First off, an apology. I had meant to write about this Language Log post by Ben Zimmer a couple of months ago; it quotes a comment by "an anonymous professor of China studies" on this amazing and hilarious rahoi.com post explaining how the menu item "Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu" got rendered as "Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk" in the English portion of a restaurant menu. ("Finally: gan si meaning shredded dried tofu, but literally translated as 'dry silk.' The problem here is that the word gan means both 'to dry' and 'to do,' and the latter meaning has come to mean 'to fuck.'") It slipped my mind at the time, but fortunately the Loggers have revisited the issue: Victor Mair discusses the ubiquitous translation of gan as "fuck" and says:
I am trying to make sense of how this phenomenon actually came about. It seems that the twenty or so different meanings of the three-stroke calendrical graph that is used to write GAN1/4 (a total of three distinct graphic forms in the traditional script — 乾, 幹, 干 — all reduced to one — 干 — in the simplified script) in Chinglish have all collapsed into the single meaning of "fuck". Wherever that graph occurs, Chinglish speakers will translate it as "fuck"...They don't have comments at the Log, so share your theories here!Who's telling the menu-makers and sign-painters to write "fuck" for GAN1/4? They probably don't even know English and probably don't know much Chinglish either. How did this get started? (Perhaps somebody was being intentionally mischievous.) And how did it become such a common phenomenon? That's the real mystery. How is this horrible mistranslation continuing to spread and not being caught by the tens of millions of Chinese who do speak good English? ... You'd think that at least they'd write "do" everywhere, or that people who do know English would tell the proprietors to hurry up and change the offending word so as to avoid further embarrassment!
From my days as a Russian major I was familiar with the term субботник, borrowed into English as subbotnik (what do you mean, it's not English? It's in the OED!) in the meaning "the practice or an act of working voluntarily on a Saturday, for the benefit of the collective"—that's how the OED defines it, anyway; for real-world truth substitute "without pay" for "voluntarily" and replace "for the benefit of the collective" with "at the insistence of the Communist Party." (The Wikipedia article says "The tradition is continued in modern Russia"; can this be true?) I note that the OED also includes an anglicized equivalent Saturdaying that seems to have had some currency in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution:
1920 Manch. Guardian 5 Feb. 9/7 In Moscow it has been found worth while to set up a special bureau for ‘Saturdayings’.
1920 Contemp. Rev. Oct. 504 For members of the Bolshevik party, ‘Saturdaying’ had become compulsory.
In the course of reading The Icon and the Axe
The idea of a new church unifying Christians and Jews was gaining grass roots support in the Orel-Voronezh region with the sudden appearance of the sabbatarian (subbotniki) sect. They added to the usual rejection of Orthodox forms of worship opposition to the doctrine of the trinity, celebration of Saturday as the sabbath, and the rite of circumcision. The sect made its first appearance in the second half of Alexander's reign [i.e., in the years around 1820].It turns out the sect is not only still around, Bill Aldacushion ("a descendant of Subbotniki and Molokan parents in America") has an admirably thorough website devoted to it.
(I wonder how Morton Subotnick's family got their name?)
Matt of No-sword has posted about a website that purports to give lessons in the reconstructed Japanese of the Jōmon period (or Joumon, as Matt prefers to call it). Apparently there's controversy over whether the Jomon people even spoke Japanese, but as Matt says, it's "cool to hear this stuff spoken instead of just read it on a page." The example sentence Matt gives is 私は赤い着物が好きです。 (aba akaki kOrOmObO kOnOmibumu, 'I like red clothes'); you can hear it spoken here (mpg file). I expect those of my readers who know about this stuff to tell me about the linguistic issues involved.
Etymologies are usually staid affairs; whether they are long lists of preforms and cognates or simple statements that the origin is unknown, they are devoid of passion, humor, and exclamation marks. Not so that of the OED's coil2 "Noisy disturbance, ‘row’; ‘tumult, turmoil, bustle, stir, hurry, confusion’":
[First in 16th c.: of unknown origin. Prob. a word of colloquial or even slang character, which rose into literary use; many terms of similar meaning have had such an origin; cf. pother, row, rumpus, dirdum, shindy, hubbub, hurly-burly, etc.Somebody was feeling mighty frisky in the Scriptorium that day!The conjectures that coil may be ‘related’ to Gael. coileid ('koletʃ) ‘stir, movement, noise’, or to goilim ('golɪm) ‘I boil’, goileadh, ‘boiling’, or to goill (goλ) ‘shield, war, fight’, are mere random ‘shots’, without any justification, phonetic or historical. Coil is unknown in Scotland, and no evidence connects it with Ireland. Gaelic or Irish words do not enter English through the air, with phonetic change on the way!]
Incidentally, definition 4 b. is "mortal coil: the bustle or turmoil of this mortal life. A Shaksperian expression which has become a current phrase." Note the quaint spelling "Shaksperian"; in the list of authors he's Shakespeare as usual. Yup, mighty frisky.
Addendum. Now see this post translated into Latin at Sauvage Noble!
A longstanding mystery has just been solved for me. Every time I look down a list of unicode characters (e.g., this one), I see something like "Latin Capital Letter S With Caron" (next to Š) and think "That's not a 'caron,' that's a haček." I always meant to look it up and find out where they got "caron," but never got around to it. Now John Cowan's post on the stability of standard names has brought to my attention Unicode Technical Note #27: Known Anomalies in Unicode Character Names, which is almost as much fun as a collection of newspaper corrections:
In this document we list all Unicode character names with known clerical errors in the spelling of their names at the time of its writing. In addition, we have compiled information on many misnamed characters, misleading character names, and characters with other known problems with their names.And alongside embarrassments like "LATIN SMALL LETTER OI" ("should have been called letter GHA") and "TAMIL SIGN VISARGA" ("This character is the aaytham"), we find:Because Unicode Standard is a character encoding standard and not the Universal Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Character Identity, the stability and uniqueness of published character names is far more important than the correctness of the name... The authors therefore intend this Technical Note to serve as a convenient summary of the information about character name anomalies in the Unicode Standard at the time of its writing.
The "caron" should have been called hacek and combining hacek. The term "caron" is suspected by some to be an invention of some early standards body, but it has also been claimed by others to have been in use at Linotype before the days of digital typography. Its true origin may be lost in the mists of time.How wonderful! Does anybody know anything more about this mysterious "word"?
Matt at No-sword has an intriguing post about the Japanese expression itadakimasu; I'll let him explain it, since he does it so entertainingly:
Everyone who's anyone knows that the Japanese word itadakimasu is a set phrase said before eating—in unison by all parties present, ideally—and means "[I] [will?] receive [+humility] [+politeness]". But today I got to wondering if it's an actual speech act (i.e. "I hereby humbly receive this meal [in toto, and having received it I shall begin at once to eat it]") or just a statement about the near future (i.e. "I will [over the course of the next X minutes] humbly eat this meal").Well? (And I always thought of it as a speech act, but that's an interesting question too.)I didn't reach a conclusion that satisfied me, but I did open up another fruitless line of internal inquiry: where did itadakimasu, as a set phrase said before eating, even come from? I know that people like to identify it with ancient Shinto, traditional Japanese respect for life, mists of time, &c., but can anyone point to an actual example of it (or even an equivalent phrase) being used in this way in a text written before, say, 1900?...
This is pure speculation, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if its genesis as a nationwide, prescribed, unchangeable thing was early this last century, when the government was using the schools to push three things which were necessary for their imperialist project: nationwide conformity of and obedience to behavioral norms, gratitude for whatever food was available, and shady revisionist Shinto.*
Having said all that, virtually this entire post could be shot down by an example or two of unambiguously non-conversational itadakimasu (or itadakisourou or whatever) from the 1800s or earlier. So does anyone have any?
Oh, and that asterisk? It goes to the following footnote, whose second sentence I should place prominently somewhere on the LH front page:
* Please do not interpret this as a cue to make barbed ironic comments about modern Japanese schools. This blog has a fifty-year minimum wait for political commentary.
Over at Poetry London there's a feature "Did Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound get it wrong? Four poets discuss the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry" in which John Weston, W.N. Herbert, Polly Clark, and Yang Lian respond to the subject of "the complex beauty of Chinese characters" and the ways Western writers have tried to make use of it in their translations, most notably Ezra Pound, who used as a jumping-off point Ernest Fenollosa’s essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" (online here with Pound's annotations). Last year I posted about Sarah Maguire's excellent analysis of Pound's Cathay; I think she's exactly right when she says "By the time Fenollosa's notebooks fell into his hands, Pound was steeped in Chinese art and profoundly curious about the radically different world it represented. What Ming Xie and other Chinese commentators point out is that, even by the time of Cathay, Pound grasped 'the paradigmatic frame of an entire culture'." In other words, Pound was not simply looking at characters through Fenollosa's overheated description and making stuff up, he was using Fenollosa's idea as a lens through which to focus what he already knew about Chinese culture and poetry. This, sadly, has not generally been the case with subsequent poets who saw what Pound achieved and wanted to smoke some of what he was having.
The discussants at Poetry London are aware of the trap, but they don't always avoid falling into it. This, by Herbert, particularly bothered me:
When Yang Lian discussed how, for him, each character seems to exist in its own self-sufficient universe, almost without any need for tense or grammar, it seemed to me that a Chinese reader looking at a character can be described as gazing into both pictorial and conceptual space. An English reader, on the other hand, is looking at a language which continually reveals its etymological roots. They are therefore gazing into time.Why is there this craving to see Chinese as some sort of weird Forbidden City? It's just a language, much like any other; it happens to be written with a more complicated set of graphs than most, but it's as full of borrowings (pace Herbert's "autonomous field of reference") and has just as much grammar as any other. Chinese readers are not "gazing into both pictorial and conceptual space," they're reading, just like anybody else. Yes, a Chinese writer can choose to foreground the pictorial element of a character, just as an English writer can choose to foreground a word's roots, but there's no inherent philosophical chasm—you play with the elements you find around you, and English poets can also play with the pictorial aspect of words. In general, I find the idea of the "exotic" one of the most unfortunate of our built-in preconceptions; it can lead to enjoyable works of art, but it makes it impossible to see what's actually going on, which has deleterious consequences in real life as well as literature.Further, a Chinese reader will find all their referents — everything that makes up pictograms, ideograms and phonograms — within Chinese. It is an autonomous field of reference. An English reader, however, is looking at hundreds of years of borrowing from foreign sources — Latin, Greek, French, German etc. The language presents itself as naturally gregarious, acquisitive, absorbent...
I loved Yang Lian’s description, for instance, of the way the character for ‘fresh’ is built out of the combination of the characters for ‘fish’ and ‘lamb’; or Zhou Zan’s use of the characters for ‘accident’ at the end of one line, and her neat reversal of the same two characters to produce the combination for ‘story’ at the end of the next. I understood we were only scratching the surface of a complex field of study, but felt that the excitement of that surface encounter was easily akin to the huge complex of information and emotions that overwhelmed me in visiting the Forbidden City for the first time.
An interesting post at Varieties of Unreligious Experience inspired a comment by Gawain (whose blog Heaven Tree I highly recommend) that is relevant here:
Aged 20, I resolved to learn both Chinese and Japanese to a degree of fluency which would allow me to know what they felt like "from the inside". In the course of this study I have spent huge swathes of time trying to figure out, par example, how the rather startlingly different Chinese terminology for the simple Indo-European verb "to take" (they actually DO have a number of different verbs for it, depending on the different ways of holding) might affect the way the Chinese conceptualize the world and interact with it. As my fluency with the language grew, these ideas began to wane for the simple reason that I began to realize that the Chinese world is not all that different from ours.(Via wood s lot.)
I've long been fascinated by Sana'a (صنعاء), the ancient capital of Yemen; its unique style of architecture is pleasing to my eye, and its Great Mosque is one of the oldest in the Islamic world. I just discovered an article, "The Secret Gardens of Sana'a," by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who's lived in Sana‘a for more than 20 years and whose Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land
Down on al-Zumur, one of the busiest market streets in the old city of Sana‘a, my neighbor Maryam the qashshamah sits behind a heap of greenery: deep green alfalfa, fodder for animals; gray-green ‘ansif (Astragalus abyssinicus) to give a zing to tea or to shafut, sorghum pancakes drenched in herby yogurt; parsley, rocket and fennel; and chives, lettuce and mint... All this I must climb over to get to my favorite breakfast place along the road, for Maryam’s shop is my doorstep. But the pile of vegetation—usually interspersed with small children—is a pleasing inconvenience. And in any case Maryam always disarms potential objections. “Here,” she says, holding out a bunch of basil and marigolds, “have a mushquri.”You will look in vain for that word in the standard Arabic reference books. Its origin goes back further—to Sabaic, one of the ancient South Arabian languages. Shqr (the vowels are anyone’s guess) is the cresting on a building, and 2000 years of semantic vagaries have turned it to mean a posy to decorate your turban—a crest for the head. Similarly, qashshamah, Maryam’s job title, and that of her male equivalent, the qashsham, as well as miqshamah (plural: maqaashim), the garden where they grow their produce, all have an origin just as old but better preserved: qshmt, the Sabaic word for a vegetable plot...
Other great Islamic cities, such as Damascus and Bukhara, are famous for the gardens that surround them, but in Sana‘a, they are all on the inside, walled gardens wrapped in a walled city, doubly hidden.The idea of a city full of hidden gardens is appealing to this city boy who's learned to appreciate the virtues of greenery.Altogether there are 43 of them. They range in area from nearly three hectares (7.4 acres) down to less than 1000 square meters (10,500 sq ft), all within the ring of mud wall and bastions that protects the historic core of Sana‘a. Only a handful are visible at all from street level, and of these, one alone, Miqshamat al-Qasimi, can be seen in its entirety. The unsuspecting visitor would never guess that these urban oases occupy 13 percent of the space within the city wall. Most of them bear that ancient name, miqshamah, and most are also attached to nearby mosques as waqf, property of a foundation and inalienable under Islamic law. A few, known by the more usual Arabic name bustan, are held by individual families. None are public parks (except for the fortunate eyes of neighboring householders). Whether stadium- or backyard-sized, miqshamah or bustan, they were all founded as working market gardens...
Fish names are a tangle, and bream is applied to all sorts of creatures, freshwater and marine, European and American and Australian. Fortunately, my concern here is purely with the word itself, and specifically its pronunciation. The OED gives only /bri:m/ (i.e., with the "long e" sound of seem); both Merriam-Webster's Collegiate and the New Oxford American say /brim, brēm/ (giving preference to the short-e form prounounced like brim); and the Australian Oxford says /brim/ is used for "any of several Australian marine fish, valued for sport and eating" and "any of several Australian freshwater perch," but the long-e form is used for "a similar marine and freshwater fish of Europe etc." So my general question is: if you actually use this word in speech, how do you pronounce it? (Please say where you're from as well.) And my question to Australian readers is: do you actually pronounce the word differently depending on whether it refers to Australian or European fish? That sounds unlikely to me, but when it comes to language just about anything is possible.
Claire of Anggarrgoon has put up her report on the Second European Workshop on Australian Languages, whose theme was "Narrative and Grammar"; there's all sorts of good stuff about grammatical devices and discourse categories, and I'd love to know more about "the heterodoxy of Northern Australia," but I confess what makes me unable to resist blogging it is the map she reproduces of the Eastern Mediterranean labeled in Burarra/Kriol. I think I'll print it out and use it to perplex people (like myself) who think they can make a pretty good guess about such things; the disconnect between language and geography should make it very difficult for anyone but an Australianist to figure out. And even looking at it, I had to think a moment to realize "Boníchiya" was Phoenicia; I have no idea how Cyprus becomes Jayprach.
There are three fairly obscure words reeve in English; I was familiar with the first two, a noun for various officials (ranging from 'a local administrative agent of an Anglo-Saxon king' to 'the council president in some Canadian municipalities') and a verb meaning 'to pass (as a rope) through a hole or opening,' but I just now discovered the third and most obscure, a noun meaning 'the female of the ruff (sandpiper).' All these definitions are from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, which is where I found it, and what first struck me was the bracketed etymology "origin unknown." On the face of it, it certainly looks related to ruff (itself pretty obscure, and I'm frankly not sure whether I knew the word or not), so I checked the OED, which says "Of obscure origin: the form REE n.2 is found earlier, but is less frequent." Huh. I tried the American Heritage and found "reeve The female ruff. Probably alteration of ruff1." Well, if the etymologists at AHD think that, how come the ones at Oxford and M-W don't?
And perhaps even more pressing a question: why is this incredibly obscure and pretty much useless word for the female of Philomachus pugnax in all these general-purpose dictionaries in the first place?
A story by John Noble Wilford in the NY Times reports on recent discoveries that have pushed the story of Mayan civilization back a considerable ways:
On the sacred walls and inside the dark passageways of ancient ruins in Guatemala, archaeologists are making discoveries that open expanded vistas of the vibrant Maya civilization in its formative period, a time reaching back more than 1,000 years before its celebrated Classic epoch.The writing, however, still needs to be deciphered:The intriguing finds, including art masterpieces and the earliest known Maya writing, are overturning old ideas of the Preclassic period. It was not a kind of dark age, as once thought, of a culture that emerged and bloomed in Classic times, at places like the spectacular royal ruin at Palenque beginning about A.D. 250 and extending to its mysterious collapse around 900...
Stephen Houston, of Brown, said, "We are entering a golden age of Preclassic study," adding that the discipline of Maya research "will be marked by a time before the discovery of these paintings in the jungle of Guatemala, and a time thereafter." Other experts have already focused new research on Preclassic ruins, some dating at least to 900 B.C., and are reinterpreting finds in light of the San Bartolo evidence.
One new puzzle yet to be solved is the Preclassic Maya script found at San Bartolo. The column of 10 glyphs, painted in black on white plaster, is definitely Maya writing from 300 B.C. to 200 B.C., experts say, but so far it is unreadable.Of course, I look forward to hearing from readers with inside information on this stuff; all I know is what I read in the papers.Dr. Saturno, the discoverer, and colleagues reported that the writing sample "implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica."
Dr. Houston, an expert in Maya glyphs at Brown, agrees, saying the sophistication of the scribe's technique and the inventory of signs suggest that "this was not a system invented the day before." How long before, a few generations or centuries, he added, is not known in the absence of further evidence, but its origins could be contemporaneous with Zapotec writing in Oaxaca, Mexico, or some symbolic systems of the Olmec along the Gulf Coast.
The origin of writing in Mesoamerica, the area of southern Mexico and parts of Central America, is a contentious issue. Zapotec scholars say writing started first in Oaxaca as early as 600 B.C. and spread into Maya territory to the south. But if it did, the San Bartolo glyphs show the time gap is closing.
Meanwhile, Lameen Souag of Jabal al-Lughat has discovered an Amnesty International press release ("Watemaal: Li risinkileb’ laj nat’ol na’ajej moko a’an ta li xb’ehil re xtuqub’alkil ru li ch’a’ajkilal chi rix li ch’och’") in a Mayan language! Pretty neat, though (as Lameen says) somewhat self-defeating.
I just stumbled upon a truly remarkable etymology. I've finally gotten around to reading Pushkin's Капитанская дочка [Kapitanskaya dochka, "The Captain's Daughter"], one of those all-time classics I should have read several decades ago, and I've reached the brigand song "Не шуми, мати зеленая дубровушка" in Chapter VIII (and if anyone can point me to an audio file of this or a similar choral song so I can get an idea of what it sounds like, I'll be deeply grateful). When the song's protagonist proudly answers back to the tsar that his comrades are the dark night and his knife, horse, and bow, the tsar begins his response Исполать тебе, детинушка крестьянский сын! 'Hail to thee, young fellow, son of the peasantry!' I was curious about the word Исполать [ispolát'] 'hail!'; I'd never seen a more Slavic-looking word, but the derivation wasn't immediately obvious. So I went to my trusty Vasmer, and discovered it was a 16th-century borrowing from Greek εις πολλά έτη [is pola eti] '[may you live] for many years,' which in rapid speech would become /ispoláti/! I'll bet that provides fertile ground for folk etymology.
(Oh, in case you were wondering, the tsar in the song promises the brave young brigand a fine home... in the form of a gallows.)
In last week's New Yorker, Lawrence Wright writes about Syrian filmmakers in "Captured on Film." The article isn't online (though you can get a good summary, along with stills of the movies discussed, from the slide show with Wright's voiceover linked at this page), but I wanted to share this striking passage:
In 1978, in conjunction with the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma, the club sponsored two weeks of "cinema and politics." There were two screenings a day in a seven-hundred-seat theater rented for the occasion. "We sold out every performance," [Omar] Amiralay recalled. The critics of Cahiers du Cinéma had chosen eighteen films, but the Syrian government banned more than half of them. Instead, the French critic Serge Daney sat on the stage and narrated detailed descriptions of them. "It was a screening without an image—an absolutely beautiful happening," Amiralay said.
(Incidentally, the phrase arte povera was in my head because of this post at Grant Barrett's blog, though I was already familiar with it. The post serves as a nice little snap vocabulary test—of the thirteen words listed, I knew seven and made more or less successful guesses about a couple more. One of the latter is macarism, whose more general definition is extremely pleasing.)
A very funny observation by John Holbo:
First, I happened to quote something from Hegel's Philosophy of MindI have to admit I don't think I would have been able to come up with Hegel's given name to save my life. Very strange. The only other examples that come to mind of famous writers known only by a surname are pseudonyms like Voltaire. (Via Avva, who wonders if his wife called him "Professor Hegel" even in bed.)This reminds me of a story. Someone - can’t remember who - was complaining about someone else - can’t remember who - giving Hegel lectures and presuming to call the subject ‘Georg Hegel’, or even just ‘Georg’. Apparently even Hegel’s wife didn’t call him ‘Georg’. The story goes: she called him ‘Professor Hegel’. But I still think it would be ok to include his initials on a cover.
The remarkable Wengu site does a good job of explaining itself, so I'll quote the welcome page:
This site allows you to read some Chinese classic texts in original language and with some translations. Your browser must display Chinese correctly. If you can't or don't want to get Chinese font, you can visit this site in No-Chinese mode. (A link at the foot brings you back to normal mode.) To help you reading these texts, each character is linked to a short on-line dictionary and a small pop-up appears if you stay a moment on a character. This site has a version française.When you go to one of the books, you have to click on a chapter number to get the text; here, for instance, is the start of the Analects. It's really amazing to have not only the Chinese text but the mouseover to show you the reading and meanings of each character. (Via MetaFilter.)Now, see intro, general table of contents or go directly to the Book of the Odes (Shi Jing), the Analects of Confucius (Lunyu), the Book of Changes (Yi Jing, I Ching), the Book of the Way and its Power (Daode Jing, Tao-te King) attributed to Lao-tse or the 300 Tang Poems anthology.
Stanley Kunitz died Sunday at the age of 100. There's a good selection of links at wood s lot; I'll just provide this wonderful poem (nicely discussed by Loren Webster here):
The Thing That Eats the HeartThe thing that eats the heart comes wild with years.
It died last night, or was it wounds before,
But somehow crawls around, inflamed with need,
Jingling its medals at the fang-scratched door.We were not unprepared: with lamp and book
We sought the wisdom of another age
Until we heard the action of the bolt.
A little wind investigates the page.No use pretending to the pitch of sleep;
By turnings we are known, our times and dates
Examined in the courts of either/or
While armless griefs mount lewd and headless doubts.It pounces in the dark, all pity-ripe,
An enemy as soft as tears or cancer,
In whose embrace we fall, as to a sickness
Whose toxins in our cells cry sin and danger.Hero of crossroads, how shall we defend
This creature-lump whose charity is art
When its own self turns Christian-cannibal?
The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart.
(From the NY Times obit, a grim reminder of how things were in this country within living memory: "He began writing poetry at the suggestion of a professor, then set out to earn a doctorate at Harvard. But on being told that he would not be offered a lectureship because the Anglo-Saxon students would resent being taught English literature by a Jew, he dropped out of the program in 1927 after completing the requirements for his master's degree.")
Lameen Souag of the always interesting Jabal al-Lughat has turned up the blog Awal_nu_Shawi about the language Tashawit (or Tachawit):
Tashawit is a variety of the Berber language (a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family). It is spoken by Ishawiyen, the Berbers of Eastern Algeria. Our aim is to provide a free platform for the discussion and dissemination of ideas related to Tashawit. We seek to expose the beauty of shawi words and explore their creative dimensions in poetry, prose and music. We believe that AWAL, the word is the gate of cultural heritage, and that writing is the key to its permanence.It mainly posts song lyrics, occasionally with English translations, as in this lullaby:
sussemBut there's also a longish discussion of case markers in Shawi Berber. I wonder if there are other Berber blogs out there?sussem sussem a 3alla memmi
ennig a3law i babak
babak iroH iba3dek
yewwi TarumiT ijja yemmek
sussem sussem a 3alla memmi
ennig a3law du qachabi
babak iroH ijja lwali.Hush
Hush hush 3alla, my son
Let us weave a burnous for your daddy
Your daddy who took off and left you
He left your mother for a French woman
Hush hush 3alla, my son
I am weaving a burnous and a qachabi
Your father abandoned his family.
I've developed a pretty high threshold of interest for the eggcorns they investigate so assidously over at the Log: once you realize how common it is for people to get phrases wrong (free reign for free rein being a classic example in writing, for all intensive purposes instead of for all intents and purposes in speech), you get jaded. But Jeanette Winterson has renewed my enthusiasm, in a wonderful essay for The Times, by taking note of the stories people invent to account for what they take to be the idiom. She starts off with a beautiful example:
The other day my elderly country neighbour asked for a bit of help to get his new washing machine into the kitchen. That generation never use “it”, always, “he” or “she”, so I wasn’t surprised to hear the washing machine called “he”, but I was surprised by what followed: “My old washing machine, he’s given up the goat,” he said, in a broad Gloucestershire accent.People are lousy at accurate reproduction, but they're great at storytelling, and I could happily read an entire book of anecdotes like that. (Winterton herself "laboured long into adult life really believing that there was such a thing as a 'damp squid', which of course there is, and when things go wrong they do feel very like a damp squid to me, sort of squidgy and suckery and slippery and misshapen. Is a faulty firework really a better description of disappointment?")“The goat?” I replied. “Are you sure?” “Oh, yes,” said my neighbour, “ain’t you never heard that expression before, given up the goat?” “Well, not exactly . . . where does it come from?” “Ah well,” said my neighbour, “in the old days, when folks didn’t have much, and mainly worked the land, a man would set store by his animals, especially his goat, and when he come to die, he would bequeath that goat to his heirs, and that is why we say, ‘he’s given up the goat’.”
Courtesy of Syntinen Laulu at Wordorigins.org.
Anyone interested in Old Russian literature owes a debt to John Bruno Hare, proprietor of the Internet Sacred Text Archive, who has put online the 1915 Leonard A. Magnus translation of the Слово о полку Игореве [Slovo o polku Igoreve], which can be and has been translated in various ways: the Lay of the Host of Igor, the Tale of Igor's Army, or (as Nabokov has it) the Song of Igor's Campaign. Don't ask me why Magnus chose the word armament; yes, it once meant (in the OED's words) "a force military or (more usually) naval, equipped for war," but it hasn't meant that for quite some time now, and it's not "appropriate to the period" because it didn't exist before the 17th century, so it seems pointlessly perverse. But never mind that, and never mind that Nabokov called this version "a bizarre blend of incredible blunders, fantastic emendations, erratic erudition and shrewd guesses." Nabokov was hard on everyone, and besides, the Nabokov translation is both under copyright and out of print (hard as that is to believe), whereas the Magnus is free for the taking and now available to anyone with an internet connection. And it's not just a translation: the bulk of the book consists of introductory material about the history of the MS, the history of Russia, the construction of the poem, the language and grammar, and so on (not to mention ten genealogical tables, which Nabokov admitted were extremely handy), and the text itself is presented in parallel columns with the original on the left, and not in modernized spelling either:
Не лѣпо ли ны бяшетъ, братие,Of course there are better texts available, but having the parallel translation there is extremely convenient. (Thanks for the link go to Plep.)
начяти старыми словесы
трудныхъ повѣстий о пълку
Игоревѣ, Игоря Сватъславлича?
I'm a bit late with this, but I wanted to get enough of my books categorized that my own statistics page would make an impressive showing (I'll bet no other LT users come close to 145 languages!). Anyway, LibraryThing has added a feature I've been wanting since the beginning, language support:
• Every book has three fields: primary language, secondary language and original language.Now, I have some complaints about the system. It would be useful to have more than "primary" and "secondary" fields; I have a number of books that have three equal languages, like Moderní Perská Frazeologie a Konversace by Mansour Shaki, which has everything in Czech, Persian, and English. And the "complete" menu of languages is immensely frustrating; it includes extremely minor languages like Yapese and breaks French down into Old and Middle as well as the modern variety, but lumps all the Chinese "dialects" (actually separate languages) under the same heading, so that I have to file my Cantonese dictionary, phrasebook, etc., as if they were Mandarin. Meanwhile it perversely insists on breaking the single language Serbocroatian down into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, so that I have to decide for each book how to file it; I pretty much flip a coin, except that I give the original language of my Andric novels as "Bosnian"—it would probably piss him off, but books like Bridge on the Drina and Bosnian Chronicle are full of Turkish loan words and local expressions, and if you're going to use "Bosnian" for anything it might as well be that.
• Languages are drawn from Amazon, your library record or the whole LibraryThing collection...
• The catalog shows "language" and "original language" fields. Go to "change fields" to see them.
• Language can be edited within your catalog, much as tags are.
• Each language has its own dedicated page (eg., French). At present, these only show the most popular works originally in that language.
Similarly, there's no listing for Hindustani, so I have to choose whether to list certain books under Hindi or Urdu when the choice makes no sense. Also, the menu doesn't include Dari (the variant of Persian spoken in Afghanistan) or Sicilian (they have a listing for Sardinian, for Pete's sake!), and even though they have Indo-European (other) and Sino-Tibetan (other) and Romance (other), they don't have Turkic (other), or Old Turkish either, which forces me to pick "Turkish" for books that don't really fit there. But enough bitching and moaning; I'm very glad Tim did this, and consider this another plug for LT. If you haven't seen it yet and you love books, go over and sign up!
I absolutely have to pass on this AskMetaFilter comment by the learned and much-traveled polyglot zaelic; one begins to get a feel for how he came by his polyglottery:
In my family, when we spoke English we were generally being nice. For the nasty backbiting stuff we had a pool of languages that would always leave somebody out of the loop - Hungarian, Yiddish, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. I learned Romanian completely through the bitter invective of my Grandmother, who hadn't taught it to her own kids, who in turn, used Russian as a secret language of hate. As adults it came as a surprise to find everybody in the family was fully conversant in Spanish — no one ever told anybody else, because it was only used to whisper nasty comments about people in private. And my Mom has just started to teach me abusive language in Turkish that she learned in the 1940s working at her family's Sephardic Turkish restaurant in Budapest.Wow. And I thought it was impressive that my mother's parents could lapse into Norwegian when they didn't want the kids to understand.
If any of you have similar anecdotes, the microphone is, as always, open.
I imagine the name of C.T. Onions is familiar to many of my readers; he joined the staff of the OED in 1895 and became a full editor in 1914 (he wrote the final entry in the first edition, "zyxt obs. (Kentish) 2nd sing. ind. pres. of SEE v"), and at the end of his long life he was putting the finishing touches on the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), published a year after his death. I don't know why it never occurred to me to check the etymology of Onions, especially given that its bearer was perhaps the most famous English etymologist, but I just got around to looking it up (as I eventually get around to looking everything up) and discovered that it is not (as one might think) from the edible rounded bulb of Allium cepa but is one of a number of anglicized variants (Eynon, Enion, Inions, Onians, etc.) of the Welsh name Einion, which is from Latin Annianus (best known, though that isn't saying much, as the name of an Alexandrian monk). It's also pronounced un-EYE-unz, though as the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names informs us, UN-yunz "is appropriate for C. T. ~, philologist, grammarian and an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; also for Oliver ~, author." But now that I look the latter up (never having heard of him), I find that the Wikipedia article says "pronounced oh-NY-ons." Oh dear, oh dear—I hate it when reference works disagree! (Yes, I know, it's only Wikipedia, where anybody can write whatever they want, but why would somebody insert such an odd bit of information unless they were basing it on something?)
I imagine Brits know this from childhood, but it had somehow escaped my notice that Tennyson not only hailed from Lincolnshire but wrote dialect poetry. I quote the beginning of "The Church-Warden and the Curate":
Eh? good daäy! good daäy! thaw it bean't not mooch of a daäy.It's not exactly "Crossing the Bar," but it's not without its charms. (Casselty is defined in the glossary as 'casualty, chance weather.')
Nasty casselty weather! An' mea haäfe down wi' my haäy!
It's always fun to make guesses about unfamiliar words. The Tensor has a post on this very subject, introducing "two separate bits of terminology associated with modern sport fencing: homologated and maraging." If you already know these words, you're presumably a fencer (and I'd be interested to know how you pronounce the latter, since it seems to have undergone a curious process of foreignizing in some circles in the few decades of its existence). If you don't, take a stab (so to speak) at the meaning of "homologated jackets, britches, and masks" and "maraging blades" (or, more properly as far as I can tell, "maraged blades"). Then pop over to The Tensor and get the facts (which suprised me).
Pok-ta-pok, according to the OED, is "the Maya name of the sacred ball game of Middle America, called tlachtli by the Aztecs, which was played on a court as a religious ritual. The object of the game was to knock a rubber ball through a stone ring, using only the hips, knees, and elbows." Now, when I ran across this entry, it struck me forcibly because I recently got Long Hidden: The Olmec Series
Update. Jesse Sheidlower, Editor-at-Large of the Oxford English Dictionary, informs me that the revised OED entry for this term explains that the form pok-ta-pok is itself an error; the correct word in Yucatec Maya is actually pokolpok, and the ta- form is an error introduced by Frans Blom in 1932 and repeated throughout the literature. The classical Maya name for the game was pitz.
Further update. The September 2006 quarterly update of the OED just came out, and they've put the revised entry (dated June 2006) online. The etymology now reads:
[Alteration of, or error for, Yucatec Maya pokolpok (1877 in J. PIO PEREZ, Diccionario de la lengua Maya).
Blom states (p. 497 of the article cited in quot. 1932) that he adopted the word to signify the game after consulting Juan Martinez Hernandez ‘the outstanding Maya linguist of today’. This inaccurate name remained current for some time. The classical Maya name was pitz.]
Joel Martinsen reports on a Chinese publication that makes me wish I knew Chinese:
Among all of the copycat urban lifestyle magazines, the paparazzi rags, and the ever-changing array of undistinguished special-interest publications that make up China's periodicals market, Yaowen-Jiaozi (咬文嚼字) stands out as one of the most delightfully peculiar magazines available. With a title variously translated as "Correct Wording," "Verbalism," and "Chewing Words," it turns a critical eye to the misuse and abuse of language in Chinese society...What fun! But lest you think they're nothing but "a curmudgeonly group of conservative language pedants," they're quite willing to accomodate change when it makes sense to them:Perhaps there's a bit of guilty pleasure to be had in unmasking the usage foibles of major papers, but it's done with a wink rather than a warning of impending social breakdown. The strongest condemnation is reserved for those who should know better: copyeditors who let malapropisms slip by, sign-makers who splash typos across storefronts, and monks in TV shows who mispronounce their Sanskrit transliterations.
In 2005, the magazine featured a different evening paper's errors in each issue, while this year the scheduled targets are television stations. In addition to biting the popular media over language misuse, Yaowen-Jiaozi also chews on pressing usage questions: What's the pronunciation of 峠, which appears in names in translations of Japanese novels? What's the correct usage of · ? What are the usage differences between 三部曲 and 三步曲?
On the subject of Internet slang, for example, the magazine has no issue with its use online, although it cautions against its use in more conventional communication. Other areas of language change and development are given the same sort of consideration. After an examination of the term "since all along" (一直以来), the editors conclude:Oh, and the answers to those "pressing usage questions":Back in 2000, this magazine mentioned "since all along." At the time we took a position against the term, and we maintain that position now. We believe that there is a semantic contradiction between "all along" and "since."....However,....in practice, we cannot find another term to replace "since all along." Although in many circumstances, "since all along" is used to indicate "all along" or "for a long time," they are in fact not identical. We ought to respect society's power of choice in language. As we have not found any words to replace it, this magazine will no longer criticize the use of "since all along."
峠 has the provisional pronunciation shà, though some people pronounce it kǎ. The separator · should be allowed in titles—the editors conclude: "To say that if there is no rule in Punctuation Usage then it must not be used means that punctuation usage would never develop, and it would be unable to satisfy real usage needs." 三部曲 is a foreign import for "trilogy" that applies to literary works; it has been tweaked to apply to three-step processes using the homophone 三步曲.Many thanks to P. Kerim Friedman for the link!
Thanks to a MetaFilter comment by xueexueg, I've discovered the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini, which, as xueexueg says, will be the OED of older Italian. It's only up to the letter D (and is only "quasi complete" for A and B) and uses only texts from before 1375, but it's extremely comprehensive and fun to consult. Looking up amore (naturalmente!), we find first a full list of spellings (ammore, amò, amô, amor, amor', âmor, amore, ämore, amori, amorre, amors, amur, amure, amuri, amurj, mor, 'mor, 'more), a list of collocations it occurs in (amare per amore, amor falso, amore fraterno, amore paterno, amor fino...), a set of definitions, and finally the heart of the entry, a list of citations illustrating each of the senses:
1 Sentimento di chi desidera o intrattiene un rapporto intimo ed esclusivo, spirituale o fisico, con un'altra persona; affetto intenso, passione.A splendid project; I hope it's well funded and perseveres to the end of the alphabet.[1] Raimb. de Vaqueiras, Contrasto, c. 1190 (gen.), 53, pag. 165: Si per m'amor ve chevei, / oguano morrei de frei: / tropo son de mala lei / li Provenzal.
[2] Giacomo da Lentini, c. 1230/50 (tosc.), 19c.1, pag. 275: Amor è un[o] desio che ven da core / per abondanza di gran piacimento...
[3] Pamphilus volg., c. 1250 (venez.), [Panfilo], pag. 47.20: E chascun amore lo qual non è pasudo, çoè saciado de çogi e de solaci, sì è debele et enfermo.
[4] Andrea da Grosseto (ed. Selmi), 1268 (tosc.), L. 3, cap. 19, pag. 256.5: Et sappi, che a l'amor perfetto fa fine 'l tempo et non l'animo; perciò che, nonn- è in podestà dell'animo del lasciare e di rimanersi de l'amore.
[5] Giovanni, 1286 (prat.), 8, pag. 22: Dialtuccia piace(n)te i(n) aspecto, / suo viso rispre(n)de i(n) dilecto: / alchuno no(n) fue sì in p(er)fecto / amore. [...]
I have received a welcome shipment from Language Log Plaza: a copy of Far from the Madding Gerund
And all of that is beside the real point, which is that this is a tremendous pleasure to read. I've read just about everything in it already, but I find myself inexorably drawn to read it all again. The first selection is one of my all-time favorite posts, last year's The disappearing modal: for those who'll believe anything, which contains this immortal exchange:
Q: Is James Cochran, then, nothing but a mendacious pontificating old windbag?I read that several times over when it appeared online (once, out loud, to my wife), and I've reread it again now with undiminished joy. The selection after that is They are a prophet, which promotes one of my favorite causes, singular they. Then comes The blowing of Strunk and White's rules off, an attack on one of my favorite targets, and after that a demolition job on the Chicago Manual of Style's sadly deficient new grammar section ("They commissioned a tired rehash of traditional grammar repeating centuries-old errors of analysis instead of trying to obtain a more up-to-date presentation. A real lost opportunity that has lessened the authority of a wonderful reference book, one that on topics from punctuation to citation to indexing to editing can really be trusted")... Well, it's all good stuff, is what I'm trying to say.
A: Yes, it would appear that he is an utter fraud.
Furthermore, it fills an important gap: there are plenty of good linguistics book out there, but they're written for linguists and students for the most part, and they tend to require a serious commitment of time and effort. And there are plenty of language books aimed at the general public, with short, easy-to-digest takes on words and language use, but they're almost uniformly terrible, written by people who may be experts on some other subject but know nothing about linguistic facts, and who keep passing on the same tired myths and lies to the public at large. This book does not demand that you clear your head and sit down with furrowed brow for several hours; nothing is more than a few pages long, and technical vocabulary is kept to a minimum. And it's written by real linguists who actually know what they're talking about, which means that the more people read it, the less acceptance there will be for the nonsense peddled by the Strunks and Whites of the world, and the less occasion I will have to grow red in the face and sputter incoherently. So get copies for everyone you know!
In a spirit of full disclosure, I will point out that Languagehat gets five mentions in the book (yes, of course the first thing I did was look myself up in the index), including a reference to my citation of Aristotle on blogs, which I hope will now enter the wider world of discourse and become as well known as the burning of the Library of Alexandria to provide fuel for bathhouses. I must say, though, I was saddened by the quote from my How many new words?, which in their version begins as follows: "Lieberman [sic] rightly (in my opinion) discounts the trademarks..." I know Mark hates it when people misspell his name, and I know I had a bad habit of doing that, but I broke myself of it, and I went back and fixed it in that entry, but to no avail: my oafish slip is now immortalized for the world to see, speared by that cold, cold [sic]! Mea culpa, O Marce, mea maxima culpa!
As an American, I've never actually had any experience with Bovril (and I can't say I have any desire to), but I certainly know the word. Imagine my surprise when I was leafing through the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
His sf novel is The Coming Race (1871[...]), a utopia set in an underground lost world inhabited by an evolved form of Homo sapiens, larger and wiser than surface dwellers. This race derives its moral and physical virtue from vril, an electromagnetic form of energy of universal utility which fuels flying machines and automata, and even makes telepathy possible. (The UK beef-tea Bovril took its name from vril.)This is no urban myth; the official website of the company that makes the stuff says "The name Bovril comes from an unusual word Johnston found in a book. 'Vril' was 'an electric fluid' which 'cured diseases and established equilibrium of natural powers.' He combined it with the first two letters of the Latin word for beef 'Bos'." But the OED's etymology (yes, they have an entry for Bovril—they're Brits, aren't they?) says simply "f. L. bōs, bovis, ox, cow." Were they ashamed to cite a trashy popular novel? If so, they'd gotten over it by the time the Visor-Vywer fascicle appeared in 1920; it includes the entry:
vrilThe last citation is from 1888 (Pall Mall G. 27 Dec. 4/1 If so,.. we are within hailing distance of the discovery of vril); I think it should be brought back into circulation. Use the vril, Luke!
[Invented by Lytton.]
A mysterious force imagined as having been discovered by the people described in one of Lytton's novels.
1871 LYTTON Coming Race vii. 47 These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers.
Darija "is the term used by speakers of Maghreb Arabic to name the varieties they speak" (it's also called darja); Lucy Melbourne, an American professor and creative writer who teaches English and American literature at Mohammed V University in Rabat, has an interesting discussion of it in the Morocco Times:
Darija, what the participants at the Salon du Livre clearly recognized as the real deal, is the spoken vernacular Arabic of Morocco and, aside from a few songs, has rarely been written down. Hence it is a kind of fluid, oral medium in which people swim in common but never see themselves in the fixed reflection of individual reading.She describes the attempts of some Moroccans to write books in dialect, and the opposition evoked (reminiscent of the language controversy in Greece, which saw riots break out over a vernacular translation of the Gospels). A fascinating read, and I thank Liosliath for bringing it to my attention.Animated by the rhythms of Morocco's hypnotic storytellers and stinging with the barbs of village gossip, Darija reaches deep into the Moroccan soul, shaping its psyche and its often irreverent wit.
The written language, on the other hand, is in its turn rarely spoken: the sinuous curves dotted and dashed of classical Arabic are reserved for the print media—and the Koran.
When spoken, classical Arabic, like most languages cut off from their umbilical in sound, is pontificated as sermon or filtered through the sterilized, hot potato equivalent of a BBC announcer anxious to disguise his class origins.
In short, Moroccans are linguistic schizophrenics: if literate—and only 51% are—they must leap a thousand times a day the chasm between body and mind, between the organic timbre and gestures of their mother tongue and the patriarchal reverberations of a silently echoing script.
Incidentally, I learned about darja from Lameen Souag, whose Grammar of Algerian Darja is no longer available at its former Geocities site. Lameen says, "I hope to reestablish my website sometime soon - can anyone recommend a good free/very cheap website hosting service other than Geocities?" Anyone who can help him out will be doing a service both for linguistics and for me: I need to update my links!
My wife asked me about the surname Aiuvalasit, which she had just encountered in a list, and I drew a complete blank. Googling has [wrongly, apparently] convinced me that it's a Jewish name, but that's as far as I can get. Any further information (pronunciation, alternate spellings, and of course etymology) will be much appreciated!
Update. It seems Ajovalasit is a much more common spelling, and it's apparently a Sicilianized Greek name; I'm still hoping for more details.
I just found (via wood s lot) a wonderful interview with one of my favorite novelists, Richard Powers, but when I realized the interview was from 1999 I thought "I must have linked to it before and just forgotten about it." When I checked, though, I discovered to my horror that I've never even mentioned Powers on LH. So it's high time I informed you all that the man's combination of intelligence, wide knowledge, and brilliant writing is unparalleled, and you should all run out and start reading him right away. The book that made me a believer was Galatea 2.2
My idea is that successful writing advances as its own, complex, living hierarchy, one that mirrors the kind of complex hierarchy that we living beings are. We exist at the cellular level or even the nucleic or chemical level, at the level of organs and systems, at the level of the complete organism, and at the social level. All of these different levels have their analogies in a good story, levels from diction on up to meaning, and in a good story, all these levels advance simultaneously, in concert. We may not even be aware of these phenomena as we read, but in great fiction, all the parts and subassemblies of creation are integral and mutually supporting. You could look at a sentence of a well-made story and see it as a fractal microcosm of the entire workings of the story. You can hear in the syntax, or in the diction of a sentence, the sensibility that drives voice, and the voice that drives character, and the character that drives drama. Again, a good story exemplifies a continuum, both discrete and continuous, and it works because all of its levels participate in a negotiated conversation with one another....The novelist's job is to say what it means to be alive. I don't think there are any wrong ways of doing that; I think there are wrong ways of not doing that, of avoiding it, but I think there's nothing that you could throw into that hopper that would be irrelevant. The more you can treat—providing you can continue to synthesize it into something that's both intellectually and emotionally engaging—the better. Right now a lot of fiction restricts itself totally to dramatic revelation, raising a lot of proscriptions about the way that fiction can and can't function. The direct introduction of discursive material has been considered anathema for a long time. I've been trying in different ways to violate that prohibition from my first book on. True, you can get more emotive power over your reader by dramatic revelation than by discursive narrative. But you can get more connection with discursive narrative! The real secret is to triangulate between these two modes, getting to places that neither technique could reach in isolation. Because that's how the human organism works. We employ all sorts of intelligences, from low-level bodily intuitions to high-level, syllogistic rationalism. It's not a question of which way of knowing the world is the right one.
I was struck by the fact that Powers, like myself, spent time in Thailand as a kid, though he was there a decade later and thus saw Bangkok as "a capital for American servicemen on R & R" rather than the quiet little city laced with canals that I remember.
Incidentally, wood s lot is full of good stuff today, including various links celebrating May and Giuseppe Ungaretti ("Translating Ungaretti") and a new online magazine called Otoliths that looks worth investigating.
