NPR's "Talk of the Nation" today features a conversation between Grant Barrett, Geoffrey Pullum, and Martha Barnette on "new words, new blogs and new usage"; if you've got a spare half-hour, it's a real pleasure. Grant and Geoff are two of my favorite wordanistas, and it's great to hear them provide genuinely informed discussion of topics usually gnawed endlessly by cliche-ridden ignoramuses (and it was a particular thrill to hear Geoff's peculiar accent, the result of a remarkably checkered career: born in Irvine, Scotland; moved to West Wickham, in Kent, while still very young; moved to London; joined a rock band and worked in Germany in nightclub residencies and on American air bases; went to college in York; moved to the States...). I particularly liked the sympathetic and friendly way they dealt with a young woman who called in to complain about people who write till for until and thru for through (yes, they explained that till is the older form). Here's a link to the show's webpage; click on Listen (you'll get a choice between RealAudio and WindowsMedia) and enjoy it. (Via Wordorigins.org.)
I'm reading (finally—I bought it 15 years ago!) Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, and she mentions that in the 8th century the Chinese called the Arabs Ta-shih (or Dashi in pinyin). Anybody know the etymology?
While I'm at it, I'll just complain about the absurd mix of toponyms in this passage:
This is understandable because, according to [Pegolotti's] itinerary, it will take 25 days by ox-wagon to go from Tana to Astrakhan, another 20 days by camel to reach Organci, another 35-40 days by camel-wagon to reach Otrar, 45 days by pack-ass to Armalec, another 70 days with asses to reach Camexu on the Chinese frontier, 45 more days to the river that leads to Cassai (Kinsai or Hangchow), and then finally 30 days overland to Peking (Khanbalik).To be consistent, the names should be Tana (Azov), Gintarchan (Astrakhan), Organci (Urgench), Oltrarre (Otrar), Armalec (?Kulja), Camexu (Ganchau), and Garnalec (Khanbalik, modern Peking). (Cassai is OK as is.) What a mess!
Everybody likes unusual words; that's why books like They Have a Word for It sell so well (see my grumpy strictures here). I do too (as should be obvious by now), but I have the quirk of insisting that the words actually exist, which makes most such books an annoyance to me. (An exception: Erin McKean's Weird and Wonderful Words and More Weird and Wonderful Words, whose entries are taken straight from the OED.) Now Grant Barrett, like Erin an actual lexicographer, has come out with The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English: A Crunk Omnibus for Thrillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age, and I'm delighted to report that not only are the entries impeccably sourced, they're provided with full citations. If you want to see what it's like, you have only to visit Grant's blog Double-Tongued Word Wrester (which I discussed here), since the presentation is the same (and I presume many of the entries in the book are from the blog). Just flipping the pages will introduce you, as it has me, to all manner of hitherto unknown lexical items; on facing pages, for instance, are vogue 'a tire,' and (one of my favorites) vuzvuz 'a derogatory name for an Ashkenazic Jew... This term is usually used within the religion, especially by Sephardic Jews.' (How my friend Allan would have loved that!)
My only quibble would be that some entries have appeared in other dictionaries; tools of ignorance 'catcher's gear' is in The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, for example, and dhimmi 'a non-Muslim living with limited rights under Muslim rule' is in the big Webster's. With so many unrecorded words out there clamoring for recognition, it seems a shame to give preference to those already wearing the crown of legitimacy.
Avva recently linked to an old post in which he quoted at length a C.S. Lewis essay on Gawin Douglas's great 16th-century translation of the Aeneid into Scots (Avva translates the essay into Russian, but reproduces the original as well). I like the section on "quaintness" so much, and it resonates so strongly with my own feelings about the idea of the exotic in general, that I'm going to quote it here:
Poetically, the first impression which Douglas's version makes on a modern English reader is one of quaintness. I am glad that the question of quaintness should cross our path so early in the book; let us get it out of the way once and for all. To the boor all that is alien to his own suburb and his 'specious present' (of about five years) is quaint. Until that reaction has been corrected all study of old books is unprofitable. To allow for that general quaintness which mere distance bestows and thus to be able to distinguish between authors who were really quaint in their own day and authors who seem quaint to us solely by the accident of our position—this is the very pons asinorum of literary history. An easy and obvious instance would be Milton's 'city or suburban' in Paradise Regained. Everyone sees that Milton could not have foretold the associations that these words now have. In the same way, when Douglas speaks of the Salii 'hoppand and siggand wonder merely' in their 'toppit hattis' it is easy to remember that 'top hats', in our sense, were unknown to him. But it is not so easy to see aright the real qualities of his Scots language in general. Since his time it has become a patois, redolent (for those reared in Scotland) of the nursery and the kaleyard, and (for the rest of us) recalling Burns and the dialectal parts of the Waverley novels. Hence the laughter to which some readers will be moved when Douglas calls Leucaspis a 'skippair', or Priam 'the auld gray', or Vulcan the 'gudeman' of Venus; when comes becomes 'trew marrow', and Styx, like Yarrow, has 'braes', when the Trojans 'kecklit all' (risere) at the man thrown overboard in the boat race, or, newly landed in Latium, regaled themselves with 'scones'. For we see the language that Douglas wrote 'through the wrong end of the long telescope of time'. We forget that in his day it was a courtly and a literary language,not made for village churlsUntil we have trained ourselves to feel that 'gudeman' is no more rustic or homely than 'husband' we are no judges of Douglas as a translator of Virgil. If we fail in the training, then it is we and not the poet who are provincials.
But for high dames and mightly earls
About this first mental adjustment there can be no dispute; but there is another adjustment which I think necessary and which may not be so easily agreed to. Virgil describes Aeneas, on hearing Turnus's challenge, as laetitia exsultans; Douglas says 'he hoppit up for joy, he was so glad'. To get over the low associations of the verb 'hop' in modern English is the first adjustment. But even when this has been done, there remains something—a certain cheerful briskness—in Douglas which may seem to us very un-Virgilian. Here is another example; Virgil writes:When I googled around to find a link for Gawin Douglas, I discovered the Britannica article, which says: "he is medieval in the casual way he brings his original up to date, and in the absence of 'classical' diction and gravity of tone." So you see that Lewis's strictures are not out of date, any more than Douglas's lively Scots lines.Quamvis increpitent socii et vi cursus in altum Vela voccet, possisque sinus implere secundos. (iii. 454)Douglas translates:Ya, thocht thi fallowis cry out, Hillir haill! On burd! ane fair wind blawis betwix twa schetis![Hillir hail - a nautical cry; On burd - "aboard"]It is admirably vivid; but it sounds very unlike the Virgil we knew at school. Let us suspend judgement and try another passage.
lumenque juventaeDouglas says that Aenaes' mother made him 'Lyk till ane yonkeir with twa lauchand ene' [lauchand ene - "laughing eyes"]. The picture is fresh and attractive; somehow unlike the Aeneas of our imagination. But is that because Virgil has never said anything about the beauty of Aeneas, both here and in other places? On the contrary, Virgil quite clearly has told us that his hero was of godlike beauty. There has been something in our minds, but not in the mind of Douglas, which dimmed the picture; our idea of the great king and warrior and founder apparently shrinks (as Virgil's and Douglas's did not) from the delighted vision of male beauty. Douglas shocks us by being closer to Virgil than we are. Once a man's eyes have been opened to this, he will find instances everywhere. Rosea cervice refulsit: 'her nek schane like until the rois in May'. Do you prefer Dryden's "she turned and made appear Her neck refulgent"?
Purpureum et laetos oculis adflarat honores. (i. 590)But refulsit cannot possibly have had for a Roman ear the 'classical' quality which 'refulgent' has for an English. It must have felt much more like 'schane'. And rosea has disappeared altogether in Dryden's version—and with it half the sensuous vitality of the image. Thus, again, Douglas translates omnibus in templis matrum choris by 'in caroling the lusty ladeis went'. If this seems altogether too merry and too medieval, turn to Dryden again, and you will find that Dryden has flatly refused to translate those five words at all. And that brings us to the real point.
It is hard to blame Dryden forsuppressing matrum chorus. In the style which he is using it simply cannot be translated. As long as we are under the spell of schoolroom 'classicality' we can do nothing; 'women', 'wives', 'matrons' are all equally fatal. But it will go at once and delightfully into the medieval line about ladies 'caroling'. And the reason is that at this point there is a real affinity between the ancient and the medieval world, and a real separation between both of them and the modern. And as soon as we become aware of this we realize what it is that has made so many things in Douglas seem to us strangely un-Virgilian. It is not the real Virgil; it is that fatal 'classical' misconception of all ancient poets which the humanists have fastened upon our education—the spectral solemnity, the gradus epithets, the dictionary language, the decorum which avoid every contact with the senses and the soil. (Dryden tells us that though he knew mollis amaracus was sweet marjoram, he did not so translate it, for fear 'those village words' should give the reader 'a mean idea of the thing'). Time after time Douglas is nearer to the original than any version could be which kept within the limits of later classicism. And that is almost another way of saying that the real Virgil is very much less 'classical' than we had supposed. To read the Latin again with Douglas's version fresh in our minds is like seeing a favourite picture after it has been cleaned. Half the 'richness' and the 'sobriety' which we have been taught to admire turns out to have been only dirt; the 'brown trees' disappear and where the sponge has passed the glowing reds, the purples, and the transparent blues leap into life.
As for "gradus epithets," here's the OED on gradus:
Short for Gradus ad Parnassum ‘a step to Parnassus’, the Latin title of a dictionary of prosody until recently used in English public schools, intended as an aid in Latin versification, both by giving the ‘quantities’ of words and by suggesting poetical epithets and phraseology. Hence applied to later works of similar plan and object; also extended as in Greek gradus, and transf.
According to a news story, the history of the Basque language has been pushed back centuries:
Archaeologists have unearthed inscriptions in the Basque language that could date from as early as the third century, a find Basque linguists hailed as extraordinarily important...Until now, a text written by a monk in both Castillian Spanish and Basque had been the oldest written example of the language, dating from the year 1040.
The new inscriptions were found at a Roman site near the Basque town of Vitoria in northern Spain, and included the names of colours, verbs and references to God, Christianity and the Holy Family etched into bricks, bones and pieces of glass.I'm afraid my first response is skepticism—Larry Trask instilled in me a deep suspicion of any and all claims pertaining to Basque—but if it's true, it's exciting. Anybody know more about it?The head of the excavation, Eliseo Gil, said the pieces would not be dated exactly until October or November, but members of the Academy of the Basque Language, Euskaltzaindia, said the find was extraordinary
Among the words inscribed were the colours "urdin" (blue), "zuri" (white) and "gorri" (red), verbs "edan" (drink) "ian" (eat) and "lo" (sleep), the excavation team said.
Another piece read "Iesus, Ioshse ata ta Miriam ama" (Jesus, the father Joseph and the mother Mary) while another had the greeting "Geure ata zutan" (May the Father be with you).
(Thanks for the link, Edward!)
Update. The texts are fake.
This extremely interesting post at bethemedia explains the uses and abuses of "predictive text messaging," a phenomenon of which I was unaware. Sample and conclusion:
And kids (and Media Types from London) are telling me my blog is totally Book. WHAT? Here's the great new thing. Because 'Book' comes up before the word 'Cool' on T9, effectively kids are now re-associating the 'Signified' - our perfect Platonic notion of 'Cool' - with a signifier that shares no traditional meaning derived from existing language, but jumps to another (almost) randomly associated signifier - simply because of T9 associating them through structural similarities.Thanks for the link, Ben!Language is set to evolve a new way - around technology, and with marvellous effects. And random association and correct spelling look like they will be preserved in the process.
It's been a rough day, people. Oh, nothing serious, just the usual detritus of life. I woke up to find we couldn't get onto the internet; that sometimes happens, but usually it goes away in an hour or two. This time it didn't. I could edit my Word files, but I was going to have to e-mail them on deadline. I called Time Warner and went through the usual round of menus and getting passed from one helpful but helpless human to another. They said they'd send somebody. Meanwhile, my mother-in-law was anxious, my wife was having a difficult time at work, and the World Cup games weren't going well. By the time a genial fellow showed up and got us back online (it was a router problem), hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of spam comments had accumulated on my poor blog—I've never had such a heavy attack. I think perhaps "tamilu" hit every single thread that hadn't been closed; I'm still deleting them by the score, but I'm taking time out to post, because I've got to get back to work and god knows how long it will take me to clear out all the kudzu. Oh, and while I was waiting for each batch of spam to be dealt with I read the New Yorker "Life During Wartime" double issue that's been sitting around for a few weeks now (you can get an idea of the contents from MoorishGirl) and got more and more depressed. (Here are two quotes that pretty much put war in a nutshell. From "Ivory Coast, 2000" by Tony D’Souza: "Donatien said, 'This is where the Dioula used to live.' The Dioula were Muslim people from the north whom I'd soon be sent to serve. 'What happened to them?' I asked. Donatien stared at the foundations as though he were searching his memory. Then he said 'The price of cocoa fell, times became hard. We told the Dioula to go, but they refused.' 'What did you do?' 'We came in the night and killed them.'" And from the journal of Second Lieutenant Brian Humphreys, with the U.S. army in Iraq: "We are fighting a rival gang for the same turf, while the neighborhood residents cower and wait to see whose side they should come out on.") I have a couple of books to tell you about, but I haven't got time or energy at the moment. Instead I'll leave you with a couple of tidbits I've happened on recently:
1) While trying to discover the origin of the name Lunacharsky (which isn't in Unbegaun, annoyingly), I saw that the name Lundyshev is derived from an obsolete Russian word lundysh 'cloth' which comes (via Polish and German) from London. Etymology is such fun!
2) While distracting myself with one of my few rare books, Jacob Rodde's Russische Sprachlehre (Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1778, 4th ed. 1789—a "teach yourself Russian" book for the use of Baltic Germans in the time of Catherine the Great), I discovered that one of the домашные разговоры/Gespräche von Haussachen 'household conversations' included the sentence:
Господинъ Розе прислалъ сказать, что онъ будетъ и съ женою своею.
Herr Rose hat sagen lassen, dass er mit seiner Liebsten kommen wird.
'Mr. Rose sent word that he would be coming with his wife[?].'
Now, жена means 'wife,' but in modern German that would be Frau, while Liebste means 'sweetheart.' You'd have to know a lot more than I do about 18th-century usage and customs to know who Herr Rose is going to show up with.
Oh, and sorry about the mess I made of yesterday's post; I did too much research and then was tired and hasty when I tried to put the post together, and ran out of steam halfway through. I forgot to mention she was closely involved with the famous religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, and I didn't even make clear that she's known to the secular world as Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavaeva (under which name you will find her in Russian biographical dictionaries). I think I left out a lot of other interesting stuff as well. But it can't be helped, and I've got to go earn my daily crust now. I hope it's not as muggy where you are as it is here.
A comment by Alexei in response to my previous post led me to investigate a woman I'd never heard of, Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavaeva, and her life was so extraordinary and touched so many aspects of the early twentieth century that I thought I'd share it here. She was born Elizaveta (Liza) Yurevna Pilenko on Dec. 8, 1891 in Riga, where her father, Yuri Dmitrievich Pilenko, was a lawyer. When his father Dmitri, an army general from a Cossack family, died in 1895, the family moved south to Anapa, a Black Sea port Dmitri had helped establish, and Yuri became a successful agronomist and vintner. In 1905 he was named director of the Nikitsky Botanical Garden and the family moved to Yalta, but the next year he died suddenly and unexpectedly (still in his fifties) and his widow Sofiya (born 1862, died 1962!) took Liza to Saint Petersburg to live.
Liza hated Petersburg. After the South it was cold and dank; in her reminiscences she says "На улицах рыжий туман. Падает рыжий снег. Никогда, никогда нет солнца." [There was red-brown fog in the streets. Red-brown snow fell. There was never, never any sun.] The death of her beloved father destroyed her belief in God and made it impossible for her to concentrate on her studies; she wandered the streets and thought bitter thoughts. Then, the next year, her cousin took her to a poetry reading where she saw and heard Alexander Blok and (like so many others) fell under his spell; she felt that here at last was someone who could understand her grief and disillusionment. She found out his address and visited him at home, where the 27-year-old poet took the 15-year-old girl seriously and talked with her for hours; after she left he wrote two poems, Когда вы стоите на моем пути and Она пришла с мороза (both, most unusually, in free verse), the first of which he sent her along with a letter that enraged her for what she felt was its condescension. She gave up on him as a mentor/friend, but began writing seriously herself and frequenting Petersburg's literary and artistic circles; after a brief romance with Nikolai Gumilev (who addressed to her the poem Это было не раз, это будет не раз) she met and quickly married (in early 1910) Dmitri Vladimirovich Kuzmin-Karavaev, son of a liberal politician who had an estate in the northeast of Tver province adjoining Slepnyovo, the family dacha of Gumilev, where he brought his new bride Anna Akhmatova in 1911—there's a photo of Liza standing next to Anna at Slepnyovo in 1912, the year her first volume of poetry, Скифские черепки [Scythian potsherds], was published.
The marriage didn't last long; she left Dmitri and moved with her mother and her lover back to Anapa, where in December 1913 her daughter Gayana was born. Her lover was killed in WWI; she was elected mayor of Anapa in February 1918, then was arrested and threatened with death [I had the politics wrong here—see Tatyana's comment below for details]. A member of the government of the Kuban region, Daniil Skobtsov, took an interest in her case, and after she was freed they were married and left Russia via Georgia, Constantinople, and Belgrade, ending up (like so many Russian exiles) in Paris.
They had two children, but that marriage also broke up, and in 1932 she took monastic vows and became the Orthodox nun Mother Maria. (Oddly, her former husband Kuzmin-Karavaev converted to Catholicism and eventually became a cardinal.) In that capacity she worked to help poor emigrants, and when WWII came she joined the Resistance and helped Jews escape by providing them false papers and other assistance. Betrayed by a fellow emigré, she was arrested and sent to Ravensbruck, where she died in 1945 (perhaps volunteering to take the place of another inmate, though there's no proof).
There's a Russian site dedicated to her, with writings by and about her, and more here and here; in English there's a paragraph here, underneath a gorgeous watercolor she did in Paris. She's one of those people I wish I'd been lucky enough to know.
[Note: I added the name by which she's known in the first sentence to avoid confusion; I've already found one site that links to this and calls her "the poet Liza Pilenko." Sorry, my sloppy. (That nominalized adjective is for Mark Liberman.) Also, here's another good Russian link about her, with lots of good pictures.]
Looking up Vyacheslav Ivanov—who a century ago ran an influential St. Petersburg literary salon in his turreted house, called the Tower—in Solomon Volkov's gossipy and irresistible St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, I found this:
The Tower was imbued with an intensely intellectual atmosphere. As a woman poet who participated in the meetings recalled,Great quote, right? But... "a woman poet"? What the hell, are they interchangeable? The footnote is no help: "Aleksandr Blok v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Alexander Blok in the Reminiscences of Contemporaries), vol. 2 (Moscow, 1980), pp. 62-63." So if anyone has that book or happens to know whose words are being quoted, please be so kind as to inform me. Until then, I sit in darkness.We quoted the Greeks by heart, took delight in the French Symbolists, considered Scandinavian literature our own, knew philosophy and theology, poetry and history of the whole world. In that sense we were citizens of the universe, bearers of the great cultural museum of humanity. It was Rome at the time of the fall. We did not live, but rather contemplated the most refined that there was in life. We were not afraid of any words. We were cynical and unchaste in spirit, wan and inert in life. In a certain sense we were, of course, the revolution before the revolution—so profoundly, ruthlessly, and fatally did we destroy the old tradition and build bold bridges into the future. But our depth and daring were intertwined with a lingering sense of decay, the spirit of dying, ghostliness, ephemerality. We were the last act of a tragedy."
Update. It turns out she's Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavaeva, and I wound up doing a post about her. Thanks, Alexei!
Some time back I discovered the poetry of Gennady Aygi, a Chuvash who (at the suggestion of Boris Pasternak) began writing in Russian in the late 1950s. His poetry is very strange, not Russian-seeming at all; it was only when I realized that he was more of a French poet who happened to write in Russian (as he says in this excellent interview, when asked if he is a European, "Да, я европеец и – так по судьбе вышло – француз" [Yes, I'm a European and – as fate would have it – a Frenchman]) that I began to get a handle on him. His combination of simple, everyday words into mysterious, allusive stanzas reminds me of one of my favorites, Yves Bonnefoy. So I sent off for a bilingual collection, Selected Poems 1954-94, and today it finally arrived from Amazon. And when I started googling up links for this post, I discovered that he'd died in February; here's the Guardian obituary by his friend and translator Peter France:
His friendship with Pasternak, at that time being harassed by the authorities, and his own innovative poetics made him persona non grata in Chuvashia. Even so, the fields and forests of his native land permeate his work, and he remained deeply attached to his ancestral culture, striving to give it a place among the cultures of the world. He translated poetry from many languages into Chuvash and produced an Anthology of Chuvash Poetry (published in English by Forest Books in 1991). Eventually, after the perestroika of the late 1980s, his work was acclaimed in his homeland and he became the Chuvash national poet.I'd love to read that Chuvash anthology; Chuvash is the most divergent of the Turkic languages, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot available on it (though there is a 17-volume Словарь чувашского языка = Thesaurus linguae tchuvaschorum [1928-50] by N. I. Ashmarin, not to mention a Chuvash Wikipedia).His main home, however, was in Moscow, where in the 1960s he found a much-needed support system among "underground" writers, artists and musicians, who together were discovering the forbidden fruits of western culture. For 10 years he worked at the Mayakovsky Museum, acquiring a deep knowledge of the Russian avant garde of the early 20th century. Modern French poetry (above all Baudelaire) was another essential influence...
At any rate, I agree with Aygi that (pace his translator) he doesn't write free verse; he says "То, что я делаю, – не верлибр и не свободная поэзия. Она просто без рифм, и поэтому вопрос ритма становится необычайно важным" [What I do isn't vers libre and it isn't free poetry. It's simply unrhymed, and therefore the question of rhythm becomes unusually important]; as Eliot said, "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job." Here's a long and interesting interview in English ("The city is a book itself. Not every city, I mean. I went to Paris a while ago. It is a really big book..."), here are a lot of his poems in Russian, and here are eight poems translated by France. I'll quote a tiny poem from 1994:
это
(быть может)
ветер
клонит - такое легкое
(для смерти)
сердцеéto
(byt' mózhet)
véter
klónit - takóye lyógkoye
(dlya smérti)
sérdtsethis
(maybe)
is the wind
bending - so light
(for death)
a heart
So they say over at Sawf News:
"It's true we Swiss Germans are becoming more isolated," Marianne Junger, a 30-year-old English language instructor from Bern. "I would not marry outside my language group for example and most of us are reluctant to take jobs in other Swiss towns."Of course, they include the standard "on the other hand" balance: "But the Forum Helveticum report may be pushing the pendulum back toward standard German with educators insisting it once again be the language of classroom instruction beginning this year." Not to mention the standard self-interested quotes ("'Young people are limiting themselves in their contact with the outside world...,' said Pablo Barblan, director of the Forum Helveticum, which encourages communication among Switzerland's diverse language communities") and idiotic statements about language ("Unlike high German, dialects have simple grammar"); furthermore, they say "to mark this year's 60th anniversary of The Little Prince, a translation has appeared in Bernerdeutsch under the title Dr Chyl Prinz," but I couldn't help but notice that in the picture accompanying the story the title is clearly Der Chly Prinz. Still, an interesting piece; anybody have any thoughts on linguistic developments in Switzerland? (Thanks to Sidcup for the link.)The break with standard German came after World War I when Swiss Germans wanted to separate themselves from what was going on in Germany, according to Roy Oppenheim, a former director at the Swiss national broadcaster SRG/SSR.
"This trend was only strengthened after the Second World War and later during the 1970s it became fashionable for radio and television programs to broadcast in local dialect."
Standard German remains the written language for the federal government, banking, school instruction, newspapers and literature.
But now fewer Swiss Germans speak proper German and are increasingly turning to dialect even in written form. For young Swiss Germans dialect has become the language of text messaging, e-mail and even poetry and rap music...
Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat has a thoughtful post on Moroccan linguistic and educational policy. He starts by linking to a brief MoorishGirl post on the subject ("I'm fully in favor of using Darija, because of the huge impact it would have on the creation of a reading culture") and expands on it:
Developing a literature of sorts in Darja would allow kids to get into the habit of reading way earlier. A fair number of kids in the West are reading by the age of three; for an Algerian or Moroccan kid to even understand much of the language his/her books are written in at that age would be unheard of. With Darja literature for them to use, they could start reading before they ever started school; it might even lead to them acquiring literary Arabic faster. Moreover, an oral literary tradition already exists, best exemplified by the traditions of melhoun poetry and chaabi lyrics; the language used in these is recognizably a literary register, and all that would be needed would be to write it. My puristic instincts would also rejoice in a move with the potential to stem the tragic loss of inherited vocabulary, and overuse of French, now afflicting Darja.If you're at all interested in the situation of minority languages, read the whole thing. (More on Darija here.)
Things announcers have said while I've been trying to watch soccer/football:
1) "A bit of a row has broken out between employers and employees..."
Unexceptionable, you say? Ah, but row was pronounced as in "Row, row, row your boat." Had the fellow never heard it spoken, or was he simply having a brain spasm?
2) "My hero as a childhood boy was Beckenbauer." That one's definitely a brain spasm.
Incidentally, I trust today's 6-0 thrashing of Serbia-Montenegro has convinced everyone of what I've been saying since the beginning: Argentina is going to win this thing. Oíd, mortales, el grito sagrado: “libertad, libertad, libertad!”
Like most people, I read Dear Abby for the Schadenfreude, but today's column was interesting to me in my capacity as Languagehat. The subject was people who talk about others thinking they can't be understood, and there were some great anecdotes sent in by readers. A couple:
DEAR ABBY: My son, an 18-year-old college football player of Italian/Irish heritage, was sitting in an airport in Austin, Texas, during a layover. A family from Japan was sitting next to him, complaining about their flight and their food, and finally, that someone nearby smelled bad. My son turned to them and, in perfect Japanese, said, "Yes, something does smell funny." He said they looked at him in shock, got up and literally ran away. He said the same thing your writer did: People shouldn't automatically assume others don't speak their language, even those visiting our country. —DORIS IN KAILUA, HAWAIISo remember, you never know what languages that person you desperately want to mock might know!DEAR ABBY: My mother is from Germany, and I speak German. I vacationed there with my husband, two children, my mother and my in-laws. On the way home, my father-in-law and I went to the flight desk to check in. The woman behind the counter told us our plane had left two hours before! Then, in German, she said to her co-workers that we were stupid Americans, and she'd make us stay another night and take a flight the next day. I replied in German that we were not stupid, and we'd take a flight that day. Her jaw dropped, and her boss came over and ran with us to the next flight. —CAROL IN PORTLAND, ORE.
A simple AskMetaFilter question ("What does this pin say, and what does it mean?" Answer: Leningrad) inspired a woman with the username posadnitsa ("The posadniki were the medieval mayors of Novgorod. There was one posadnitsa, Marfa Boretskaia, but unlike her I have never incited Tsar Ivan III to invade my hometown...") to comment: "My host mother in St. Petersburg made annoyed noises whenever anyone brought up Solzhenitsyn; how can anyone take him seriously, she asked, when he actually suggested renaming the beautiful city of St. Petersburg Nevograd?" Needless to say, this caught my attention; some googling turned up an article by Ekaterina Vidyakina on the history of the city's names that said (my translation; the Russian's in the extended entry):
The discussion was started off by a letter to the newspaper Smena ['Change'] by the dissident writer Solzhenitsyn, who at that time [1991] enjoyed greater popularity; he announced that in his opinion the city's name should not be changed back to "Sankt-Peterburg," since "it was foisted on [the city] in the 18th century, contrary to the Russian language and Russian consciousness."So it sounds like it wasn't Solzhenitsyn himself who proposed it, though it was in response to a letter of his. But I also turned up this sci.lang post by Andrey Frizyuk, who says:Solzhenitsyn's letter attracted many replies, in which Leningraders, as well as inhabitants of other cities, proposed their own names for the "nameless" city. Bearing in mind that Russians have never suffered from fantasy [?], one should not be surprised at the variety of names which our good fellow citizens wished to bestow on our city: Petropol, Nevograd, and the like.
As the name St.Petersburg isn't particularly poetical, Russian poets (Derzhavin, Pushkin, etc) invented Greeko-Slavic names for the capital: Petropol(is), Petrograd, Nevograd, etc. When the WWI started 90 years ago, there was a discussion if the name should be changed to Petrograd or to Nevograd. The former version proved more popular in official circles, because it was first used by Pushkin in "The Bronze Horseman". The popular nickname has always been Peter.Anybody know anything more about this (to my ears stupid-sounding) proposed name?
The original Russian of the excerpt from the article I translated above:
Начало дискуссии положило письмо в газету "Смена" пользовавшегося в то время большей популярностью писателя-диссидента А. Солженицина. В нем автор заявил, что не следует, по его мнению, возвращать городу название "Санкт-Петербург", так как "оно было в ХVIII веке навязано вопреки русскому языку и русскому сознанию"...
Письмо Солженицина повлекло за собой многочисленные отклики, в которых ленинградцы, да и жители других городов предлагали свои названия для "безымянного" города. Помятуя о том, что русские люди никогда не страдали от фантазии, не стоит удивляться разнообразию наименований, которыми добрые сограждане хотели наградить наш город: Петрополь, Невоград и т.п.
Sally Thomason at Language Log has a post in which she describes how she came to learn the synonyms stot and pronk, both of which describe the "hilarious pogo-stick bounds" of mule-deer (and antelope, gazelles, and the like). The etymology of stot is unknown, but pronk is "from an Afrikaans word meaning 'to show off, strut, prance', and ultimately from Dutch pronken 'to strut'; and it was first applied to the spectacular bounds of the little South African antelope called a springbok." I felt it my bounden duty to tell you about these wonderful words, even if few of us will have the chance to use them in the course of our daily lives.
Tom Montag, aka The Middlewesterner, gave a talk about Lorine Niedecker (one of my favorites) at UW-Baraboo/Sauk County in Baraboo, Wisconsin; he's kindly posted it, and its a good, detailed, meaty examination of how the great, too-little-known poet got her effects—just keep following the "Continued here" links at the end of each page, and for ease of reference I'll link to the Exhibits (bits of her poems that he discusses) and Notes. This is very well said:
I think Niedecker was not particularly concerned with "meaning" in the denotative sense. She was concerned with the thing, and with "something else" beyond that, but it doesn't seem to me that she was intent on making unequivocal and definitive statements. I'll venture that for Niedecker, poetry was closer to painting than to philosophy. The painter dabs color onto the canvas just so, but what do color and shape and line mean? What does a dab of cobalt put here mean? That's not a question Niedecker would ask.Thanks to Dave Bonta for the link, and I envy both Tom and Dave their visit to Montreal for a blogswarm (which I found out about via this post of Lorianne's).
And speaking of swarms, don't miss Dave's amazing photographs of a swarm of bees on a tree branch.
"Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity" (pdf, Google cache) is a riveting look at "the link between coercion and absurdity" by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (whom Yale has cravenly refused to rehire); though I recommend the whole thing, I cite it here for this look at the nexus between language and behavior in Madagascar:
What’s more, one result of the colonial experience was that what might be called relations of command—basically, any ongoing relationship in which one adult renders another an extension of his or her will—had become identified with slavery, and slavery, with the essential nature of the state. In the community I studied, such associations were most likely to come to the fore when people were talking about the great slave-holding families of the 19th century whose children went on to become the core of the colonial-era administration, largely (it was always remarked) by dint of their devotion to education and skill with paperwork. In other contexts, relations of command, particularly in bureaucratic contexts, were linguistically coded: they were firmly identified with French; Malagasy, in contrast, was seen as the language appropriate to deliberation, explanation, and consensus decision-making. Minor functionaries, when they wished to impose arbitrary dictates, would almost invariably switch to French. I particularly remember one occasion when an official who had had many conversations with me in Malagasy, and had no idea I even understood French, was flustered one day to discover me dropping by at exactly the moment everyone had decided to go home early. “The office is closed,” he announced, in French, “if you have any business you must return tomorrow at 8AM.” When I pretended confusion and claimed, in Malagasy, not to understand French, he proved utterly incapable of repeating the sentence in the vernacular, but just kept repeating the French over and over. Others later confirmed what I suspected: that if he had switched to Malagasy, he would at the very least have had to explain why the office had closed at such an unusual time. French is actually referred to in Malagasy as “the language of command”; it was characteristic of contexts where explanations, deliberation, ultimately, consent, was not really required, since they were ultimately premised on the threat of violence.(Via MetaFilter.)
I keep meaning to post about a journal called Sudanic Africa cited by Eliza in a comment to this Yoruba post, and now I've finally gotten around to it. Only a minority of the articles are available online, but all the book reviews seem to be, and there's a lot of interesting material about a too-little-known part of the world:
Sudanic Africa is an international academic journal devoted to the presentation and discussion of historical sources on the Sudanic belt, the area between the Sahara and the Bay of Niger, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The journal typically presents such sources in the original language and in translation, with comments.Here (pdf), for example, is an article called "A Sudanese Missionary to the United States: Satti Majid, 'Shaykh al-Islam in North America', and his Encounter with Noble Drew Ali, Prophet of the Moorish Science Temple Movement":
Sometime in the late 1920s there was an encounter, direct or indirect we do not know for certain, between two figures from two very different traditions of ‘Islam’. The present article partially documents this encounter, presenting a tantalising glimpse of African American Islam’s earliest encounter with global Sunnı Islam. On the one side is a Sudanese 'ālim, the very model of Nile Valley Islamic orthodoxy; on the other is an African American, a generation only removed from slavery, an actor in the great northward migration that was to transform the African American worldview, as it was later to transform world music. The Sudanese 'ālim was Sātti Mājid Muhammad al-Qādi from Dongola; the African-American was Timothy Drew, later known as Noble Drew Ali, from North Carolina. The topic also opens up new avenues for research into the missionizing activities of immigrant Sunnis, Ahmadis, and other Muslim groups, and for the history of the Moorish Science Temple, which latter movement may, in some sense, have been—even unconsciously—a link between the Islam of some African slaves in the antebellum South and the Lost and Found Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad.Thanks, Eliza!
OK, this is very nitpicky, but I'm a confirmed nitpicker, so it's driving me crazy, and if anyone can help I'll be most grateful. I'm reading The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin
In Zurich he was immediately among friends. His brother's sister-in-law, Madame Sophie Nicholaevna Lavrov [sic—should be Sofya Nikolaevna Lavrova], was studying there; she lived with another Russian, Nadeshda [sic—should be Nadezhda] Smezkaya, a wealthy woman who later financed some of the insurrectionary efforts of the Italian anarchists and who was already a disciple of Bakunin.Now, there is no such name as "Smezkaya"; my reference books and Google come up empty (I tried both Смезкая and Смезкий). Does someone happen to have any sources that would identify this woman so I can leave Zurich and move on to Geneva along with Prince K?
A couple of years ago I did a post about an online translation of the Hyakunin-isshu, A Hundred Verses from Old Japan, and Miriam (of Creosote.org, if it's still a going concern) left a comment discussing tournaments based on a game called karuta (from Portuguese carta 'card') and adding, tantalizingly, that she had "found a fantastic website on the history of karuta a few months ago" but didn't know where to find it. Now Dave Bull has added a comment suggesting that she might be referring to his own 1996 essay Karuta: Sports or Culture?; I don't know if it's what Miriam had in mind, but it's so well written and interesting I had to give it its own LH post. Dave starts out in medias res, with "an elderly gentleman" chanting poetry and a group of formally dressed people suddenly exploding into action, then goes into the history of the poems, the cards, and the game. Here's a snippet to whet your appetite, but you're going to want to read the whole thing if you have the slightest interest in Japanese culture:
Cards were formerly made in many shapes and sizes, and not only from pasteboard. Elegant sets were fashioned in lacquered finishes, or drawn on slips of thin wood. Well-known painters down the years have turned out sets of cards, perhaps the most famous of which is the much-photographed set by Ogata Korin, backed with fine gold foil, and of which reproduction sets sell for as much as 1,100,000 yen. In the Edo era it was apparently common for sets of cards to be produced by relatively upper-class people, as they had both the time, and the elegant calligraphy skills that were required. One drawback to this, of course, was that cards produced in such a way were quite difficult to read. This was especially so when the tori fuda [the cards with the final couplets, which the players must try to grab when they recognize the poem] were written in complicated Chinese characters, as was inevitably the case back in those times. It was in the mid-Meiji era that a newspaper company had the idea of producing sets of cards written using the cursive hiragana syllabary, which could be read easily by anyone, even young children. To give an impetus to the sale of their new cards, they began to organize large-scale competitions, and it is here that we see the origin of today's nationally organized groups and competitions. (This Meiji-era burst of popularity in karuta saw the birth of another Japanese institution — the Nintendo company, of video game fame, who started out as producers of karuta and hanafuda, which they still make. Home entertainment has come a long way in a hundred years ...)
(According to the Wikipedia entry, Nintendo [Japanese 任天堂, ニンテンドー Nintendō] "roughly translates as 'leave luck to heaven', 'heaven blesses hard work', 'in heaven's hands', or 'work hard, but in the end it's in heaven's hands.'")
Many years ago I was reading a book about (I think) the Crusades in which there was a footnote mentioning a medieval exclamation of contempt, tprut, that turned up in a number of languages. I recently recalled this and thought I'd investigate; it turns out it's in the OED:
prut, int. and n.And the Middle English Dictionary has an entry, with a remarkable variety of spellings: "prut, interj. Also ptrot, tprut, tprot, thprut, trupth, trut. [AL ptrut, phrut & OF trout, trut, tproupt, tropt.] An exclamation of contempt or disapproval; ~ for a fig for (sb. or sth.)." Their first cite is the same as the OED's (with different punctuation); their next is from Harley's "The Execution of Sir Simon Fraser" (quoted here): "Tprot, scot, for þi strif!/ hang vp þyn hachet ant þi knyf," and there are several more. It's a pity this savory ejaculation has fallen out of use. Anybody have other examples from medieval languages?1. An exclamation of contempt.
c1300 in Langtoft Chron. (MS. Fairfax 22, lf. 4), Tprut! Skot riveling, In unsel timing crope thu out of cage. 1303 R. BRUNNE Handl. Synne 3014 And seyþ ‘prut for þy cursyng, prest!’ a1779 D. GRAHAM Janet Clinker's Orat. Writ. 1883 II. 150 If they had tell'd me tuts, or prute no, I laid them o'er my knee, and a com'd crack for crack o'er their hurdies. 1870 LUBBOCK Orig. Civiliz. viii. 282 From pr, or prut, indicating contempt.
While reading David Rieff's NY Times Magazine article on Mexican politics, I was struck by a couple of names in this passage: "[López Obrador's] economic team is led by Rogelio Ramírez de la O, a Cambridge-educated economist who is well respected in international business circles. And Carlos Slim, the telecom mogul who is Mexico's richest man and the third-richest man in the world, has let it be known, without formally endorsing AMLO, that he finds nothing alarming about his candidacy." Now Slim, while an unusual name for a Mexican, presumably reflects English ancestry, but I can make nothing of de la O. It's a common surname, but I can find nothing about its origin except a suggestion on this page that it's from "a place in Spain if I'm not mistaken, Palencia.. the name of the Church there is named after Our Lady... as Nuestra Senora de la O," which makes no sense to me, and one here that it's from a French name De l'Eau, which seems unlikely. Anybody have any information?
Update. The name turns out to come from the feast of the Expectation of Our Lady, the “O” coming from the expression of longing said in the office of the Mozarabic liturgy (see comments below); Sister Maria Philomena sent me a link to her post on the subject, which reproduces a poem by James J. Galvin, "Lady of O." Thanks, Sister Maria!
A story by Pam Belluck in today's NY Times describes the changing fortunes of the French language in Maine:
Frederick Levesque was just a child in Old Town, Me., when teachers told him to become Fred Bishop, changing his name to its English translation to conceal that he was French-American.You can go to the article to read about the comeback; what I want to focus on is the bad old days. I can understand the reaction against the language of the enemy during wartime, against German during both world wars for example; it's irrational and deplorable, but understandable. But why on earth were people subjecting their neighbors and their neighbors' children to that kind of harassment in the '50s and '60s? It shocks me to learn that during the very years when I was happily learning French, others of my generation were being punished for using it in a supposedly free country. If anyone can explain this to me, please do. I mean, generalized "why can't they speak English" griping is one thing; forcing people to change their name is quite another.Cleo Ouellette's school in Frenchville made her write "I will not speak French" over and over if she uttered so much as a "oui" or "non" — and rewarded students with extra recess if they ratted out French-speaking classmates.
And Howard Paradis, a teacher in Madawaska forced to reprimand French-speaking students, made the painful decision not to teach French to his own children. "I wasn't going to put my kids through that," Mr. Paradis said. "If you wanted to get ahead you had to speak English."
That was Maine in the 1950's and 1960's, and the stigma of being French-American reverberated for decades afterward. But now, le Français fait une rentrée — French is making a comeback...
Incidentally, Benjamin Zimmer discusses this story in Language Log and demolishes the idea that "French-American French, derived from people who left France for Canada centuries ago, resembles the French of Louis XIV more than the modern Parisian variety."
While I'm on the subject of the Sunday Times, I have to let William Safire have it yet again. His latest column contains the idiotic statement "Most Americans associate the phrase Fur Ball, usually capitalized, with events to raise funds for the Humane Society or A.S.P.C.A." When I read this, I thought perhaps I, having been raised abroad, was an unrepresentative sample of Americans, so I turned to my wife and said "Say, what do you associate the phrase fur ball with?" She thought for a moment and said she associated it with cats. Wanting to give Safire a fair shake, I said "Are you sure you don't associate it with events to raise funds for the Humane Society or A.S.P.C.A.?" She looked at me as if I were crazy. Perhaps Safire should have an automatic blinders-checker that would replace the phrase "most Americans" with "the tiny group of insiders I hang out with." While I'm at it, he calls this a "familiar saying": "If they want me in on the crash landings, I better damn well be in on the takeoffs." And he claims it's bad English to say "Our discussion anchored itself on Article II" because his old pal Rear Adm. Dick West (retired) says "In the Navy we say anchored in... as in 'anchored in 300 fathoms of water.' To be more specific, you could say that the anchor is on rock, sand or sediment. When you want to say you're physically attached to something, you say that you're moored to it, like moored to the dock." That's nice, but it has nothing to do with usage by English speakers outside of the Navy. Come on, Bill, wouldn't you rather be golfing? If you must write a weekly column, couldn't you pick a subject you can write sensibly about?
Waggish is reading Finnegans Wake and reporting enticingly on the results. Of the two entries so far posted, the first is a general introduction:
The book is easier than its reputation would have you believe because it exudes purposeful meaning: everything is there for a reason, and usually several reasons. It's more difficult than its reputation because underneath the surface text, there is no single plot, character, or explanation for what is buried under the opaque verbiage. This becomes most noticeable in most of Book III, where the text tends to be a lot less abstruse than in Book II, but in which the situations being portrayed are even less realistic than before, culiminating in the grandiose fantasia of III.3, in which four senile old men seem to be excavating the mound of history itself, until a litany of betrayals and suffering pour out. I found this section tremendously moving, however little I understood it. Though the book may be impenetrable, Joyce is not the most philosophical of writers: he constantly references the physical and the commonplace, and as much as we all know these things, we can read ourselves into bits and pieces of the Wake.The second pursues a comparison with John Crowley's Little, Big, which I haven't read, but he makes an important point about Joyce's this-worldliness:
One look at Finnegans Wake and it seems like mysticism. But Joyce is almost devoutly quotidian: the things he repeatedly, obscurely analogizes are the very basics of the world and more importantly, the known: male, female, parents, children, birth, death, day, night, sex, education, work, play. The most realistic scene (in III.4) appears to concern a pub-owner and his family, and the situation as far as I can discern it is hardly anything more unusual than Leopold Bloom's in Ulysses. If anything, it's more normal, as there's far less information given to make these people unique. The pub-owner, named Porter, is a Protestant Irishman and well-respected citizen leading an typical middle-class life. Joyce loads the scene up with the usual allusions and such, and I take from it that this scene is to be put on an equal footing with all the complications and mysteries have gone before. The message: This is it. This is the world for all to see and all that anyone can see.If you're at all curious about Joyce's famously "difficult" final work, this might be just the thing to get you started.
(Via wood s lot.)
I have to post about the National Spelling Bee that was broadcast last night; I'm fond of spelling bees in general (I still remember being furious with myself in grade school for blowing the word Christmas), but this one was particularly notable because the winning word was Ursprache 'protolanguage'—a word dear to the heart of this Indo-Europeanist manqué. (It's pronounced OOR-shprah-khuh, but the NPR newsreader who announced the result this morning made it rhyme with rake, which annoyed me mightily.) Oddly, the word that eliminated the second-place finisher (Canadian Finola Hackett, who'd lucked out with a string of French-derived words she handled easily) was also pure German (to the point of usually being capitalized): Weltschmerz. (The poor girl, after much agonizing, started off "V...") Also oddly, several of the other late-round words were language-related as well: tmesis, koine, and tutoyer. Next year look out for laryngeal and aphaeresis!
Joel of Far Outliers has written a long and interesting post about Chamorro and Saipanese and their struggle for survival on the island. A tidbit on Saipan Carolinian to whet your appetite:
The Trukic languages form one long dialect chain, where speakers on neighboring islands can understand each other fine, but speakers from farther apart have increasing difficulty. There is no contrast between l and n in most of the dialects. Where this speaker writes aramasal Seipel 'people of Saipan', a speaker of a different dialect might write aramasan Seipen. Similarly, the town of Tanapag, settled by a different group of Carolinians, also goes by the name of Tallabwog.Unfortunately, Joel is "going to have to concentrate on some high-priority projects with relatively tight deadlines, so posting will be very light" this summer. Work well and come back soon!
