STRAW DOGS.

I knew the phrase straw dogs only as the title of the 1971 Sam Peckinpah movie. Now, thanks to Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log, I know the origin, a passage in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching:

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs;
the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.

Zimmer continues:

D.C. Lau's translation of Tao Te Ching (Penguin Classics edition) explains in a footnote that "straw dogs were treated with the greatest deference before they were used as an offering, only to be discarded and trampled upon as soon as they had served their purpose."

Any Sinologists out there know of other classic and/or interesting passages of Chinese literature that use this phrase? And what is the phrase in Chinese? (And, for extra credit, was the original Chinese phrase used as the title of the Peckinpah movie in Hong Kong or Taiwan—I assume it wasn't shown in mainland China—or was a new title invented to avoid whatever distractions the original phrase might involve?)

YAWNING BREAD AND GEYLANG.

Yawning Bread is an interesting website run by Au Waipang, a Singaporean of Chinese descent, who in his about page explains:

As both my parents were educated in English-language schools (run by Christian missionaries, as most English-language schools were in their day), the family language that I grew up with was English. My parents speak to me in English; all my teenage rows with them were in English.

So, regardless of the Singapore government’s silly notion that one’s mother tongue is determined by one’s race or ethnicity, I have always maintained that my mother tongue is English. I think in English, I dream in English, and as is apparent from this site, I write in English.

I love people who confuse those who think in stereotypes, and this guy is a funny, acerbic writer to boot. I got a kick out of his rant about Chinese who "perceive Singapore as an extension of the Chinese world"; it includes, among much else, a discussion of a "unique habit" of Singaporeans:

We first draw some conclusion about a person's race before we decide what language to use. A Singaporean would not speak to someone who looks Indian in Chinese. Generally, we would use English to him without a moment's thought.

In most other places, people use the lingua franca of their country or province regardless of the colour of the person they're speaking to, unless the person is very evidently a foreigner (e.g. a Caucasian man in Thailand). In Thailand, the Siamese use Thai when addressing people of Punjabi, Chinese or Burmese ancestry. In France, they use French to everyone, whether you're white, yellow, brown or black.

In China too, if you look Han Chinese (or East Asian), people will mostly speak to you in the provincial language first, e.g. Shanghainese or the Sichuan dialect, and if that fails, they will switch to Putonghua. If you don't look Han Chinese (e.g. if you're Egyptian or Uighur), then they will assume you're not from the locality, and they'll speak to you in Putonghua from the start. Putonghua is the lingua franca, the link language for communication across ethnic groups.

And a fascinating excursus on the name of an area of Singapore called Geylang:

It's an old name, predating the arrival of the British in 1819. This means its origin was almost surely from the Orang Laut people who inhabited this island before the empire-builders came ashore.

The Chinese immigrants, of whom a plurality were Hokkien (from the Xiamen region of Fujien province) [1], learnt the name of the area from the original inhabitants and they too pronounced it as "geylang". In written form, the Chinese found two ideograms, which in the Hokkien pronunication sound like "gay lahng". Thus, so long as one pronounced the Chinese ideograms using the Hokkien dialect, it came out right.

Then we decided to get rid of Chinese dialects insisting that all Chinese characters should be pronounced the putonghua way. Thus, those same two ideograms had to be pronounced as "ya long" ("yah" + "long", where the second syllable is a long "oh").

Meanwhile, Singaporeans continued to know the place as Geylang, and even when we speak Mandarin, we insert the place name into our sentences without mutating its pre-existing pronunciation. It doesn't have to be a Chinese name to fit into a Chinese sentence, just like how Australians might say, "we're off to Joondalup", knowing full well that "joondalup" is from a native language.

The result is that some Singaporeans, otherwise fluent in Mandarin, do not know that Yalong is Geylang, since they never say "Yalong".

(He has a box showing the characters, but they're images rather than Unicode, so I can't reproduce them here.)

I have to correct him on one point. He says:

In Bangkok, the road names Witthayu and Silom mean, respectively "wireless" and "windmill". But we'd be a fool to get on board a taxi and say, "take me to Windmill Road", or "take me to Wireless Road", using the translation of the meaning of the Thai words. We'd say "Silom" or "Witthayu" as close as possible to the way Thais say it. We'd think it useless to have a map in hand that marks the roads as Windmill Road and Wireless Road.

But in fact they do say "Wireless Road" in Bangkok (where I used to live), and it is so marked on English-language maps.

Thanks for the link, Charles!

TSAR.

I'm reading Fearful Majesty, a biography of Ivan IV "the Terrible" by Benson Bobrick, and I just ran across this bit of information:

Upon his return to Moscow on December 12 [1546], Ivan [announced] that he intended "to study the coronation formula of his ancestors," specifically that of Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh and, in emulation of that prince, to be crowned Grand Prince and "Tsar," meaning Emperor. Etymologically, the word "tsar" derived from caesar,but had entered Church Slavic through the Greek as a translation of basileus, meaning "emperor." However, from the days of the Mongol conquest, Russians had applied it not only to the Byzantine emperor but to the Tartar khans. At the Moscow court only Tartar descendents of Genghis Khan who had also been rulers in their own right were honored by the name.

I imagine John Emerson knew the Tatar khans were called "tsar," but I sure didn't.

RIP IAN HAMILTON FINLAY.

The Scottish poet, artist, and pacifist Ian Hamilton Finlay has died at 80:

Ian Hamilton Finlay was born in the Bahamas of Scottish parents in 1925. He was called up in 1944, and served in the Army for three years. When demobilised in 1947 he attended Glasgow College of Art, though he considered himself then primarily to be a writer — and indeed throughout his career referred to himself as a poet rather than an artist. After college he lived in Perthshire, making a precarious living by writing: he published a volume of poems, The Dancers Inherit the Party, and had several scripts broadcast by the BBC.

In 1966 he made what was to prove the most momentous decision of his life, by moving with his wife into a property at Stonypath in rural Lanarkshire, with extensive grounds which would eventually come to be known as Little Sparta. Here he began to work on the garden which became central to his life’s work.

The transition from writer to visual artist was gradual. As a poet, Finlay had become dissatisfied with, as he saw it, the failure of verse on the page to reflect its meaning in purely visual terms. Then by chance he found a book of Brazilian writings which exemplified “concrete poetry”, in which the look of the text on the page was as important as, if not more important than, the bare significance of the words. Many of his subsequent works have taken the form of brief poetic texts beautifully lettered, printed or cut into stone tablets, alongside sculptural pieces in which the words, if any, are used for their visual associations and evocative effect.

You can see some gorgeous photos of Little Sparta by Philip Hunter here, and there's a nice MetaFilter thread on him from last year, which I closed with what is now an even more appropriate Finlay quote, "a little poem inscribed on a rock set into the earth":

WAVE

  ave

An appreciation by Brian Kim Stefans contains a wonderful "translation" of a Lorine Niedecker poem into Scots. Niedecker:

She now lay deaf to death.
She could have grown a good rutabaga
in the burial ground
  and how she’d have loved these woods.
One of her pallbearers said I
  like a damfool followed a deer
wanted to see her jump a fence (
pretty thing
  the way she runs.

And Finlay:

Noo lyin deef tae daith...
Och, think on aa the rhubarb
she micht hae grawn there
on her lair
  an hoo she wud
hae lood sic wids.
The wan o her pallbearers saye
  I, silly eedjit
gaed aff ahint a deer
never’d seen a deer
Loup over a fence ( O
  aw
    the braw
      wee dear...

Via wood s lot.

WORLD LANGUAGE MAP.

World Language Phyla/Family Mapping, created by Dr. Stephen Huffman (creator also of the Unknown Language Identification page), shows samples of truly beautiful language maps (the complete maps are large pdf files).

Dr. Huffman has classified the languages of the Ethnologue into broader groupings following Merritt Ruhlen’s A Guide to the World’s Languages (published 1987, 1991 by Stanford University Press), and has produced a series of maps of language phyla and families using this classified data and GMI's World Language Mapping System and Seamless Digital Chart of the World geographic datas sets. PDF versions of the maps [are] available for download, as are Dr. Huffman's data and ArcGIS project files.

For additional discussion of both language classification , see Dr. Huffman's paper describing this work: Mapping The Genetic Relationships of the World’s Languages (pdf).

Thanks, Laurent!

GIMI DRENKI.

Having finished a long detour into American history, I'm back to Russia and finally reading James Billington's classic The Icon and the Axe. On page 86 Billington reports that vodka "appears to have reached Russia by way of a Genoese settlement on the Black Sea, whence it was brought north a century later by refugees fleeing the Mongol conquest of the Crimea." He continues:

It was fateful for Russian morals that this deceptively innocuous-looking beverage gradually replaced the crude forms of mead and beer which had previously been the principal alcoholic fare of Muscovy. The tax on vodka became a major source of princely income and gave the civil authority a vested interest in the intoxication of its citizens. It is both sad and comical to find the transposed English phrase Gimi drenki okoviten ("Give me drink aqua vitae": that is, vodka) in one of the early manuscript dictionaries of Russian.

(As you can see, my laptop and I made it to Santa Barbara. It's not as warm as I expected, but it's sunny.)

167 LANGUAGES IN IRELAND.

I don't know why, but this Irish Times article by Carl O'Brien was quite surprising to me:

From Acholi to Zulu, Ireland a land of over 167 languages

More than 167 languages are being used in Ireland, according to research conducted by academics at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

The list of languages, ranging from Acholi - spoken in Uganda and Sudan - to Zulu, was based on research with translation firms, schools and the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner.

Anne Gallagher, director of the language centre at NUI Maynooth and president of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics, said they expected a high number of languages but were surprised at the results.

"When you ask most Irish people how many languages are used here, they expect the figure to be around 30 or 40. I expected between 100 and 130 languages. But I don't think anyone expected 167," she said. The languages are used by 160 nationalities. Regional dialects were excluded...

A conference on the new languages of Ireland at NUI Maynooth yesterday heard that the lack of translation services was a serious issue for thousands of migrants based here.

Mary Phelan, a lecturer at Dublin City University's school of applied language and intercultural studies, said there was a "huge" demand for interpreters by State authorities, but little focus on the standards of translation.

In areas such as the courts, Garda stations or health services, the consequences could be serious. "People offering their services don't always see a need for training because authorities are not looking for standards," Ms Phelan said.

I knew in part of my mind that Ireland had very much joined modern Europe, but in another part of my mind it was a quaint land where people spoke a little Irish and a lot of English. Wake up, Hat, it's the twenty-first century! (And thanks for the link, Trevor.)

NUT-HYPHEN-BASKET.

Or, the practical importance of punctuation, at PartiallyClips.

(Thanks, Songdog!)

Incidentally, I'm flying to California tomorrow, and for the first time I'm taking my laptop (having observed that others seem to do it without incident, and reassured by the answers to my AskMeFi question), so hopefully there will be at most a day's hiatus. But you never know, so I thought I'd mention it.

WORDS IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY.

From the Spring 1998 issue of Redefining Literacy, an article by M. T. Clanchy called "What medieval philosophers understood by 'words'"; I found this particularly interesting:

Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142), one of the first professors ('masters' is the medieval term) in the university of Paris, used the Biblical belief that Adam had named the animals to distinguish between the natural and the cognitive sciences:

No word (vox - 'voice') signifies a reality in nature; it is a construct of men. The Supreme Architect has committed the construction of language (vocum impositionem - the 'imposition of voices') to us, but He has reserved the nature of realities to His own disposition... So it does not seem to be due to nature, but to the custom and situation of men that division by words (divisio vocis) pertains.

(Dialectica, ed. L. M. de Rijk, second edition, 1970, p. 576, lines 34-37, p. 577, lines 13-15).

The secrets of nature are God's business, Abelard is arguing, whereas cognitive science pertains 'to us' because 'division by words' is man-made. 'We' are therefore entitled to interpret texts as we think best. As the greatest logician of his day, Abelard claimed to be the master of language because logic was the science of words.

Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org.

HOW BABIES LEARN WORDS.

A LiveScience report by Robert Roy Britt describes research done by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek:

Like teenagers, babies don't much care what their parents say.

Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study finds.

And they do it quickly.

The infants were able to learn two new words in five minutes with just five presentations for each word and object, said study leader Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University. Importantly, the babies paired a new word to the object they liked best, regardless of what object the speaker referred to.

"The baby naturally assumes that the word you're speaking goes with the object that they think is interesting, not the object that you show an interest in," Hirsh-Pasek said...

"Ten-month-olds simply 'glue' a label onto the most interesting object they see," said Shannon Pruden, a Temple doctoral student in psychology and lead author of a report on the findings in the March/April issue of the journal Child Development.

Later, around 18 months, children learn to use the speaker's interest—such as where the eyes gaze—as a guide to learning, the researchers say.

Still, Hirsh-Pasek thinks there is a lesson for parents and educators of children at all ages: "Sometimes we fail to take notice of what our learners are doing and what they're interested in," she said. "We all learn best when things are meaningful."

Thanks to Songdog for this extremely interesting news.

And thanks to John Emerson of Idiocentrism for sending me a depressing article about how Chinese parents will have to start picking babies' names from a government-approved list. I realize some European countries also restrict parents' choices, and I don't like it there either. Governments exist (or should exist, if they have any excuse at all) to serve us, not vice versa.

WORDCATCHER TALES.

Joel of Far Outliers has interrupted his appalling series on the sufferings of Indians trying to escape Japanese-occupied Burma in 1941-42 to favor us with a delightful triptych of stories about obscure Japanese words, phrases, and customs. I'll quote the first:

塩盛り shiomori 'salt pile' - The other night, as we were leaving our favorite local fish restaurant in Ashikaga, my recently arrived Minnesota in-laws noticed what looked like a small pile of snow beside the door as we left. It turned out to be salt, and there was a matching salt pile on the other side of the entranceway, so I went back in and asked the very friendly and talkative sushi chef (who trained 3 years in San Francisco and 1 on Maui) what the story was. There were no customers at the sushi bar at that moment, so he came outside in the chilly wind and told us the story. The salt has two functions. The most commonly recognized one is to purify the premises by keeping evil spirits out. But the more interesting one is to attract customers in. The latter function apparently goes back to the days when goods traveled by oxcart. The idea was to tempt the oxen to stop and lick the salt, whereupon the traveler might also decide to stop for food or rest. The salt piles were called 塩盛り shiomori 'salt helpings', a term which is otherwise chiefly found in restaurant menus for assorted salty dishes.

Isn't that great?

TO BREAK THE PENTAMETER.

Yesterday's wood s lot presents a poem by Wilfred Owen, a sonnet titled "1914":

War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.

It fascinates me because it shows so clearly the exhaustion of the poetic language of the nineteenth century. Owen is capable of powerful writing, but trapped as he is in the need to fit his feelings into the ta-tump-tee-tump, ABBA mold of his chosen form, he selects worn-out words like "rending" and creaky formulations like "rich with all increase" and inversions like "Is over all the width of Europe whirled" and "Now begin famines." In between you can hear the faint voice of something new trying to get out: "Verse wails," and "Love's wine's thin." But he couldn't break out of the box the Victorians had bequeathed him. This poem shows as clearly as anything I can think of the vital necessity of Pound's revolution in verse, that allowed him to write, in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly":

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

That's how you write poetry about World War One.

While we're on the subject of war poetry, there's some powerful Vietnam-era writing in this MetaFilter thread and its links.

TRANSLATION AND THE INTERNET.

An interesting discussion by Linda Schenck, a Swedish-to-English translator, of some problems she encountered in trying to translate Ett oändligt äventyr [An Endless Adventure] by Sven-Eric Liedman. The book begins (in her translation):

In 1749, Carolus Linnaeus journeyed to study southern Sweden. He arrived at Vittskövle, in the eastern province of Skania, on the evening of May 26th. There, he noted, the sand pinks spread a lovely scent and “the nightingales performed all evening”.

Linnaeus spent two days in Vittskövle. May 28th was a Sunday. Before going to mass he made an excursion to the sandy fields that still open out toward the sea east of the village, known today as “the Mölle mound”. He made some remarkable discoveries there. The first and most astonishing was an Astragalus Arenarius, an herbaceous plant “no one has previously found in Sweden”. Here it grew abundantly “between the grove of firs and the dunes of sand”. Apparently it had already been identified in England, as he added: “How it was able to make its way from England to Vittskövle is extremely difficult to figure”.

Since the plant came from England (according to Linnaeus), she quite naturally wanted to know how you say sandvedel (modern Swedish for Astragalus arenarius) in English. The rest of the piece recounts the saga, and the surprising discovery, that ensued; she concludes:

This mini-adventure into the realms of knowledge took place between 26 and 29 January 2002, all thanks to the “information technology” that on other days and for other reasons is the bane of my existence. Twenty-five years ago this kind of correspondence and research might have taken weeks to accomplish. Difficult to say whether that would have made it more or less exciting, but I do feel extremely privileged to be party to these erudite exchanges on subjects a life without translation would never open up for me. There are also translations I take on today that I would have found too daunting from the research point of view in the days before the Internet. I suppose, too, there are books written because the research can be done much more expeditiously than ten years ago. Perhaps to some small extent those advantages balance the verbiage the information society generates. On my good days, I believe so.

I apologize in advance for the ugly white-on-brown graphics, but the story's worth it. (Via wood s lot.)

GEOFFREY CHAUCER HATH A BLOG.

I keep forgetting about this, but fortunately No-sword wrote about it and reminded me: this is well worth your attention. Yeah, yeah, Chaucer blogs, got the idea... but it's really well done and funny as hell. Geoffrey gives advice:

Sir -
Ich wishe for ad[v]yce in the matter of fashion and armes. Ys it verrily a mistake to wear a lilyflour in my helm? (Ich have a shylde of golde.)
Thopas

Mon Sire Thopas,

By seinte Jerome, finallye someone who kan spelle! Messire Thopas, yow seem a man fair and gent, and Y sholde muchel relish for to tellen yowre tale. Ich shalle have myne peple calle yowre peple. As for the lilye? It dependeth how whethir yow wolde ben 'easte coaste' or 'weste coaste.'

Le Vostre G

Geoffrey on the Perle poete (and I do mean "on"):

O, thatte olde colde tyme on the montayne, when we ownede the worlde and nothynge semed wronge! Indede – the makere of Perle was “wyth” me...

Depe did we stepe ourselves in drinke. Thenne – and by the waye ich assume thou wilt kepe this knowledge from dere Philippa! – we dide thynges that wolde make Alanus of Lille his hede explode. We dide thynges that wolde make Peter Damyan spontaneouslie combuste. We dide thynges that are notte even listede in Burchard of Worms. Rim, ram, ruf!

At morwe-tyde, he sayde me, “Thou knowst I am not of the scole of Edwarde II.”

“Me neithere,” quod I “‘Tis nobodies privitee but oures.”

He prefaces the latter post with the classic blogger's apology: "Lordynges, by Goddes grace ich yow biseche that ye forgyven me myn tardinesse yn updatinge myn blogge. In this droughty march, the customes house is unusualie bisy."

(Originally seen at MetaFilter.)

DONGXIANG.

An article by Jim Yardley in today's NY Times reports on the Dongxiang, an Islamic population in China's Gansu province whose isolation has preserved their culture and language, which is part of the Mongolian branch of the Altaic family. Yardley writes:

For years, many Chinese scholars assumed that the Dongxiang descended from the Mongol soldiers in Genghis Khan's army who eventually settled in Gansu during the 13th century when the Mongols ruled China under the Yuan Dynasty. But their exact origins were never fully known, an uncertainty that fed an inferiority complex.

"A man once asked me, 'Where do the Dongxiang come from?' " said Ma Zhiyong, a historian who grew up in the county but moved to the provincial capital, Lanzhou, as a teenager. "I was 18 or 19, and couldn't answer the question. I was ashamed."

Mr. Ma decided to look for an answer. Over several years, he scoured research libraries in Gansu, talked to other scholars and studied old maps. He found that some Dongxiang villages shared names with places in Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan.

He also found shared customs. He said peasants in Uzbekistan and Dongxiang both learn to cut a slaughtered chicken into 13 pieces. He found that Dongxiang people described themselves as sarta, a term that once referred to Muslim traders in Central Asia.

There was even a physical similarity, as many Dongxiang look more like people from Central Asia, as opposed to Han Chinese.

Mr. Ma decided that the story about Genghis Khan's army was only half right. Some of the Dongxiang ancestors were Mongol soldiers. But he concluded that many others were a diverse group of Middle Eastern and Central Asian craftsmen conscripted into the Mongol army during Khan's famed western campaign. They brought several languages and, in many cases, a strong belief in Islam.

Mr. Ma said that generations of intermarriage, including marriages with local Han Chinese and Tibetans, resulted in a new ethnic group and language.

I presume the "new language" part refers to the fact that (by Ethnologue's reckoning) 30% of the vocabulary is Chinese; it would be interesting to know how different it is from other Eastern Mongolian languages. I refer the curious reader to Oliver Corff's nicely done page on "The Dongxiang Mongols and Their Language"; Corff says "This short article can hardly be called more than an appetizer for the interested reader," but he's too modest—it's a lot more than I expected to be available for such an obscure language.

SCDORIS.

My lovely wife sent me a NY Times story about a legally blind musher named Rachael Scdoris who finished the 1,100-mile Iditarod race early Saturday, asking the simple but deadly question "Whence the name Scdoris?" Damned if I know. I've scoured the internet and found others with that name (there were several of them in Nebraska in 1920), but nothing at all on the history of the name and family. Come on, this isn't Smith or Jones; how come none of the news stories address this issue? I haven't even got a clue as to what language it might be adapted from. But surely one of my far-flung readers will know. My thanks in advance for relieving my mind of this pressing concern.

Addendum. Ben of Positive Anymore ("American Dialects, Yiddish, New Yorker Cartoons, Pop Music - they all go together, right?") has done yeoman work on this and discovered that Scdoris is a deformation of Sedoris (c is an easy mistake for e, but how did it stick?), and the latter is a transmogrification of the German surname Sartorius! This makes me very happy, both because I don't have to lose sleep worrying about the origin of the strange-looking name and because it's such an interesting derivation. Sartorius! Whoda thunkit? (Sartorius, incidentally, is Latin for 'tailor,' and I presume it was originally a fancified version of Schneider. It's also the origin of the Faulknerian surname Sartoris.)

THE NAMES OF BATTLES.

I've been reading about the American Civil War, and I think I'm finally getting a grasp of how it went, at least in the eastern theater—the interaction of strategy and politics and geography and personality that produced those battles whose names are so familiar to Americans: Gettysburg, Antietam, Bull Run... But there are onomastic problems here. The easiest is the existence of duplicate names; the South tended to name battles after nearby towns or railway junctions (Sharpsburg, Manassas, Leesburg) and the North after natural features of the landscape (respectively Antietam [Creek], Bull Run, Ball's Bluff—there's a convenient list here). That was no problem for me even as a child, familiar as I was with pairs like Tokyo/Edo, Bangkok/Krung Thep, and Thailand/Siam. (To this day I love alternate names for places.)

What really threw me for a loop was examining a series of battle maps and realizing that the Battle of Chancellorsville (May 1863) and the Battle of the Wilderness (May 1864) were fought over almost the same patch of ground (the later battle was a little to the west). Furthermore, the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 1862) and the Battle of Spotsylvania (May 1864) were fought just a few miles away; all four are part of the same national military park and all four involved the same strategy (the North trying to cross the Rappahannock and get within striking distance of the Confederate capital Richmond). It would make a lot more sense if the first two were called First and Second Wilderness (like First and Second Bull Run/Manassas). Similarly, Chickamauga (September 1863) and Chattanooga (November 1863) were just a few miles apart and part of the same series of events; they could perfectly well be called First and Second Chattanooga. But of course people don't give things names with a view to the convenience of future students.

Still, you'd think they'd make the relations clearer in modern reference books. Battle maps tend to be either abstract (rectangles representing the opposing divisions, labeled with the names of commanding generals, and arrows showing the motion during a specified time frame) or lavishly pictorial (little blue and grey mannikins shown in action poses advancing or retreating across a lovingly rendered landscape); in both cases, there is usually no indication of wider context (what state are we in again? which direction is Washington?) and only the most cursory idea of what role the battle played in the larger scheme of the war. If I were making a Civil War atlas, I'd have plenty of "context pages" that showed the areas of battles on a wider grid, so you could see at a glance how Fredericksburg related to the Wilderness, and I'd create nice names for larger elements of the war that would allow you to make sense of the battles (the Rappahannock Campaign, the Push to Georgia, etc.).

And why "Chancellorsville," anyway? As far as I know, there was no -ville at all, just an inn called the Chancellor House in the middle of the Wilderness. Questions, questions...

PARKOUR.

Via a MetaFilter thread I learned of the existence of Parkour:

Le Parkour (also called Parkour, PK, l'art du déplacement, free-running) is a physical discipline of French origin. It is an art form of human movement, focusing on uninterrupted, efficient forward motion over, under, around and through obstacles (both man-made and natural) in one's environment. Such movement may come in the form of running, jumping, climbing and other more complex techniques.

It doesn't interest me as an activity, but the word is notable in that it's a borrowing from French in nonstandard spelling, something of a rarity. As a result, when you look at it in English it's not clear how to pronounce it; if it had the standard spelling parcours that wouldn't be a problem. (Frankly, I find this kind of respelling with k for c pretty ugly, but I guess that's the point, or part of it. Epater le fuddy-duddy, you know.)

Incidentally, the same MeFi thread introduced me to the word thixotropic; see my first comment therein for more.

SIRAYA ONLINE.

Pinyin News ("Most of what most people think they know about Chinese is wrong") has a fascinating post on the centuries-old romanization of Taiwan's aboriginal language Siraya (now extinct):

About 80 percent of the “Sinkang Manuscripts” (新港文書) have been deciphered in the ongoing collaboration project between Academia Sinica's Institute of Taiwan History and Institute of History and Philology. These documents, in the language of the Siraya people, were written in a romanization system devised by the Dutch colonists in Taiwan in the seventeenth century. Although the Dutch were forced out of Taiwan in the 1660s, writing in this system continued for at least 150 years.

The name Siraya, however, has been applied to the people of that group only since the period of Japanese rule (1895-1945). It was derived from the group’s pronunciation of the word for “I.” The documents get their name from Sinkang Sia, the largest Siraya settlement near the Dutch stronghold Fort Zeelandia.

Most of the documents are records of land contracts and business transactions. Some are bilingual: in Siraya and Dutch, or Siraya and Chinese. One long bilingual document is a translation by the Dutch of the Book of Matthew...

THere are plenty of great links; check it out. (Via the always via-ble No-sword; as he says, "I wish the sample wasn't one of the boring parts of the Bible, though. On the plus side I am now pretty confident that if a Siraya speaker ever asks me who begat someone, I will be able to answer in their native language.")

GERMAN DIALECTS.

A nice link catalogue (maintained by the University of Exeter) of sites having to do with German dialects; the coverage (links in the right and left margins) is pretty amazing, with everything from maps to obscure Low Saxon dialects to related languages like Yiddish and Lëtzebuergesch (though Sorbian would seem to be pushing it, since it's not even Germanic). Thanks, as so often, to aldi at Wordorigins.org.

ALGONQUIAN IN THE NEW WORLD.

A NY Times story by John Noble Wilford describes how linguists helped Terrence Malick get authentic Algonquian dialogue for his The New World (a wonderful movie, by the way, slow and gorgeous and moving):

When the director of "The New World," Terrence Malick, decided that for authenticity Powhatan should speak in his own language, he called in Dr. [Blair A.] Rudes, who has worked with Dr. [Ives] Goddard in reconstructing the defunct Algonquian language of the Pequot of Connecticut. He is also engaged in language restoration for the Catawba of North Carolina and is collaborating with Helen Rountree, emeritus professor of anthropology at Old Dominion University, on a dictionary of Virginia Algonquian.

Dr. Rudes was asked what Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas would say and how they would say it. It was a daunting assignment.

The related Algonquian languages were among the first in America to die out, and no one is known to have spoken Virginia Algonquian since 1785. Like many other Indians, except some cultures in Mexico and Central America, Algonquian speakers had no writing system, and their grammar and most of their vocabulary were lost.

Just two contemporary accounts — one by Captain Smith and the other by the Jamestown colony secretary, William Strachey — preserved some Virginia Algonquian words, including ones that have passed into modern English as raccoon, terrapin, moccasins and tomahawk...

The first challenge for Dr. Rudes was the limited vocabulary. Smith, the colony leader, set down just 50 Indian words, and Strachey compiled 600. The lists were written phonetically by Englishmen who were not expert in linguistics and whose spelling and pronunciation differed considerably from modern usage, making it difficult to determine the words' actual Indian form.

Dr. Rudes had to apply techniques of historical linguistics to rebuilding a language from these sketchy, unreliable word lists. He compared Strachey's recorded words with vocabularies of related Algonquian languages, especially those spoken from the Carolinas north into Canada that had survived longer and are thus better known.

This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as Spanish is to Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related languages revealed the common elements of grammar and sentence structure and many similarities in vocabulary.

A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by Massachusetts Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee Delaware version spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, including those who sold Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and vocabulary are fairly well known to scholars.

"We have a big fat dictionary of Munsee Delaware," said Dr. Rudes, who adapted some of those words when needed for Virginia Algonquian. Recordings of the last Munsee Delaware speakers, a century ago, were a valuable guide to pronunciations.

Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of the extinct ones.

The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words for walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, "paukauns," "mawhcasuns," "aroughcoune" and "opposum." In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are paka-ni (meaning large nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and wa-pa'oemwi (white dog).

From this, Dr. Rudes reconstructed the Virginia Algonquian words pakán, mahkusun, árehkan and wápahshum," or pecan, moccasin, raccoon and opossum.

When he started the project, he was handed the movie script for the parts to be translated. "I had to rewrite terms for the dialogue," he said. "For example, we often use nonspecific verbs, 'He went to town.' In Algonquian, you have to tell the mode of travel, 'He walked to town.' "

There's a little idiocy ("Pocahontas would not have said to Smith, if she ever actually did, 'I love you.' She would have used the verb for love, with a prefix meaning you and a suffix for I."), but hardly worth mentioning in a generally good and fascinating story; how can you not like a newspaper story that gives an entire line of dialogue in reconstructed Virginia Algonquian?

So Smith's reply was changed to "We came from England, an island on the other side of the sea," and the translator then used documented words of Virginia Algonquian for sky, no, island and sea. The spelling was slightly modified to account for Strachey's misspellings and conform to similar words in other Algonquian speech. Because the word signifying a question is not known in Virginia Algonquian, Dr. Rudes borrowed the word sá from a related language.

Of course, Powhatan's interpreter could not be expected to have a word for England. He presumably did his best to reproduce what it sounded like in Algonquian, Inkurent, to which he added the general locational ending -unk, meaning at or in. He also followed the practice of naming the place first and adding the word for "we come from there."

The translation thus reads: "Sá arahqat? Mahta. Inkurent-unk kunowamun - mununag akamunk yapam."

Now I'm even more eager to see the movie again.

Thanks for the link, Bonnie!

BALASHON.

Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective is a new site that looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. The blogger, who goes by DLC, says:

An American in Israel investigates language - modern and classic Hebrew, slang, Yiddish, Aramaic, Yeshivish, and more - with an eye on etymology. I'm not a professional linguist, and will be using this blog to explore my own questions, and I welcome yours as well.

The discussion is wide-ranging; the latest post is on besumei 'intoxication' and goes from the "obligation to get drunk on Purim" to the English word barmy ("while you might be feeling balmy while you are m'vusam - there might be a connection, but it's not etymological"), and the earliest on the page at the moment is on teruma (which apparently means 'donation') and includes the following intriguing quote:

"אמרם בכל המשנה תרם ותורם ויתרום מקשים עליו הבלשנים החדשים, ואומרים שהעיקר הרים ומרים וירים. ואינו קשה באמת, כיון שהעיקר בכל לשון חוזר למה שדברו בו בעלי אותו הלשון ונשמע מהם, ואלו בלי ספק עבריים בארצם, כלומר בארץ ישראל, והנה נשמע מהם תרם וכל מה שהופעל ממנו. וזו ראיה שזה אפשרי בלשון, ושזה מונח מכלל המונחים העבריים. ועל זה הדרך תהיה תשובתך לכל מי שחושב מן החדשים שלשון המשנה אינו צח ושהם עשו פעלים שאינם נכונים באיזו מלה מן המילים. והיסוד הזה שאמרתי לך נכון מאוד אצל המלומדים השלמים המדברים על העניינים הכלליים הכוללים כל הלשונות כולם".

To summarize, the Rambam is stating that linguistic innovation is legitimate, by saying that all languages change naturally by the people speaking them.

If anyone can provide an actual translation, I'd be grateful; I love such premodern acknowledgments of the process of language change.

UNICODE IN JAPAN.

A long and detailed explanation of the history of Unicode with respect to Japanese; it's subtitled "Guide to a technical and psychological struggle" and is very interesting even if Unicode isn't your thing. The author begins with a brief pre-Unicode history:

Before the arrival of Unicode on the scene, the Japanese government produced various standard lists of characters for various different purposes. Three government departments (the ministries of industry, culture and justice) have been involved with creating character sets. In order to understand the decisions made by these departments, it is necessary to bear in mind that the Japanese language was dramatically simplified and reorganized after World War 2, and for some decades thereafter the aim of Japanese language standards was to change and simplify the language, not to describe it.

During the 19th century, the number of kanji required for literacy in Japan was perhaps about 4,000. Even at that time, there were many people calling out for a rationalization and pruning of the writing system. In the early 20th century, the Ministry of Education (now the Ministry of Culture) issued a list of common kanji and a new kana system. Newspapers also announced their own plans of restricting kanji to some sensible subset (although these subsets appear very large and baroque by modern standards). However, opposition from traditionalists effectively postponed reform until after World War 2. In 1945, the Yomiuri newspaper announced that the abolition of kanji would now finally be possible, which at the time wasn't too extreme a position—others were advocating the total abandonment of the Japanese language!

Japanese character sets as we know them, therefore, have arisen from a background of rapid change and strong reformism.

It goes on to many other topics, including this excursus on personal names:

There is one interesting property of Japanese names that, while not directly relevant, sometimes gets thought of as a character set issue. Most Japanese people have a hanko, a seal which has the individual's name carved on it and works like a signature. To be valid on legal documents, a hanko must have a certain level of complexity and uniqueness. The same variants of the same characters written in the same style still won't count as a signature; the exact precise glyph (including wear and damage) that appears on the hanko is the one that constitutes the individual's signature. Therefore, not merely a character and a variant but an actual glyph is recorded for many Japanese people's names—a unique situation. Luckily, character sets are not concerned with particular glyphs (except possibly Mojikyo) so this issue does not affect us.

They also use those seals in Taiwan; I wish I knew what happened to mine, since it produced a very handsome impression.

(Via MetaFilter and No-sword.)

GUEST-WORKER LITERATURE.

A provocative rant by Kemal Kurt (translated by Marilya Veteto) on the subject of the validity and reception of writing by immigrants, with particular attention to Germany:

The assertion that literature is only possible in one's mother tongue loses its validity more and more in this era of mobility and migrations. Immigrants from North Africa, India, Pakistan, from the Caribbean and various African countries write in the language of their country of choice rather than in their mother tongue. They are increasingly becoming accepted as fully-fledged authors and are not infrequently honored with national prizes. On my copy of Adah's Story by the Nigerian woman writer Buchi Emecheta it says "Best of Young British Novelists 1983." The Algerian author Tahar Ben Jelloun received the most prestigious literary prize in France, the Prix Goncourt in 1988. This prize was [also] won by Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese writer who has lived in Paris since 1976 and who writes in French and speaks it with a heavy accent. In Great Britain a Nigerian, Ben Okri, received the Booker Prize in 1991, which was awarded in 1992 to Michael Ondaatje from Sri Lanka; in 1981 it was Salman Rushdie. Mahdi Sharifi and Hanif Kureishi have established themselves as authors in France and England. When the Turkish woman writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar won the city of Klagenfurt's Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1992, it was a surprise for everyone and all but a scandal. The competence of the jury came under question.

While the United States boasts of William Saroyan, Derek Walcott and Amy Tan, Great Britain of Jean Rhys, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie, and France of Samuel Beckett, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Julien Green, Germany has only the prime example of Adelbert von Chamisso. Born and raised the son of a French family of nobility, the young Chamisso fled revolutionary France with his parents for Berlin. Though he spoke German with an accent his whole life, Chamisso is numbered among the most well-known German poets. His fanciful novel The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl—in which the hero sells his shadow and from then on is a societal pariah—is on every school's reading list. The high symbolic value of the shadow gave rise to various interpretations. In light of the life story of Chamisso, who as an artist and as a French emigrant felt he was pressed into the role of the outsider, it is likely that the loss of a shadow emblematizes the loss of his fatherland and his mother tongue.

The acceptance and reception of "authors of other mother tongues" is much different in Germany than in France and England. Here there is no tradition of this, for historically there is only one, already cited, example. The list of foreign authors living in Germany and writing in German who have found a broad readership begins with Chamisso, and it ends with Chamisso. In between: nothing. In the past ten years many newly-arrived authors have written their books in German. There is a hands-off approach to them, categories are invented for them such as Guest-Worker Literature, Migrant Literature, Literature of Victims, Literature of Commitment; those who are quite proper use the rather cumbersome "Literature of German-language Authors of non-German Mother Tongues" for it. Separate anthologies, separate publishing houses, separate prizes and separate journals are the result. Critics do not acknowledge these authors—whatever you want to call them, after all, you are a part of it. The number of readers is small.

It ends up with an unconvincing and banal screed about not writing "obscurely," but what the hell, I don't ask writers to be right all the time, just to say things that catch my attention and make me think. (Via wood s lot, which also links to Passport: The Arkansas Review of Literary Translation, which not only "publishes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in English translation," including the Kurt piece, but has its own blog.)

KNITTING IN FINNISH.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee at Yarn Harlot has a great post about the hilarity that ensued when she settled down with needles, yarn, and a mitten kit... in Finnish.

I knew the intructions were in Finnish - but I really didn't see that as a barrier to understanding.

I'm an optimist, I feel pretty good about my intelligence, and as a general rule, if I'm interested in something ...I can make it work. Perpetually (and despite failing miserably at things on a regular basis) I'm convinced that if I really try and am really motivated, I will really be able to do something. This means that even though I don't speak Finnish, have never had a Finnish lesson, don't speak with Finnish people so can't have even picked up a word or two, don't have a Finnish radio station I like to listen to....in effect, have no working knowledge, relationship or ability in this area....

I believed that if I really made an effort. I could read Finnish.

It turns out "The online Finnish translator knows very little...perhaps nothing, about knitting"; "My best try (which is really just making up whatever I want) is very much wrong"; and "I really don't speak Finnish. Even if I really make an effort." But she does deduce that "Peukalo is definitely thumb." Fortunately, she has a loyal crew of commenters, some of whom actually know Finnish, so it looks like there may be a happy ending. (Thanks for the link, Leslie!)

READING AND WRETCHING.

Having pretty much caught up with the New Yorker, I'm making my way through this week's issue (which has a nice old-fashioned cover by Sempé). I'm not quite sure why I started Jack Turner's "Green Gold: The new absinthe craze" (not online) except that my default setting is to read whatever's in front of me, but I became increasingly distressed as I read. Nothing to do with absinthe (in which I have no particular interest); no, it's a matter (as usual) of language. The first alarm bells went off on the very first page, with the sentence "Near the entrance stood an immense plastic tub of wormwood, absinthe's distinctive and contentious constituent, which, since the late nineteenth century, was held to cause insanity." Leaving aside the problematic phrase "absinthe's distinctive and contentious constituent" (shouldn't it be "absinthe's most distinctive and contentious constituent"?), what bothered me was the combination of the phrase "since the late nineteenth century" with the simple past "was held." This violates what is (to my knowledge) one of the basic rules of English grammar (the real kind, not the ending-sentences-with-prepositions kind): a verb whose action explicitly continues into the present (as with a "since" phrase) requires the perfect tense; in this case, "has been held." Contrariwise, if there is an explicit indication of a particular time in the past, the perfect tense cannot be used; if the phrase had been "in the late nineteenth century," it would have to have continued "was held to cause insanity"—"had been held" would be ungrammatical. But you can't mix and match; one of the most common errors of foreigners speaking English, even when they have a good knowledge of the language, is to say "Yesterday I have gone downtown" or "I lived in this country since 1990." I presume the author started with one construction, changed his mind, and nobody read the sentence over to make sure it still worked. Bad editing.

I was concerned a couple of pages later when I read "Water was poured over the sugar into the absinthe, causing it to 'louche,' or turn a cloudy pale green"—there's no verb to louche in the OED or in my experience—but googling tells me it's in common use in the world of absinthe (see, e.g., here and here). False alarm.

But near the top of page 43 the author writes "...after drinking it I wondered for several moments if I would wretch." There's just no excuse for that; it's a grade-school misspelling (of retch 'try to vomit,' originally spelled reach and apparently still so pronounced by some in the U.K.) that even the greenest proofreader on my local paper would be expected to catch or lose his job forthwith. To see it in the formerly impeccable pages of the New Yorker is truly disheartening. Shape up, people, or I'm not renewing my subscription!

Addendum. I just got to page 53, where in the course of a Calvin Tomkins puff piece on the Whitney a curator is quoted as referring to "the early twentieth-century." Remember the Copy Editor's Revenge? This is where he would have taken the hyphen from in order to fix the modifier he maliciously left unadorned by punctuation. Seriously, New Yorker, shape up. This is unacceptable.

THE WRITTEN RECORD.

Bill Poser at Language Log has a brief post about problems caused by inadequate translation in court. What particularly struck me was this: "No one really knows how often this leads to miscarriages of justice, in part because it is very difficult to appeal on these grounds because appellate courts normally consider only the written record of the trial, and the written record contains only the English translation of the testimony, not what was actually said." This strikes me as a serious problem, and it seems to me that trial records should include a taped record of foreign-language testimony so that if there is a complaint about the translation it can be checked. Otherwise, what's to prevent an ignorant or malicious interpreter from completely distorting, or even inventing, testimony?

Bill is talking about Canada; does anyone know what the situation is elsewhere? I presume it's no better in most places, because preserving the original would be cumbersome, but if there's a jurisdiction that does that, I'd love to know.

Addendum. Follow-up by Roger Shuy at the Log, with further details on this problem.

BURMESE LANGUAGE.

The Burmese Language website looks like a good resource; they have a series of graduated lessons (with audio files) to teach the script and grammar. Unfortunately, in their words, "You need to use the NETSCAPE to view the fonts correctly," so all I'm seeing is Latin-alphabet symbols, but it's easy enough to download Netscape if you want to take advantage of it. (Via Plep.)

FOE.

Dropping by The Tensor, I found a post about a new unit of measurement, the foe; as the Wikipedia entry says, "A foe is a unit of energy equal to 10⁴⁴ joules." Naturally, my first thought was not "Man, that's a lot of energy" but "What's the etymology?" Fortunately, Wikipedia goes on to explain that it's "an acronym derived from the phrase fifty-one ergs, or 10⁵¹ ergs." So now you know, and the next time you hear the output of supernovas discussed, you won't feel out of it.

(I was about to write that there should be a hyphen in "fifty one ergs," and then I realized "It's Wikipedia—I can add it myself!" So I did.)

MORE ON MAYAN.

A while back I reported on Mel Gibson's new movie, Apocalypto, shot in Yucatec Mayan; now Ben Zimmer of Language Log provides an update with links to a video of Mel actually speaking the language as well as to A Grammar of the Yucatecan Mayan Language by David and Alejandra Bolles (a fine site, though frustrating in some ways—why on earth would you deliberately choose not to indicate vowel length or glottalization in a site intended for learners?). I also found a site that allows you to hear Mayans read sample phrases and sentences aloud, which is a real boon.

While I'm over at the Log, let me recommend a Berke Breathed Opus strip reproduced by Mark Liberman (involving an attempt by the chauvinist-pig character Steve to demonstrate his linguistic versatility: "I talk perfect woman"); and while I'm on audio links, here's a page where you can hear actual Belgians pronouncing the names of those wonderful beers (Maredsous is more or less mah-red-SOO).

Oh, one other tidbit: Ben says "the joke, such as it is, has Gibson speaking at length in Yucatec Maya, but the subtitles simply say 'Not... ...me.' (The long-speech-with-short-subtitles gag was already getting tired when Mike Myers did it with Cantonese in Wayne's World.)" This reminded me of an anecdote I read (by amazing coincidence) just yesterday, involving the very same dialect of Maya, as I was finishing Nelson Reed's fascinating 1964 book The Caste War of Yucatan (the war began in 1847-48 and tailed off for decades); the author is making a trip to Yucatan in 1959 to round out his research for the book and interview anyone who might have personal knowledge of the events of the early part of the century, and he's met an old gent named Don Norberto Yeh:

My next question, Did he remember the time of General Bravo [who conquered the independent Maya 1899-1912], brought a long, explosive diatribe (and Maya can be very explosive) which was translated, "The Señor says Yes."

A more recent example is the Suntory scene in Lost in Translation (discussed here): "Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that."

MUST BE GIVEN SEA SPONGE.

Here's an appropriate follow-up to my last post, which involved a less blatant (in fact, barely noticeable except to copy editors) overlooked typo; this one is more, um, in-your-face. Law.com has the following tale of an invasion of sea sponges:

Spell-checking on his computer is never going to be the same for Santa Cruz solo practitioner Arthur Dudley.

In an opening brief to San Francisco's 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words "sea sponge" instead of the legal term "sua sponte," which is Latin for "on its own motion."

"Spell check did not have sua sponte in it," said Dudley, who, not noticing the error, shipped the brief to court.

That left the justices reading -- and probably laughing at -- such classic statements as: "An appropriate instruction limiting the judge's criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction."

And: "It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense."...

Dudley corrected the error in his reply brief, telling the court that a "glitch" caused the weird wording and instructing that "where the phrase 'sea sponge' is found, this court should insert the phrase 'sua sponte.'"

The faux pas has made Dudley the butt of some mild ribbing around Santa Cruz. Local attorneys, he said, have started calling his unique defense the "sea sponge duty to instruct."

Thanks go to Nick for the link.

THE COPY EDITOR'S REVENGE.

From America's Finest News Source, a story of a good man driven to desperate measures:

Copy Editor's Revenge Takes Form Of Unhyphenated Word

February 27, 2006 | Issue 42•09

BOSTON—Bruce Huntoon, a copy editor at Pilot magazine, intentionally did not correct the copy of columnist Justin Mann Monday. "I am tired of that insufferable asshole's mean-spirited jokes," Huntoon said. "So, when he described the carburetor warmer as a 'twentieth century' invention, I decided to leave the copy untouched and let him deal with the consequences of his actions. The fucker." Huntoon said the unhyphenated compound modifier is the most extreme step he has ever taken, adding that he drafted a resignation notice that he will hand in should his superiors notice the omission.

I must confess that I have been similarly tempted myself, but the high dignity of my calling and the oath we editors are required to take before being issued the red pencil and green eyeshade ("I will allow no error to pass without correction...") have so far restrained me. (Thanks for the link, Songdog, and I hope the coming week is better than the one you've just been through!)

COUNTER-ROLL.

Did you know that's the original form of control? I didn't (or more precisely, I probably did at some point and later forgot). The OED says control is "perh. a. F. contrôle, earlier contrerolle ‘the copie of a roll (of account, etc.), a paralell of the same qualitie and content with th' originall; also, a controlling or ouerseeing’ (Cotgr.), corresp. to med.L. contrarotulus, f. contra against, counter (cf. CONTRA- 3) + rotulus ROLL. But, as the n. appears only about 1600 in Eng., and app. not in the original literal sense, but only as a noun of action, it was probably then formed immediately from the verb. A few examples of COUNTER-ROLL (q.v.) directly represent the Fr.

"Johnson (copied in later Dicts.) has as first sense, but without quotation, 'A register or account kept by another officer, that each may be examined by the other'. This J. retained from Bailey's folio, where it was founded on the statement in Kersey's Phillips, 1706, 'properly, a Book, or Register, in which a Roll is kept of other Registers'. But this is merely an etymological remark, applicable to med.L. contrarotulus, and OF. contrerolle; there is no evidence that control was ever so used in Eng.: see COUNTER-ROLL."

Neat, huh?

By the way, I'm off to Cape Cod for a brief but much-needed vacation; I'll be back Saturday evening.

THE OXFORD ETYMOLOGIST.

Oxford University Press has a blog that deals with all sorts of subjects, and they've just added a language column by etymologisst Anatoly Liberman: "His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here each Wednesday." His first post, Etymology and the Outside World, discusses the decline in prestige of historical linguistics with the rise of structuralism in the early 20th century and celebrates the fact that the lay public has never lost interest:

Fortunately, the general public had no notion of what went on in the halls of Academia and retained its interest in word origins, an interest that is inborn in us. People have been asking where words came from since the beginning of recorded time. Etymology is rarely taught on our campuses, but the shelves of even small libraries are well stocked with books on “the loom of language” and “the romance of words.” Healthy instincts are ineradicable and pay no attention to fads and fashions. As an active etymologist I receive queries from all over the world. Even when predictable, they are thought provoking. Many people want to know the origin of their family names. They usually have an idea of what they will hear from me, but a second opinion never hurts. Another never-ceasing source of curiosity is the origin of slang. But there are many other things to ask about. Where did ain’t come from? What accounts for the odd spelling of women? Is the popular origin of posh right? Sometimes I know the answer or know where to find it, sometimes I have to concede defeat: “Origin unknown.” Knowledge, once it frees itself from charlatans’ grip, has its limits. What counts is not whether I am able to satisfy every correspondent, but that the fount feeding their letters never dries up. As long as it bubbles, etymology will remain in good shape.

Worth keeping an eye on, and I hope he keeps allowing comments, which are what bring a blog to life.