this site to images of the book covers and information about each book. Forty percent of the translations have not been transcribed yet, but I have transcribed all version published before 1902, and after 1998, and almost half of the ones in between.

The pronunciation page quotes some basic information about the OE writing system and poetic meter, and links to much more. (Via No-sword.)

INTERRUPTUS.

In a story in today's NY Times sports section, "No Good-Conduct Medal for Ugly Americans" by Selena Roberts (which the Times is hiding behind its annoying TimesSelect pay-to-read screen), a description of the Olympic ideal ("The Olympics are the one event where the type of self-absorbed behavior that is tolerated and even celebrated in the mainstream is taboo...") is followed by the sentence "But how can anyone demand Diva Interruptis?"

In the first place, there is no Latin word "interruptis" [or rather, none that fits in this grammatical slot; as commentator Justin points out, it is the plural dative-ablative form of interruptus]; what Roberts meant to write was interruptus. In the second place, interruptus is a masculine form and diva is feminine; the phrase, if you insisted on using what seems to me a construction too silly even for the sports page, would be diva interrupta. But this is not about the illiteracy of sports reporters (though there is much to be said on that topic); it would be unfair and certainly unrealistic to expect the average American, even the average American reporter, to know Latin adjectival declension or the proper spelling of Latin borrowings. That's what editors are for, which is what this is about. The editing of even the front section has gotten sloppier and sloppier, but it's as if they don't consider the sports section worth bothering with at all. Sports reporters can babble whatever gibberish pops into their heads, and the staff on 43rd Street merrily tosses it into the paper as is. I can imagine some copyeditor glancing at "Diva Interruptis" and thinking "That's not right, is it? But who cares—it's just sports!" Meanwhile, Grantland Rice and Red Smith toss restlessly in their graves.

SO TRUE, SO TRUE.

A wonderful quote, allegedly from the Mahabharata:

"Well," Brahma said, "even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred."

I assume this is a modern witticism attributed to Ancient Wisdom for greater impact, but on the off chance that the attribution is correct, I'd love to have the Sanksrit if there are any Mahabharatists in the audience. (Via Avva.)

Totally unrelated, but did you know the English word for a person from Lisbon is Lisboan (liz-BO-an)? I didn't.

KHALED MATTAWA.

Khaled Mattawa is a poet and translator who was born in Libya and moved to the U.S. in 1979. I have his collection Ismailia Eclipse (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996), from which comes this prose poem:

DAYS OF 1959

Warm rain in Baghdad, the butchers calling it a day. They've wrapped their meat in burlap, sent their servants home. It's been a month since the last coup and the wailing from funeral tents hasn't stopped. On a boat docking at the river bank, a black boy practices on his nai. Oblivious of the struggle between captains and kings, he sees bodies swaying to his music in the city's new night club. His voice is sweet, and lately he has made a living reciting verses at the new martyrs' graves.

Nai: a reed flute.

He has a website that my browser won't let me access for some reason (I click on the link and nothing happens), but Google cache allows me to read the poems there, and I liked this stanza from his "Samovar Love Compendium" (each stanza of which begins with the same line):

I love the word samovar and I love
hats, skull caps my mother brought
from Mecca, one I wore rising at dawn
to pray, a fedora a lover bought me
because my face matched the dreary green,
and the one you hid under all summer,
the times I needed to touch your hair
but tucked my hand in my pocket instead.
It's hard to love your hiding, my hesitancy,
and the words that die unsaid.

DERRING-DO.

A post on Wordorigins reminded me of the curious history of this word, which began as a perfectly ordinary phrase meaning 'daring to do.' The OED's first citation, from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (c.1374), exemplifies the usage:
v. 837 Troylus was neuere vn-to no wight.. in no degre secounde, In dorryng don [v. rr. duryng do, dorynge to do] þat longeth to a knyght.. His herte ay wiþ þe firste and wiþ þe beste Stod paregal, to dorre don [v. rr. durre to do, dore don] that hym leste.
The online edition (by Skeat) I linked to [Book] v above gives the passage thus:

And certainly in storie it is y-founde,
That Troilus was never un-to no wight,
As in his tyme, in no degree secounde
In durring don that longeth to a knight. [longeth 'is appropriate to']
Al mighte a geaunt passen him of might,
His herte ay with the firste and with the beste
Stood paregal, to durre don that him leste.
[paregal 'fully equal'; durre don that him leste 'dare (to) do what he wanted' (leste = list)]

In the next century, Lydgate in his Chronicle of Troy imitated Chaucer in the following passage:
1430 Lydg. Chron. Troy II. xvi. And parygal, of manhode and of dede, he [Troylus] was to any þat I can of rede, In dorryng [v. rr. doryng(e] do, this noble worþy wyght, Ffor to fulfille þat longeþ to a knyȝt, The secounde Ector.. he called was. [edd. 1513, 1555 In derrynge do, this noble worthy wyght.]

The misprint in the 1513 and 1555 editions seems to have been the crucial factor, obscuring the connection with the verb and enabling Spenser to mistake it for some sort of nominal construction, which he picked up for use in The shepheardes calender (1579):
Oct. 65 For ever who in derring doe were dreade, The loftie verse of hem was loved aye. [Gloss., In derring doe, in manhood and chevalrie.]

That later magpie Sir Walter Scott saw the usage in Spenser, liked it, and stuck it into Ivanhoe (1820):
xxix, Singular.. if there be two who can do a deed of such derring-do. [Note. Derring-do, desperate courage.]

And everybody read Scott, so "derring-do" entered the general vocabulary, to vaguely puzzle readers for centuries to come.

ARAB-JEWISH NAMES.

A friend sent me a link to this page entitled "Jewish Women's Names in an Arab Context: Names from the Geniza of Cairo"; I had known, of course, that Jews, like other people, have tended to absorb names from the society around them, but it was still startling to see a list of names like Amat al-'Aziz, Diya, and, uh, Sitt al-Qa'ida. Not sure what Esther is doing in there, though... (Thanks, Mike!)

OKINA/'U'INA.

I was flipping through Garner's Modern American Usage when my eye caught on the surprisingly long entry on Hawaii. Along with sections on Sense (the state or the Big Island?) and Pronunciation (only people actually living there can get away with using a v), there is one called "Spelled Hawai'i" that features the Hawaiian diacritic called the okina (discussed here). His conclusion that "as a diacritical mark in an English context, the mark seems largely out of place" is unexceptionable; what bothers me is his explanation that the mark is "called an okina [/oh-kee-nə/], 'u'ina [same pronunciation], or hamzah [/ham-zə/ or /hahm-zə/])." Setting aside the odd use of the Arabic term hamzah in this context (Garner didn't invent it, as you can tell by googling, but I fail to see how it clarifies anything for anybody) and the fact that the word okina should itself begin with an okina if you're being accurate, can it possibly be the case that 'u'ina is pronounced like okina? I want to say "No, that's silly," but Garner not only says so, he makes a point of it later ("look at 'u'ina itself—most speakers would be at a loss how to say it"—speakers of English, I presume he means). Surely he didn't simply make it up; could he have misunderstood something he read? I await enlightenment from Those Who Know.

NO, NO, THAT'S A BOOK.

I never thought I'd see a correction notice to match this one, but the Feb. 6 New Yorker (yes, I'm falling behind again) contains the following gem from the Guardian (of April 22, 2004, according to this site):

In our profile of Daniel Dennett (pages 20 to 23, Review, April 17), we said he was born in Beirut. In fact, he was born in Boston. His father died in 1947, not 1948. He married in 1962, not 1963. The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett's students was Dennett's seminar at Tufts, not Gould's at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a "Darwinian fundamentalist". Only one chapter in the book, not four, is devoted to taking issue with Gould. The list of Dennett's books omitted Elbow Room, 1984, and The Intentional Stance, 1987. The marble sculpture, recollected by a friend, that Dennett was working on in 1963 was not a mother and child. It was a man reading a book.

You've got to admire a publication that can correct itself with such panache.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH.

I had no intention of writing about Safire again so soon, really I didn't. I skimmed Sunday's column with as little attentiveness as possible and moved on to the Ethicist. But two of my readers have drawn my attention to two different passages, and I guess I'll saddle up and do battle once again.

He begins with his typical roundup of vaguely related terminology, in this case terms allegedly borrowed by bloggers from "the MSM — that's the superannuated, archaic mainstream media." These include genuine items like sidebar and spurious ones like this: "Even the reporter's byline, that coveted assertion of journalistic authorship, has been snatched by the writers derogated as 'guys in pajamas' and changed to bye-line, an adios or similar farewell at the end of the blogger's politely expressed opinion or angry screed." (Raise your hand if you've ever seen or heard the latter term... I thought so. But somebody obviously thinks it's clever.)

But what my correspondent took particular issue with was this:

A ping is not just the word for a sound anymore. It is also an acronym for "packet Internet gopher," a program that tests whether a destination is online and can also be the gently noisy notification sent when a blog needs updating or has been updated.

She said:

In the latest "On Language", Safire informs us that the Internet usage of "ping" is an acronym. It is not. You can read the gory details here [where the guy who created the term says "I named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired by the whole principle of echo-location"].

And if you go there, you will find various of his other misunderstandings mocked, which is a good thing; I can't do all the mocking myself.

My other correspondent was irked by Safire's closing paragraphs:

During halftime at Super Bowl XL (Extra Large? No; 40), Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones performed "Satisfaction," their 1965 hit. He pointed out in his introduction to the song that it could have been sung at Super Bowl I, adding, "Everything comes to he who waits."

That was a verbal malfunction more shocking than a previous Janet Jackson halftime. Because he is the subjective case of the third-person male pronoun, it cannot be the object of the preposition to. The pronoun must be the objective case him. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in an 1863 poem that called up the image of a patient falcon carved in wood, had it right: "All things come round to him who will but wait."

He says:

He's contending Jagger was wrong ("more shocking ... than Janet Jackson") to say 'everything comes to he who waits' on grounds that the preposition needs the object 'him.' I been teaching the youngerns that the clause is the object and the pronoun needs to function the way it does in the clause.

Here's what I wrote in response:

I checked with my bible in these matters, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, and found (at the end of the Pronouns article):

The last of the problem environments mentioned by Quirk et al. is the pronoun that seems to lie between two clauses; this pronoun is often drawn toward both nominative and objective forms by reason of its different relationships to the preceding and following parts of the sentence. Usage is decidedly mixed:

It was she (her?) John criticized -- in Quirk et al.

Everything comes to him who waits -- English proverb

Just as the ideal of even-handed justice for all can be somewhat tilted toward he who can afford to argue the rightness of his case -- Globe and Mail (Toronto), 8 Oct. 1982

I'm against whoever is in office -- And More by Andy Rooney, 1982

Fowler, if I'm reading him correctly (he's unusually vague here), plumps for "him" at the end of the "he" entry (at least, he appears to make fun of the writers who "thanked God they had remembered to put 'he'" in examples like "The bell will be always rung by he who has the longest purse and the strongest arm"); I can find no guidance in Garner.

Oh, and one minor point—minor, but just the kind of thing you'd think Safire would hate to get wrong: that should be a comma, not a semicolon, in "No; 40." (Of course, it's possible that the Times style manual prescribes this bizarre usage, in which case I transfer my mockery to whoever wrote it. That's whoever, not whomever. I think.)

GO TO/BEEN TO.

Lameen Souag of Jabal al-Lughat has a fascinating entry on the use of be as a suppletive form of go, but only in the past participle: you can say I've been to Finland or I'll have been to Finland five times, but not *I'll be to Finland or *I am to Finland. I've used the construction all my life, but never really thought about how it works; Lameen finishes up with this thought-provoking bit of research:

Google does reveal a couple of instances: "I'll be to bed in a minute", "I'll be to work way early", and perhaps most strikingly, "I've been to more than half of the counties, and in the next six weeks, I'll be to the other half of the counties". So it seems we have a change in progress. Does this depend on the region? Will it culminate in a complete merger of "go" and "be"? Are there any parallels to this outside English? What do you think?

And while you're at the mountain of languages, don't miss his latest post on classical Kanembu and its relation to Kanuri and Arabic:

Most strikingly, since vowel length is non-phonemic in Kanuri, it seems to use vowel length to indicate high tone instead; thus, for example Arabic al-'aakhirah "the afterlife" has been borrowed as láxíra, and thus gets spelled as لاخِيرَ. As far as I know, this would make it the only Arabic orthography to mark tone.

SKETCHBALL.

Mark Liberman of Language Log introduces me to a new word, sketchball. It's apparently a sort of generalized insult (you can see a variety of attempted definitions at Urban Dictionary, which should never be taken as a serious reference since anyone can put anything they want in it); it's obviously formed on the model of screwball and its many offspring (goofball, nutball, oddball, sleazeball, slimeball...), but what bothers me about it is that I have no intuitive sense of it. To me, sketchy (from which the noun is built) means simply—in the words of the Tenth Edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate—"of the nature of a sketch, roughly outlined; wanting in completeness, clearness, or substance." But the Eleventh Edition has a new sense "questionable, iffy: got into a sketchy situation, a sketchy character," and this has not entered my linguistic consciousness, so that the insult sounds to me like a ball with a drawing outlined on it. Intellectually, I'm resigned to the inevitability of falling further and further behind the colloquial form of my native language, but my gut has yet to accept it; I'm not ready to be the clueless old geezer wondering what in tarnation these young folks are going on about.

HAPPINESS.

Last Sunday's NY Times book section has a review by Jim Holt of Darrin M. McMahon's Happiness: A History that begins as follows:

The history of the idea of happiness can be neatly summarized in a series of bumper sticker equations: Happiness=Luck (Homeric), Happiness=Virtue (classical), Happiness=Heaven (medieval), Happiness=Pleasure (Enlightenment) and Happiness=A Warm Puppy (contemporary). Does that look like progress? Darrin McMahon doesn't think so.

In olden times, McMahon observes in his engaging book, happiness was deemed a transcendent, almost godlike state, attainable only by the few. Today, however, the concept has become democratized, not to say vulgarized (think of that damned ubiquitous smiley face): it is more about feeling good than being good...

Now, maybe I'm missing something obvious (semantics was never my specialty), but what sense does it make to say that the concept of happiness has changed? We don't say that the concept of silliness has changed because silly (or its earlier form seely) once meant 'Happy, blissful; fortunate, lucky, well-omened, auspicious' or 'Spiritually blessed, enjoying the blessing of God,' then 'Innocent, harmless,' then 'Deserving of pity, compassion, or sympathy,' 'Helpless, defenceless,' 'Weak, feeble, frail; insignificant, trifling,' 'Unlearned, unsophisticated, simple, rustic, ignorant,' and finally the modern 'Lacking in judgement or common sense; foolish, senseless, empty-headed.' We say that the word has changed meaning, that the semantic space once occupied by seely/silly is now occupied by other words like lucky or harmless while silly has gone on to occupy a different one.

Why is the situation of happy/happiness not parallel? Happy is from hap 'chance, fortune' and therefore originally meant 'lucky, fortunate; favoured by lot, position, or other external circumstance'; the fact that it has shifted over the centuries to the meaning 'glad, pleased' says nothing about changing concepts of happiness, only about the changing semantics of the word. And ancient Greek philosophy seems even less relevant; does anyone seriously think that because Aristotle wrote about virtue, your average Greek did not feel what we call "happy" when he unexpectedly came into money or his harvest was abundant or someone else bought the drinks? It seems to me there is serious confusion here about words and meanings. But as I say, I'm no expert in this area, and I welcome the thoughts of others.

CARNIVAL OF BLOG TRANSLATION.

Liz at ALTAlk Blog has a brilliant idea:

Announcing the first Carnival of Blog Translation! Tuesday, Feb. 28th, 2006!

On the day of the Carnival, a participant translates one post by another blogger, and posts it on her own blog with a link to the original. She would need to email me, or post in the comments right here, and I'll compile one big post on the day of the Carnival with links to all the participants.

You can translate any blog entry that was posted in the month of February 2006. It can be your own blog entry, if you like.

See her post for requirements and suggestions, and I hope lots of polyglots will participate.

Liz also wants to publicize the call for translations of "Gonāh" [گناه 'sin'] by Forough Farrokhzad for a future issue of Composite; if you know Farsi/Persian, give it a try (the text is in the "call" link).

HISTORY OF CIV.

When I entered college back in the fabled year of 1968, like all freshmen I was confronted with the need to buy armloads of course books and experienced severe sticker shock. Well, in the course of cleaning out the garage at my father's house (and let me tell you, a lot of stuff builds up in 30-plus years) I ran across a yellowing slip of paper, the receipt for one such armload (dated 22 Sep 68). Here are seven items I marked "Civ" (for the college's two-year series of courses called "History of Civilization," one of the reasons I chose to attend):

The Scientific Revolution 2.95
Essay on Man 0.50
Eighteenth-Century Philosophy 1.65
The Anatomy of Revolution 1.95
Classic, Romantic, and Modern 1.45
Phaedra (Racine) 0.65
Hunchback of Notre Dame 0.75

Those were new books, not dogeared discards. The most expensive thing on the receipt is my math text, which set me back $11.50 (I'm sure I swallowed hard before adding it to the pile). I know there's been a fair amount of inflation since then, but I'll bet the cost of an equivalent stack of books would be a lot more than would be covered by the changing consumer price index.

As for History of Civ (as we called it), it taught me an amazing amount about the world, and I'm grateful to it to this day. Unfortunately, my class was the last to get the benefit of it, because the lefties bullied the administration into dropping it from the curriculum—it was "Eurocentric" and insufficiently "relevant." I haven't given the college a dime since I graduated for that very reason. You know what they say about those who forget the past.

COXINGA.

Zheng Chenggong (Chinese: 鄭成功) was a military leader whose loyalty to the Ming dynasty led him to fight the new Manchu Qing (Ch'ing) dynasty until his death in 1662; because he recovered Taiwan from Dutch colonial rule, I heard a great deal about him while I was teaching English in Taiwan, and I wondered why he was known in English as Coxinga. It turns out Joel of Far Outliers has wondered too, and in the course of reading (and blogging) Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty by Jonathan Clements he found the answer:

Coxinga ... was said to have greatly impressed the bookish Emperor of Intense Warring [the remaining Ming pretender who had retreated to Fuzhou as the Manchus invaded]. Still only a youth of twenty-one, the former Confucian scholar was made assistant controller of the Imperial Clan Court. The childless Emperor also commented that he was disappointed not to have a daughter he could offer to Coxinga in marriage, and bestowed him with a new name. Once Lucky Pine [Fukumatsu], then Big Tree [Da Mu, a nickname from Sen 'Forest'], the boy was now given the appellation Chenggong, thereby making his new given name Zheng Chenggong translate literally as 'Serious Achievement'. In a moment of supreme pride for his family, the boy was also conferred with the right to use the surname of the Ming ruling family itself. It amounted to a symbolic adoption, and he was often referred to as Guoxingye, the Imperial Namekeeper. Pronounced Koksenya in the staccato dialect of Fujian, and later transcribed by foreign observers, the title eventually transformed into the 'Coxinga' by which he is known to history.

Or, as the Wikipedia article linked above to his name puts it, "Koxinga or Coxinga is the Dutch Romanization of his popular name 'Lord with the Royal Surname' (國姓爺)."

HIATUS CONTINUED.

Hello all! I'm writing you from balmy Santa Barbara, where my brother is kindly letting me use his computer. I was supposed to be in frigid Massachusetts by now, but my flight yesterday was canceled thanks to a winter storm, and I'm now scheduled to return Tuesday night (please join me in hoping conditions have improved by then!). Continue talking amongst yourselves, and if you're looking for a good novel, I highly recommend Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (which I finished as the plane's wheels touched down in Santa Barbara).

Update. I'm back; regular posting will resume as soon as I work through the comments and terminate all the spammers. Thanks for your patience!

A WEEK'S HIATUS.

I'm off to California for a week to deal with family matters. Talk amongst yourselves; I hope someone solves the egreto problem, and if you see a spammer lurking about, terminate with extreme prejudice. (I may or may not drop by, depending on internet access, but I'll definitely be here as of Sunday the 12th.)

EGRETO.

Mark Liberman at Language Log has posted about a couple of Nabokov's interviews (which are not like anybody else's); he finished up with this quote:

This exchange with Alvin Toffler appeared in Playboy for January, 1964. Great trouble was taken on both sides to achieve the illusion of a spontaneous conversation. Actually, my contribution as printed conforms meticulously to the answers, every word of which I had written in longhand before having them typed for submission to Toffler when he came to Montreux in mid-March, 1963. The present text takes into account the order of my interviewer's questions as well as the fact that a couple of consecutive pages of my typescript were apparently lost in transit. Egreto perambis doribus!

Neither Mark nor I has any idea what the jocular polymath might have meant by that last bit of pseudo-Latin, nor (as far as I can tell by googling) does anybody else on the internet, so I'm throwing the floor open to suggestions. Egrets given to the perambulating Dorians??

SHANGHAINESE ONLINE.

A while back I posted about the English word Shanghainese; now I'm reporting on a site where you can learn the actual language. It's run by Shanghainese students at the University of Chicago, and they won my heart right on the front page by quoting Max Weinreich (though without naming him, tsk): "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot." The Background page would be worth a post all on its own; along with gorgeous photos, it's got history:

The name 上海 (Shanghai) first appeared in 1077 AD on the store name of a winery in what is today the Nanshi district of Shanghai. Its name literally meaning 'on the sea'... The term Wu (吴, variant characters: 吳 or 呉) comes from the historic Kingdom of Wu (吴国) first united by Wu Taibo (吴太伯) as Gouwu (句吴) with its capital just 80km from present day Shanghai during the Autumn and Spring period... Wu today descends from the languages spoken in Eastern Chu and the Wu and Yue kingdoms, along with northern and Han influences later on.

That's followed by a nice "Map of Chinese topolects" and a discussion of why the so-called "dialects" of Chinese are considered separate languages by most non-Chinese linguists ("topolects" is a neutral term coined to avoid the controversy) and an "Overview of the phonology and grammar":

Wu dialects have preserved the full Middle Chinese set of voiced initials that do not exist in Mandarin and Cantonese... Like all Wu dialects, Shanghainese has 3-way consonant differentiation (voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated), for a large total of 30 consonants (Mandarin has 24, Cantonese 17). No other Chinese topolect has preserved the entire set of Middle Chinese initials. Wu has however been less faithful in its finals, having truncated most diphthongs and triphthongs still found in Cantonese and Mandarin into monophthongs (pure vowels), for a total of 14 pure vowels. This characteristic makes Shanghainese syllables quick and direct; the average Shanghainese syllable is 30% shorter than Mandarin...

And there's a section on "Cultural identity, conflicts with Putonghua, status, and bans"—all on the one page!

But that's just the appetizer; the meat of the site is the set of lessons, beginning with consonants and moving on to vowels and tones; there's an admirably clear account of how tone patterns work: "A polysyllabic Shanghainese word (including its postpositions particles) in general can take on one of 3 pitch accent patterns...." A number of sections are "still in the workings," but hopefully they'll keep adding to the site, making it the invaluable resource it deserves to be. Well done, U of Chi students!

(Via Plep.)

THE LISU LOVE THE YA-GEU-LEU.

This wonderful page at the Virtual Hilltribe Museum (an extremely worthy site, created by the tribes themselves) presents a matrix of names and stereotypes of the hill tribes of Thailand:

It can be confusing. In addition to the names that each tribe has for themselves, and the names of the tribes in English and Thai, each tribe also has its own name for every other tribe (these terms are called autonyms and exonyms, respectively). It can be very, very confusing. Below we have assembled a matrix of what each of the seven main ethnic groups of the area call each of the seven ethnic groups. If you are counting, that's 49 different names. Phew!

In this website we try to use a romanization of the name that the tribe calls itself. The exception for that is the Karen, because it already has a standardized English name, and the name which is uses to refer to itself is very difficult to spell in English.

We have also included the traditional opinions or stereotypes that each tribe has towards the others and themselves. We haven't listed these to assign any sort of value judgment or superiority/inferiority among the different ethnic groups, but, instead, to show how complicated the relationships between the various ethnic groups in Northern Thailand are.

So the Karen call the Lisu Kae Lisaw and the Lisu call the Karen Ya-geu-leu; furthermore, "Lisus have always gotten along with Karens because they have never tried to take advantage of each other." I can't tell you how much I love this stuff, and I wish somebody would replicate the matrix for other areas of the world. (Nigeria would be an excellent start.)

I found it at MetaFilter, by the way.

TIPITIWITCHET.

A post by aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org highlights a word the OED is apparently planning to include—not a new word at all, but an old one that's missing a couple of centuries of documentation. From the OED's Appeals list:

tipitiwitchet, tippitiwitchet, etc. (US, = Venus fly-trap):
   interdate 1763-1940

Aldi also turned up a site called "Tippitiwitchet explained: from Aphrodite's Mousetrap, a biography of Venus's flytrap with facsimiles of John Ellis's original pamphlet and manuscripts, by E. Charles Nelson and Daniel L. McKinley," which has a long discussion of the possible origin of the word (first used in print, apparently, by John Bartram, a remarkable botanist and writer whose Observations are online here):

My foray in search of the roots of the word Tipitiwitchet is first into what Eric Partridge calls 'slang and unconventional English'. A few terms seem particularly enlightening, not all of them slang. 'Tippet' is a fur collar, in ordinary English, and Marlowe's 'Hempen tippet', a hangman's rope, is a poetic embellishment. Farmer has 'Tippet' alone meaning a hangman's rope, with further play on the word in the phrase 'to turn tippet'. A 'Twitch' is a noose for recalcitrant horses. 'Twitchers' are either pincers or tight boots; and, of course, 'Twitchety' is nervous, fidgety, jerky. Additional uses of 'Twitch' and variants of 'Tippet' and 'Tippity' in the Scottish dialect are recorded. All these terms, coupled with Ellis's overworked idea of a trap for mammals, to be mentioned later, parallel the term 'Snatch-box' that Partridge records as used for vulva in popular parlance. Some aspect of the 'Toothed Vagina' may be relevant, as can be traced out in Stith Thompson's Motif Index of Folk Literature.

Further, more specifically American, although the technique must be more widespread, a 'Twitch‑up' is a trap for small animals especially rabbits, consisting of a noose attached to a bent stick or sapling that springs upward when tripped.

Again, Vance Randolph, in his volume of Ozark folk stories, records in no less than seven different tales, the more or less current (early twentieth century) use of the term 'Twitchet' for vulva or associated part of the female pudendum. Finally, vestiges of Elizabethan (and later) English, not yet stifled by radio and television, are heard from senior citizens at a mid-coast Maine hamlet - far from Tipitiwitchet country. They speak of 'Twitchet Avenue', disregarding both its present sanitized label and its presumed current lack of saleable feminine attractions.

Thus, Bartram's ‘little tipitiwitchet' was a vulva-like grasper that wrestled its prey into submission. One might add, for a touch of surrealism, the illusions generated among the distant, imaginative English naturalists, when they had both sportive names and Dobbs' fox‑trap hyperbole to spur them on (and no plants at hand, to correct perspective!). Ellis gave a fervid enough account, after he had seen living plants, although he was correct to impute a deadly aim to the plant's behaviour. While Linnaeus might innocently romanticize that the trapped insect was innocuously released as soon as it became quiet, Ellis correctly surmized that the hapless prey had no such fate in store for it. He aptly referred to the plant as a 'machine to catch food'.

It's a great word and deserves to be restored to circulation.