PLATO AND POTATO.

John Emerson of Idiocentrism is trying to trace the Aristotle/bottle, Plato/potato school of doggerel back to its source. So far he's gotten it back to Lord Byron, Don Juan (Canto I, 204; Canto VII, 4) and Conrad Roth of Varieties of Unreligious Experience has found a near-match in Ronsard; if anyone knows of earlier versions, cite away!

[Turns out Conrad was just funnin'!]

COMMA PLACEMENT.

I've almost finished Pat Barker's Regeneration (a wonderful book, and I'm looking forward to the two sequels), and I've just run across an interesting conundrum in punctuation. A sentence on page 202 reads "Sassoon, Rivers left till last, and found him lying on the bed in his new room, wrapped in his British warm coat." I was taken aback by the first comma, which seemed to me wrong (there's not normally a pause after a preposed object—cf. "Hegel I've never been able to read"), until I mentally rewrote it without the comma and had "Sassoon Rivers left till last," which temporarily threw off the sense of syntax and perhaps suggested a phantom character named "Sassoon Rivers." So I turn to you, my picky and keen-eyed readers; comma or no comma? (No fair suggesting a rewrite of the sentence; it's perfectly good English, you'd say it without a second thought, and what the mouth can say, the pen—or pixel—should be able to reproduce.)

Addendum. I've just (Sept. 6) run across "British warm" (see comments for explanation) in In Parenthesis, on page 97: "A young man in a British warm, his fleecy muffler cosy to his ears, enquired if anyone had seen the Liaison Officer from Corps, as one who asks of the Tube-lift man at Westminster the whereabouts of the Third Sea Lord."

LEARNING TO WRITE, WITH A SHEAFFER PEN.

A typically multifarious post from The Daily Growler goes on to discuss burgoos, structuralism, golf, and Mezz Mezzrow, but it starts with a reminiscence of how the Growler learned to speak and write:

I could already "speak" by the time I entered public school; I was taught not to use contractions, especially "ain't," a forbidden word in my house. "Is not, young man, and if I catch you saying that word again, I'll wash your mouth out with Lava soap" [an exceptionally harsh soap said to have been made from volcanic pumice ash] and I was afraid of my folks when it came to proper language; they really would have washed my mouth out with Lava had I tried to get away with using it again.

Also I could write fairly well with pen and ink before I went to 1st grade thanks to my dad's obsession with fine pens and with the fine penmanship you could become capable of developing using one of those fine "writing instruments," as my dad called them. He would take one of his beautiful fountain pens, he had a gold-tipped Sheaffer that was a pen among pens to him and cost him an arm and a leg that he taught me to write with [...] my dad would take his fine Sheaffer pen and he would show me how to write, like starting with the alphabet, you know, holding my hand and then moving it to form each letter—teaching me to use a square-topped A—my dad's style—his first name beginning with an A; and then a fancy B, I later think he got from seeing a letter B in German, each letter having to be printed or scripted in his certain ways, on and on, etc. Then he taught me how to sign my name—he could sign his name backwards and upsidedown; sometimes, if you caught him in a show-off mood, he would sign his name forwards and backwards at the same time. Then, using the Good Book of the Christian World of Fables, he taught me grammar and, by golly, I was growling pretty correct sentences when I entered first grade. Besides, all that prepping had caused me to develop into a little smartass know-it-all. I was amazed at how advanced I was with knowledge-seeking tools over those other just-plain kiddie dumbos who competed with me in first grade. I was a little man; they were pencil necked geeks. I knew how to spell words correctly too, another discipline taught to me by my dad who loved to read the dictionary and loved the idea of spelling bees. My dad loved learning to spell, pronounce, and use-in-sentences big words, and of course I knew how to spell "antidisestablishmentarianism" before I was 5.

I learned to write and spell early, too, but I didn't get to use any fine Sheaffer pens. Now I feel deprived.

ELMET.

My current focus on WWI is leading me to revisit David Jones' wonderful In Parenthesis (review), whose preface includes this dizzying parade of allusions:

Every man's speech and habit of mind were a perpetual showing: now of Napier's expedition, now of the Legions at the Wall, now of 'train-band captain', now of Jack Cade, of John Ball, of the commons in arms. Now of High Germany, of Dolly Gray, of Bullcalf, Wart and Poins; of Jingo largenesses, of things as small as the Kingdom of Elmet; of Wellington's raw shire recruits, of ancient border antipathies, of our contemporary, less intimate, larger unities, of John Barleycorn, of 'sweet Sally Frampton'. Now of Coel Hên—of the Celtic cycle that lies, a subterranean influence as a deep water troubling, under every tump in this Island, like Merlin complaining under his big rock.

I remember the first time I read this, years ago, I was completely flummoxed; now, with the internet and Google, it reveals most of its secrets within seconds. "High Germany" turns out to be a song from the European wars of the 18th century, and "Goodbye Dolly Gray" a song from the turn of the 20th. And the Kingdom of Elmet? Ah, therein lies a bit of Languagehattery. Elmet was a Celtic holdout in what is now the southern part of Yorkshire, around Leeds; when it was overrun by the Angles in the early seventh century, the way was clear for further Germanic expansion and the creation of the kingdom of Northumbria. But before that, probably in the last years of the sixth century, it had sent a band of warriors to Eidyn (Edinburgh) to accompany the men of Gododdin on a last-ditch expedition to push back the Germanic invaders, which came to grief at Catraeth (probably Catterick in northern Yorkshire). The epic Y Gododdin, considered the earliest poem in Welsh and the oldest Scottish poem, eulogizes the heroes of that doomed expedition, including Madog of the small kingdom... except it's called Elfed (pronounced EL-ved). Why? Because of one of the features of the Celtic languages, the lenition of intervocalic [m] to [β̃], which became /v/ (written f) in Welsh.

The Wikipedia article on Elmet mentions "an acclaimed 1979 book combining photography and poetry; Remains of Elmet, by Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin... re-published by Faber in 1994 simply titled Elmet, and with a third of the book being new additional poems and photographs." I'll have to look for it.

GALLIPOLI PLACENAMES.

Lately I've been reading about World War One, and I happened on the kind of detailed, specialized site I love: Gallipoli Placenames. If you get confused between Abdel Rahman Bair and Abdul Yere, look no further: the first is "The great northern spur of the Sari Bair range, coming off Hill 971 and stretching its lower slopes as far north as the plain east of Hill 60," and the second is "Turkish Anzac sector. The northern one of the two hills forming Hill Q." And Anafarta could really be confusing if their entry didn't separate it out for you:

(1) The Turkish name for the Suvla front.
(2) There are two villages inland from Suvla Bay called Buyuk (big) Anafarta and Kuchuk (small) Anafarta.
(3) Nickname ('Anafarta Annie') of a Turkish long-range artillery gun firing from the hills of the Anafarta Spur.

Now if only someone would produce a glossary or list of abbreviations for the novels of Pat Barker! I've just started Regeneration, and every once in a while she throws in an unexplained term like VADs or CCS, and although it only takes me a few seconds' work with Google to discover that the first stands for Voluntary Aid Detachment and refers to nurses, while the second stands for Casualty Clearing Station (a kind of small mobile field hospital, the WWI equivalent of a MASH unit), not everyone is as expert at ferreting out such things as I (the Acronym Finder gives a daunting 175 hits for CCS), and it would be convenient to have them gathered in one place. (It would be even more convenient to have a glossary in the book itself, of course.)

DANTESQUE DENTISTS.

There's a great thread over at Crooked Timber that starts with a comparison of the English and German versions of the Kant quote from which the blog title is derived ("Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden"—I'm with Ingrid, the author of the post: I prefer Isaiah Berlin's memorable English rendering, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made") and proceeds to all sorts of translation anecdotes and arguments, as well as discussion of which language to read works in when you know the original to some extent. My favorite strand of the discussion took off from the remark that "The first translation of The Master and Margarita allegedly translated 'dentist' as 'Dante scholar'"; Anatoly (from whose Avva post I got this link, and who provided some of the best comments) explained that "dantist is not pretentious in Russian, and it doesn’t transmit French overtones if you don’t already know it comes from French. It’s used alongside 'tooth doctor' [zubnoi vrach] more or less synonymously; stomatolog is another word with exactly the same meaning in common speech" but said he couldn't find dantist in the text of the Bulgakov novel, whereupon WorldWideWeber announced he had found it in the rewritten chapters—and linked to Simon Karlinsky's 1972 NY Times review of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, which contains a wonderfully splenetic blast at poor Michael Glenny, the translator:

My spot-checking failed to locate any truly spectacular howlers of the sort that made Michael Glenny's earlier translations of Mikhail Bulgakov's novels proverbial among literary scholars (among other gems, he rendered "dentist" as "an expert on Dante," "saints" as "swine," "squirrel fur" as "protein," and, mistaking the Russian word for bathtub, vanna, for a woman's name, added a new character to Bulgakov's cast). But I did find one instance of Glenny's notorious penchant for introducing female anatomy or nudity where there is none in the original: Xenya's daydream of wearing a locket with a gauzy dress in Chapter Four is expanded into "ethereal in voile with a pendant between her breasts." This is the same kind of breast fixation with which Glenny had previously saddled both Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn.

(In Glenny's version of "For the Good Cause" in "Stories and Prose Poems" a "head-and-shoulders portrait of a young woman" is translated as a "bosomy pin-up" and the innocuous description of that portrait grossly and gratuitously sexualized).

The haste with which "August 1914" must have been translated is suggested by the occasionally careless and distorted transcriptions of proper names and place names. "A family that descended from Riurik" (i.e., the dynasty that ruled Russia before the Romanovs) is not very helpfully rendered as "the Riurikovich family" and "Yelena Molokhovetz" the celebrated Julia Child of pre-Revolutionary Russia, for some reason emerges as "Malakhov's cookbook."

"August 1914" is admittedly a most difficult text for translation; still, in fairness to the reader, the English version of the novel should have been labeled by the publishers "adapted" or "paraphrased" by Michael Glenny, rather than translated by him. it is hard to think of another recent instance where the old maxim traduttore—traditore would be more apt.

One thing I'm curious about is this comment by Ingrid (the original poster):

My favourite translation blunder, that reproduces itself in all the languages I know, is the title of Ingmar Bergman’s film “Smultronstället”, variously known as “Wild Strawberries”, “Fraises Sauvages”, “Morangos Silvestres”, etc. It totally misses the original sense of that special place in your heart that you visit in your dreams and your nostalgia, your “secret little garden”.

Can anybody provide an analysis of the word smultronstället? I always just assumed it meant 'wild strawberries.'

SWAHILI, ANYONE?

I'm grateful to the volunteers who have helped me out with Finnish, Romanian, and Bulgarian; now I'm in need of someone who knows Swahili well enough to correct a mistaken phrase. As always, write to languagehat AT gmail DOT com, and you're guaranteed the thanks of a grateful nation editor.

That's a pretty mingy post, so let me fill it out with a quote from the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Pogo, specifically the strip from Aug. 27, 1949:

Albert the Alligator: What's all the fuss?

Pogo: Ol' Doc Seminole Sam, the carpet bag man, is got a bug name of Currier B. Ives what engraves funny stories on the point of a pin.

Porky Porcupine: Since only you can see Mr. Ives or read the jokes, pray read off a bit, Doc.

Doc Seminole: Very well. [squinting at point of pin] It say here: "The maximum inclination of the plane of a navigational planet to the plane of the e[c]liptic is three degrees." ------Hmmmm! [consternated] Gentlemen, apparently I've mixed the pins. This one seems to bear the constitution of a small southern republic in a foreign tongue.

Albert [smiling happily]: Go ahead an' finish her—she starts out funny.

ISRAELI KURDS AND ARAMAIC.

From an article by Tom Segev, this fascinating report on an ethnic group I didn't know much about (though I had a brief post about them a couple of years ago):

Sometimes, when Gila Hakimi leaves a note for her husband, she writes it in Rashi script, in Aramaic. That's only natural: This is the language used by the Hakimis for everyday discourse as well; they speak Aramaic to their eldest son too.

I phoned her in my search for the story furthest removed from the war, but Gila Hakimi said it isn't all that remote. Anyone who says prayers, opens the Talmud, and in effect anyone who speaks Hebrew speaks Aramaic in one way or another. But as an everyday language of discourse? Yes, says Hakimi. At least several thousand Israelis, who are generally described as "Kurds," speak Aramaic, in one dialect or another. Unfortunately, more and more people are ceasing to conduct their everyday lives in Aramaic and are forgetting the language. That is why Hakimi created her one-woman show. As far as is known, she is the first Aramaic stand-up comedian. She is extremely successful.

Aramaic is a language with a fascinating and very complex story. The Babylonians and the Persians used it as their official language, and afterward, it was mainly a Jewish language. There is ancient, middle and modern Aramaic. From its inception it was heard in at least two dialect groups, Eastern and Western. In Eastern Middle Aramaic there is a Tadmor and a Nabatean dialect, among others; in Western Middle Aramaic there is a distinction between Christian, Eretz Israel, Galilee and Samaritan dialects. There is Syrian Aramaic, which is generally located between Eastern and Western Aramaic, and in all the dialects, the spoken language is not identical to the written language.

All this is also meant to explain the difficulty of understanding what the "Kurdish" Israelis mean when they say Aramaic; they are not all referring to exactly the same thing, because there are different types of Kurds among them: Some come from Kurdistan in Iraq, some from Iran, Turkey or Syria - some are "ours" and some are not. For example, there is a Web site that perpetuates "Nash Didan" - "our people," and includes a dictionary, songs and jokes. No, said Hakimi, they (the operators of the Web site) come from Urmia and that's something else. Her one-woman show is called "Belishna Noshan" - "In our language."

Hakimi was the principal of the Yeshurun religious state elementary school in Pardes Hannah-Karkur, and when she retired five years ago, she decided to fulfill an old dream and went onstage with a show that revives the folklore of the past with a smile, here and there satirically, and all in Aramaic. The beginning was very modest, without any celebrity mannerisms, but in recent months she finds herself in the center of a major Aramaic awakening: She travels from city to city with her show, and attracts large audiences everywhere. She is told that more and more family celebrations are now being held in Aramaic, and this week she was invited to conduct a course in spoken Aramaic.

She feels as though she has extracted from the members of her ethnic group something that was hidden inside them, and perhaps until now they were embarrassed to reveal it, or neglected it and now are rediscovering it. Something of the kind has been happening for several years to Yiddish speakers, as part of the return to Judaism. Like most of the shows in Yiddish, Hakimi goes for nostalgia. One of her subjects is the traditional status of women, when the prevailing practice was "All glorious is the King's daughter within the palace." She levels criticism at modern feminism. We argued about that a little, in Hebrew; I assume that it sounds better in Aramaic.

Thanks for the link, Kobi!

(Note: the linked article includes all sorts of political/historical discussion that is bound to annoy certain LH readers; I hope they will recognize that I am blogging it solely for the linguistic/cultural information and ignore the rest, which I am not in any way endorsing.)

Update. Bulbul has posted some excellent material on the Mandaic variety of Aramaic.

SPANISH NOW MAIN LANGUAGE OF U.S.

Or so says the Guardian, in a story by Alan Smithers about a decline in the study of French and German: "The four most often spoken languages in the world are, in order, Mandarin, English, Hindustani and Spanish. Spanish is fast rising in importance and there are now more Spanish speakers in the United States than English." [Emphasis added.] This is one of the most mindbogglingly stupid statements I've seen in a professional publication (though I realize that in the case of the Grauniad the word "professional" has to be applied loosely). As Mark Liberman says in the Language Log post where I found the story:

We can't directly blame the (admittedly often slipshod and credulous) research practices of journalists, because the author of the article, Alan Smithers, is "director of the centre for education and employment research at the University of Buckingham", and thus not a journalist at all. On the other hand, we can't be sure that this is just one of the (often careless and even dishonest) talking points of public intellectuals, because the article was edited at the Guardian, and might well have been changed substantially from the text that Prof. Smithers submitted.

It's that old problem of attributional abduction. My best guess is the one I started with -- the Guardian's entire editorial staff is on vacation, and has delegated its duties to the night office-cleaning crew, who are having a little competition among themselves to see who can slip the most extravagant falsehoods into print.

Oh, if you're curious about the numbers: "according to the data from the 2000 census, 10.71% of households use Spanish, as opposed to 82.105% who use English."

Update. See now this Language Log post for further information on both Smithers and the facts of the case.

LANGUAGE HELP NEEDED.

OK, everybody, I need some specialized knowledge. I'm involved with a book of foreign expressions, and I have the gravest doubts about some of them, which seem to have been taken over from other such books, the original form, if any, having gotten garbled along the way. If anyone knows what the originals of the following might be, I'll be deeply grateful:

basa basa (Persian)
The Arabic phrase “basa basa” means to ogle, cast amorous glances or make sheeps' eyes at someone [is it Persian? Arabic? Arabo-Persian?]

quibo (Chinese)
the clear bright eyes of a beautiful woman [qu- is clearly wrong; is it qibo?]

Also, I need some help with Bulgarian, Romanian, and Finnish; if you know any of these languages, please drop me a line at languagehat AT gmail DOT com. Together we can make this an accurate book, unlike the ones described here!

Addendum: I forgot to mention mamihlapinatapai, an alleged Tierra del Fuegan [actually Yaghan (Yagán)—thanks, Jess!] word meaning "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start"; anybody know where The Guinness Book of Records might have gotten this ("most succinct word")?

Update: Beth at Cassandra Pages brought basa basa to the attention of her amazing father-in-law and reports the results in this post:

As I was making dinner that evening, the phone rang, and my father-in-law's excited voice was on the other end. "You didn't say it was bas bas!" he said, repeating the phrase in a way that, to my ears, sounded identical but obviously wasn't. "I was sitting at dinner and thinking about it and saying it over and over to myself, and then it came to me all of a sudden - you see, in Arabic we have two "s"s. There's the English-kind of S, like "Sam," and then there is the other "s". This is the other one. It's called "sah" and when you say it the tongue comes up to the roof of the mouth." He demonstrated. I tried to repeat after him, and failed, as usual. But I was happy that the mystery seemed to be solved.

"Oh!" I said. "That's fantastic! Good for you! Now, what does it mean?"

"It means to look at someone....illegally," he said, drawing the word out to its full length and clearly enjoying himself. "In a way designed to cause trouble, to make people talk." In a society where young unrelated men and women weren't even supposed to look at each other in the eyes, I could well imagine what he meant. He laughed, thinking back. "We used to say it all the time."

I love that guy, and I've never even met him.

COWCUMBER.

A recent entry from Pepys Diary ended with this sentence: "This day Sir W. Batten tells me that Mr. Newburne (of whom the nick-word came up among us for "Arise Tom Newburne") is dead of eating Cowcoumbers, of which the other day, I heard another, I think Sir Nich. Crisps son." The poisonous nature of cucumbers was new to me (and to think my wife has been feeding them to me for years!), but so was the spelling cowcoumbers. Checking with the OED, I found the following etymology:

[In Wyclif's form cucumer, app. directly from L.; in cocomber, cucumber, etc., a. obs. F.cocombre (in 13th c. coucombre, now concombre) = Pr. cogombre, It. cocomero, early ad. L. cucumer-em (nom. cucumis) cucumber.

The spelling cowcumber prevailed in the 17th and beg. of 18th c.; its associated pronunciation ('kaʊkʌmbə(r)) was still that recognized by Walker; but Smart 1836 says ‘no well-taught person, except of the old school, now says cow-cumber.. although any other pronunciation.. would have been pedantic some thirty years ago’.]

This kind of change in linguistic fashion is fascinating: who started saying K(Y)OO- instead of COW-, and why, and why did it catch on so quickly and universally? Surely not anti-cow prejudice?

HORSECLONE.

Mark Liberman quotes this sentence (from a review of a couple of horse books), with its whiff of fragrant equine snowclones: "The Blackfoot of the Plains had more than 100 words for the colours of horses, the Kazaks of central Asia 62 for bay shades alone. These are not just numerical curiosities from old horse societies, but signs of a human watchfulness and a deep connectedness to the natural world that was the norm, and is now rare." Mark says "If you know enough Blackfoot or Kazak to evaluate these claims, or can find a relevant reference, let me know." I too am curious; anybody know where on the continuum between "silly" and "overstated" this claim falls?

KOKORO, KIMOI.

A couple of Japanese-related posts caught my eye:

1) Matt at No-sword has a post about a document that "records the Shōwa Emperor's decision not to visit the [Yasukuni] shrine because of the class-A criminals there"; he says:

...my attention was caught by the memo's final phrase:

だから　私あれ以来参拝していない。　それが私の心だ

So, since then, I haven't worshipped [at Yasukuni]. That is my kokoro.

Kokoro is a tough word to Englishify. To put that more accurately, it doesn't map to English very neatly. Depending on context, it might be translated as "heart", "spirit", "soul", "feeling", "mind", "mood", "opinion", "sensibility", "hope", "situation", "meaning", "plan", "reason", "center", "topic", and I'm sure there are others, and that's only if you insist that the translation be a single noun like the source. For example, one of the articles I linked above goes with "feeling", but this article translates the relevant phrase as "That is from my heart."

Kind of reminds me of the dustman's dumpling.

2) Meanwhile, Joel at Far Outliers has a post about what the sci.lang.japan page he links to calls "a relatively recent trend in Japanese slang... to shorten long words into two or three characters plus the inflectional ending i and make new i adjectives"; the adjective that started Joel off was "kimochi warui 'unpleasant feeling', which [a visiting Japanese college student] shortened to kimoi." Since she was trying to render 'gross, yucky,' either the word has strengthened in negative connotation since Arthur Rose-Innes rendered kyō wa sukoshi kimochi ga warui as "I don't feel quite well today" or "don't feel quite well" is an example of that famous British understatement.

Incidentally, I was wondering exactly how old the Rose-Innes Vocabulary of Common Japanese Words is; my copy is a 1945 reprint of the 1942 first edition of the Yale revision of what is clearly a substantially older book, since the preface by George A. Kennedy says "The Vocabulary compiled by Arthur Rose-Innes is not merely the best of its kind, but practically the only Japanese-English vocabulary suitable for the beginning student... The principal defect of the work lies in the selection of words, many important modern terms, such as 'airplane', being lacking, while some of the included terms seem relatively non-essential." I checked BookFinder.com, but the entries for earlier editions say things like "Yokohama Early edition Hard Cover," leading me to suspect that the earlier ones were undated. Anybody know anything about the history of this useful little book (or, for that matter, of Mr. Rose-Innes himself)?

SEROW.

Another odd word for your delectation: serow, "any of several goatlike artiodactyl mammals (genus Capricornis) of eastern Asia that are usually rather dark and heavily built and some of which have distinct manes." Aside from the unusual name (it's pronounced suh-ROH), what struck me was the etymology, "Lepcha sa-ro long-haired Tibetan goat." Lepcha is a Tibeto-Burman language of Sikkim, spoken by the Lepcha, for whom, according to the Wikipedia entry, "sex is the main recreation..., beginning at age 10 or 11 and lasting throughout their lives. Adultery is expected and not viewed as a problem." Ah, happy Lepcha!

As for the serow, according to Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People-Wildlife Relations, by John Knight, the Japanese serow is a "national treasure" and "emblematic animal of Japan," comparable to the Chinese panda. You learn something every day.

TRANSLIT.RU.

I mentioned translit.ru in a comment this morning, and michael farris said it should have its own post, so here it is. You just type English letters into the box (abcde) and Russian letters appear (абцде). As you see, c gets you ц, and you can use w to get щ (though shh will also work; it collapses sh, ch, zh, etc. automatically). I've used it every day since frequent commenter Tatyana told me about it. Thanks again, Tat!

THE ARABIC UTTERANCE.

A passage from Chapter VI of Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta (pages 196-97 in my edition); Doughty is in the town of al-Ula ("el-Ally," as he calls it), where his interlocutor pokes fun at the Arabic spoken by the nomadic Bedouins with whom Doughty has been staying, and describes a brutally effective shibboleth:

" These Franks labour, said he, in the Arabic utterance, for they have not a supple tongue : the Arabs' tongue is running and returning like a wheel, and in the Arabs all parts alike of the mouth and gullet are organs of speech ; but your words are born crippling and fall half-dead out of your mouths. — What think you of this country talk ? have you not laughed at the words of the Beduw ? what is this gòtar (went) — A-ha-ha! — and for the time of day their gowwak (the Lord strengthen thee) and keyf'mûrak (how do thy affairs prosper ?) who ever heard the like ! " He told this also of the Egyptian speech : a battalion of Ibrahîm Pasha's troops had been closed in and disarmed by the redoubtable Druses, in the Léja (which is a lava field of the Hauran). The Druses coming on to cut them in pieces, a certain Damascene soldier among them cried out " Aha ! neighbours, dakhalakom, grant protection, at least to the Shwâm (Syrians), which are owlàd el-watn, children of the same soil with you ! " It was answered, 'They would spare them if they could discern them.' 'Let me alone for that, said the Damascene ; — and if they caused the soldiers to pass one by one he could discern them.' It was granted, and he challenged them thus, " Ragel (Egyptian for Rajil), O man, say Gamel ! " every Syrian answered Jemel ; and in this manner he saved his countrymen and the Damascenes.

As lagniappe, here's a completely useless new word I learned from Doughty (p. 497): "If the thing fall to them for which they vowed, they will go to the one [oak grove] on a certain day in the year to break a crock there ; or they lay up a new stean in a little cave which is under a rock at the other." Stean, saith the OED, is "A vessel for liquids (or, in later use, for bread, meat, fish, etc.), usually made of clay, with two handles or ears; a jar, pitcher, pot, urn. Now only dial. and arch." It's related to stone, and the last two citations are:
1888 DOUGHTY Arabia Deserta I. xvi. 450 If the thing fall to them for which they vowed [at the wishing-place], they will.. lay up a new stean in a little cave.
1908 A. BENNETT Old Wives' Tale I. iii. 34 In the corner nearest the kitchen was a great steen in which the bread was kept.

FSI COURSES ONLINE.

Thanks to a MetaFilter post, I have learned that the Foreign Service Institute language courses (for a long time available only as occasional finds in used book stores, where I bought them whenever I saw them) are being put online. So far they have Cantonese, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Standard Chinese, and Turkish; presumably there will be more to come. The text is in pdf files, which is annoying, but they have audio as well, which makes up for it. Well done, Glen D. Fellows et al!

GIBBERISH.

Joe Clark at fawny has a post that starts off discussing the "nonsensical stream-of-delirium lyrics" of a rock song and ends with the question "Has the phenomenon of an appearance of making sense when nonsensical words are uttered in a certain prosody actually been studied?" I imagine it has, but I wouldn't know; I did, however, greatly enjoy the Eric Idle routine called “Gibberish” that he quotes in extenso. Here's the beginning:

HOST: Ham sandwich, bucket and water plastic Duralex rubber McFisheries underwear. Plugged rabbit emulsion, zinc custard without sustenance in kippling-duff geriatric scenery, maximizes press insulating government grunting sapphire-clubs incidentally. But tonight, sam pan Bombay Bermuda in diphtheria rustic McAlpine splendor, rabbit and foot-foot-phooey jugs rapidly big biro ruveliners musk-green gauges micturate with nipples and tiptoe rusting machinery, rustically inclined. Good evening and welcome.

GUEST: Hello.

I think I'll use the line "Machine-wrapped, with butter" in any situation where it seems to apply, which may be more than one would think at first glance.

BBC PRONUNCIATION BLOG.

Remember my joy at finding a copy of a book of pronunciations that originally appeared in a regular column in The Literary Digest over 70 years ago? Well, the BBC is putting pronunciations of names and words in the news on a blog written by its Pronunciation Unit (Martha Figueroa-Clark, Catherine Sangster, and Lena Olausson, named and pictured in the first post). Here's an entry on a town name I wasn't familiar with:

"Today's pronunciation is for the English town Chester-le-Street.

"Our recommendation, based on the advice of people who live there as well as published sources, is CHEST-uhr-li-street - the first part rhymes with 'westerly'. Most English placenames with 'le' in them are pronounced in this way, rhyming with 'me' rather than the French-sounding 'luh'."

Thanks to komfo,amonan for the link!

DEDOVSHCHINA.

Dedovshchina (дедовщина) is an extreme form of hazing that has been one of the more shameful aspects of the Russian military for decades. Some say it developed during World War Two, when prisoners were taken from penitentiaries straight into the army, others think it was a product of the '60s, when the term of service was shortened and soldiers started punishing newcomers who had to serve a year less. Whatever the origin, it seems impossible to eradicate, despite horror stories like that of Andrei Sychev (see-CHOFF); Sunday's NY Times had a story by Steven Lee Myers describing the situation, with depressing quotes like "By the military’s own count, disputed as conservative, 16 soldiers were killed by dedovshchina last year, while an additional 276 committed suicide" and (from the minister of defense) "I think nothing serious happened... Otherwise, I would have certainly known about it."

However, none of this is Languagehat-related. This, from the sixth paragraph of the story, is:

The trial, however, has cast doubt on the military’s prosecution and showed how deeply rooted dedovshchina (pronounced de-DOV-she-na) remains in Russia’s barracks, still largely filled with conscripts despite overwhelming opposition to the draft.

The parenthetical information I have put in bold is wrong [or at least inadequate]. The simplification of shch to sh is reasonable anglicization, but the damn stress is on the wrong damn syllable: it's di-duhf-SHCHEE-nuh [in standard Russian]. The accent is indicated at the Russian Wikipedia article from which I drew my information about the history of the practice. Now, I don't expect Times reporters, editors, and proofreaders to know Russian, but is it asking too much that they check with a Russian before embarrassing themselves with an incorrect pronunciation? If you're not going to bother finding out the facts, at least don't make something up.

(It may be, of course, that there is an alternate pronunciation, in which case I'm sure one of my Russian-speaking readers will so inform me.)

Update. In the comments, the estimable mab informs me that there is indeed an alternate pronunciation, which was presumably used by whoever the Times consulted. Sorry, Times: my outrage was excessive. But if you didn't deserve it today, you'll deserve it tomorrow, as the parent told the naughty child.

HOW MANY LANGUAGES?

Renee of Glosses.net has been preoccupied lately by having a baby; having accomplished that (mazel tov!), she's now wondering how many languages might be too many. She writes in her LJ:

The kid calms down beautifully to Fáfnismál. The moment I sing the opening lines, he stops crying, listens attentively, and eventually dozes off or settles to eat... Oren and my mom beg me not to confuse the child with Old Norse. It is true that as a potential trilingual he has enough on his plate. I am truly not sure about the mechanics of this; my intuition tells me that it will work out more than fine, but there is no evidence either way (except Sybilla's). To appease the grown-up audience, I temporarily switched to Beethoven.

As I told her, my immediate response is "the more languages the better," but that's not much help. Anybody have any actual knowledge about the effects of exposing a helpless infant to multiple languages? (Oh, and Sibylla is the protagonist of this book; go buy it if you haven't yet!)

EUROBULGARIAN.

A correspondent sent me an International Herald Tribune article by Matthew Brunwasser about various linguistic issues that will arise when Bulgaria joins the EU:

With Bulgaria scheduled to enter the European Union along with Romania on Jan. 1, Cyrillic is becoming the bloc's third official alphabet, after Latin and Greek; by the end of the decade, if Bulgaria succeeds in joining the euro zone, it may even appear on euro banknotes.

Although Bulgaria has no commitment to reciprocate by displaying signs in the Latin alphabet, "We are doing it," says Nikolay Vassilev, minister for state administration and administrative reform. "More slowly than I would like."...

Rusana Bardarska, a Bulgarian translator, said the hardest part of introducing Bulgarian was EU terminology, for which Bulgarian words may not exist. "Should we translate 'communitarization,' 'convergence,' 'flexsecurity' and 'cohesion,' or rather introduce them as new words in Bulgarian?" she asked....

Back in Bulgaria, however, spelling is a major problem, according to Vassilev, the government minister. Many Cyrillic letters have no Latin equivalent, or several possibilities. The result, he says, is that some Bulgarian cities are spelled seven different ways in Latin - even on signs within the same city.

"There is no other country in the world with a problem of this magnitude," Vassilev said.

To address this, Vassilev developed "Comprehensible Bulgaria," a transliteration system created by linguists so that all Bulgarian proper names would be rendered the same way in the Latin alphabet. The transliteration software is available for free on the ministry's Web page.

The new spellings are now obligatory for state institutions, but people are free to continue transliterating their names as they like, and Vassilev expects it to take years for the public to adopt the new system...

The "no other country" thing is silly, of course (everybody always thinks their own language is uniquely unique), but I'd be curious to know which cities are spelled seven different ways. And I love "the Day of Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture and of the Slavonic Alphabet"; I'll have to remember to celebrate it next May 24.

LANGUAGES WITHOUT PARAGRAPHS?

Christophe Strobbe wrote to me as follows:

I am a member of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, and one that came up in a comment on our documents (more specifically this section) is if there are languages in use on the Internet that don't use paragraphs. I found your web log and noticed that you discuss languages from different language families and with different writing systems, so I wondered if you could shed some light on this or point me to a relevant resource. (Punctuation has not always existed, so there used to be more languages that didn't use sentences or paragraphs, e.g. Classical Greek, but I'm looking for current examples.)

I told him I didn't know of any, but I'd ask the assembled multitudes. So: any thoughts?

DINOSAURS, GRAVY, AND GRAMMAR.

I've allowed my love of gravy to distract from my prescriptivist linguistic crusade!

And now you know how to improve your chances of getting into heaven. (Many thanks to John Emerson, also known to be operating under the alias of The New Yorker, for the tip.)

VINDALOO.

I just discovered that vindaloo (the name of a curry I only recently dared try because of its reputation for extreme spiciness) is not of native Indian origin, but comes (according to Merriam-Webster, the OED having a similar but abbreviated etymology) "from Konkani vindalu, from Indo-Portuguese (Portuguese creole of India) vinh d'alho, literally, wine of garlic, from Portuguese vinho de alho." (No wonder I liked the vindaloo, since I like both wine and garlic!)

THE FETISHIZATION OF ORTHOGRAPHY.

I'm inured to the standard grounds for complaint about the Decline of the English Language: poor grammar, sloppy punctuation, IM-speak, and the like. I accept that people have an irrational devotion to the forms of what they perceive as "the language" (ignorant as they are of the unavoidable diversity and mutability of all languages), and I have learned to view such jeremiads with a tolerant, if wry, smile. But the recent controversy in the Boston City Council over the spelling of council(l)or floors me. According to a Boston Globe story by Matt Viser, "the question of one L or two is very serious":

About half of the council's 13 members say the word should be spelled with two Ls, a British spelling that has been used in city documents for more than a century. Tradition dictates it, they say.

Some, like Council President Michael Flaherty and Councilor John Tobin, defend the position with some ferocity. Boston officialdom appears to support them, with most signs and placards in City Hall spelling it with two Ls, as does the city charter and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Webster's New World Dictionary prefers the one-L version, however, and newer, younger councilors are using one L as a symbol of breaking from an old, hide-bound kind of politics...

For new members of the board, it is a rite of passage, among the first decisions they make when coming into office and requesting their business cards. Will they accept tradition, or try and chart a new course?...

"Those new young guys, they've just got no respect," said Tobin, whose staff for several years mocked him by giving him the nickname "Double L."

"I will not be part of the dumbing down of the English language," he said.

Spelling it councilor is "the dumbing down of the English language"? I truly cannot wrap my head around this concept. Ah well, at least the fact they're arguing about something so trivial shows they have nothing more serious to worry about.

I got the story from Ben Zimmer at Language Log, where you will find more details on the one-l spelling, which "was apparently one of Noah Webster's many attempts at distinguishing American orthography from the British model."

KURDISH GIVING WAY TO TURKISH.

The latest post at the-kurdistani discusses what is apparently an accelerating displacement of Kurdish by Turkish in some areas of Turkey:

until the end of 1980s the kurdish language was still preserved, because the kurds were still in their villages, and mountains back then. and they had their own little worlds, most of them would not know one single word turkish and the women, in specific, did not know one single word turkish! even though there are some bad sides to this, such as they were not connected to the outer world in any way or this kind of things, it was still good because the kurdish language was still living and it was being passed to the younger generations by our holy mothers! but at the beginning of 1990s, and since then going on, we have been losing the kurdish language...

all the kurds started to go to school, where they would only speak turkish, and if, in any way someone were to speak kurdish s/he would punished for speaking kurdish and this way it would have a deterring effect on the other children (students) as well! kurdish students were despised and made fun of because of their accent so the families of those kurdish students thought that if they spoke only turkish at home it would help their children and they would be able to speak turkish better, and nobody would be able to fun of them...

they only watched the turkish tv channels! and especially the mothers were very badly affected by this, because they wree the ones who would stay at home and when they did not have anything to do they would watch the tv and improve their turkish, but after a while they started to use turkish words while speaking kurdish...

It's an old, sad story and probably inevitable, but as Lameen (from whose post I got this link) says, "I had no idea the last decade or two had made such a difference."

READING IN THE 19TH CENTURY.

The Little Professor has a fascinating post discussing William St. Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, which argues that "copyright laws have exerted considerable force on the literary canon":

For the purposes of St. Clair's project, perhaps the most significant epoch in the history of British intellectual property laws stretches from 1774-1808. St. Clair dubs this the "copyright window": perpetual copyright was officially disallowed, prompting a sudden spill of older texts onto the market. (The window closes again with a series of laws passed between 1808 and 1842, each lengthening the copyright period.) Once the first window "opened," publishers began marketing large-scale anthologies of the English (or British) "classics." In fact, the Scots, operating under a differents set of copyright laws, jumped the gun in 1773 with The British Poets—soon followed by the various anthologies published by John Bell... For St. Clair, this window produces what he calls the "old canon," which would persist well into the Victorian period [basically, Samuel Butler, Chaucer, Collins, Cowper, Dryden, Falconer, Gay, Goldsmith, Gray, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Spenser, Thomson, and Young; no Drayton, Herrick, Lovelace, Marvell, or Herbert, and no women writers]...

St. Clair uses the phenomenon of the "old canon" to make several points of interest to literary historians. First, he argues that publishers formed and replicated the old canon without much regard at all to critical considerations; to the contrary, the old canon consisted, by and large, of what was out of copyright and easily available. Second, he shows that there was a "generation gap" separating readers in different economic strata. Less well-off readers during the Romantic period had access to the old canon, but not to the now-canonical "Romantics."...

St. Clair further contributes a number of case studies, some of which correct academic received wisdom. Thus, he shows that below a certain economic range, post-Shakespearean readers didn't read Shakespeare—because for years there was no affordable Shakespeare for them to read. Along the same lines, far from being a best-seller, Frankenstein was unavailable for much of the nineteenth century; many Romantic and Victorian readers knew the story only from its multitudinous stage adaptations... Ditto the Vindication of the Rights of Woman—most references to Wollstonecraft were made by people who had never seen, nor were likely to be able to see, the rare surviving editions of her work.

She has much more to say, all of it interesting; I urge you not to miss her blackly ironic final paragraph.

Via Avva, who also links to her post on a jaw-dropping book ad:

Many of us have probably read parts of Homer's epic The Iliad. Some may even have slogged through its heavy prose to the end. Some of you may even have understood what you were reading. For the rest of us there is this new reworking of The Iliad. Gone are the pesky line breaks, intrusive gods, and archaic phrasing. It's the same timeless story, but it now reads like an entirely new book.

Its heavy prose? Excuse me, I'm going to go shoot myself now.

POLYNESIAN ESPERANTO?

A correspondent sent me a story by Jon Stokes from the New Zealand Herald about a project "for the development of a pan-Pacific language":

[Maori Language] Commission chief executive Haami Piripi said the commission was in discussions with a number of Pacific nations including Hawaii, Rarotonga, Samoa and Niue to develop a language database that would be used to develop a common "Meta-Polynesian" language.

He said the initiative was required to halt the declining use of Polynesian languages driven by the dominance of the English language and high numbers of Pacific peoples settling in other parts of the world.

"There are networks of languages that share a common ancestry, from Fiji across to Tahiti, it is important to chronicle the changes to the language as it spread across the Pacific and to recognise the family of languages that exist."

He said the end result would be a database that would assist in developing greater uniformity among the various languages, driven by a need to ensure Polynesian languages are maintained.

"There is a merge point, the point where the languages merge will get greater and greater until it becomes a language of its own."...

However, the proposal has been met with scepticism by senior lecturer in Samoan studies at Victoria University Galumalemana Alfred Hunkin.

He said language and culture were intertwined and strong opposition would follow moves for change, especially from another culture.

"When we talk about language loss it is a very emotional issue. Language is about identity and pride and your culture if you have someone who comes along and says 'hey let's use this word', you are going to have some very healthy debate aren't you?"

Mr Hunkin applauded moves to compile a database and protect Pacific languages, but said initiatives to ensure the survival of a native tongue had to be driven from within the community and embraced by those at the grass-roots.

I'm afraid I agree with the skeptical Mr. Hunkin (and with Pita Sharples, who said "I support the attempt to proliferate the languages and to share, but Samoan is Samoan and Maori is Maori"), but the database is an excellent idea, and anything that promotes the study of threatened languages is OK with me.

I HAVE A LANGUAGE, YOU HAVE A DIALECT.

I'm trying to understand World War One at the moment, and I just got to this, on page 484 of Sidney B. Fay's (excellent) The Origins of the World War; the speaker is Nikola Pašić (then usually spelled Pashitch), prime minister of Serbia, reporting on a meeting with Nicholas II in February 1914 in which the tsar asked him about the ethnographic situation in the Balkans: "I also told him of the Slovenes, that they, too, were gravitating to the Serbo-Croats, and would adopt the Serbo-Croatian language, owing to the fact that their dialect is bad and that they have long lost their national independence." (Emphasis added.) Nothing like an objective analysis!

LET THE PASSIVE BE RENAMED!

Language Log has been on a campaign to redeem the passive voice, investigating the origins of the prejudice against it—"Arnold Zwicky found that the Avoid Passive rule originated in U.S. composition handbooks early in the 20th century (perhaps originally in Strunk's 1918 Elements of Style), along with a metaphorical association between passive verbs and weakness"—and showing, delightfully, that the very people who have campaigned most vigorously against it, George Orwell and Strunk & White, used it far more frequently than average English prose ("a little over 20 percent" and 21% respectively, versus a maximum of 13% in periodical prose). Now Mark Liberman adds a compilation of Churchill passages (41% passives vs. 38% actives in the paragraphs he quotes from The River War, a book of vigorous accounts of military action) and finishes with a good suggestion:

Perhaps we should start with a lexical make-over. We could try replacing the word passive with a competely new borrowing from a classical language, like the "hyptic voice". (Greek ὕπτιος meant "laid on one's back; turned upside down; backwards", and was also sometimes used to refer to the passive voice of verbs.) This might work—hyptic is a little weird, but there are useful resonances with hip and hypnotic. Or we could try a positive-sounding name based on the value of the passive in focusing different thematic roles—"thematic verbs" or "the focusing voice". We could say, "use thematic verbs to maintain the velocity of your narrative". Or, "seize and hold your readers' attention with the focusing voice".

I'm not very good at this naming business, so let's have a Rename the Passive contest. If you've got a great idea, let me know. The winner gets a year's subscription to Language Log, a lifetime supply of by-phrases, and other exciting prizes.

As a sucker for classical terms, I like hyptic myself, but I recognize it's caviar to the general. "Focusing" is good, conveying an idea of how the form is used while projecting an attractive forcefulness that should send the stigma straight into the dustbin of history. Further suggestions are welcome, as are attempts by anti-passivists to explain the plethora of uses in authors they presumably admire.

TSOTSITAAL.

Tsotsitaal (Ethnologue's Camtho) is a mixed language spoken (as a second language) in South African townships, such as Soweto. (If you saw the movie Tsotsi, you heard it used.) Andie (of Andie's Web) has put online a selection from Louis Molamu's Tsotsitaal: A dictionary of the language of Sophiatown; the vocabulary shows the usual flair and humor of popular language creation:

florsheims/A popular brand of expensive men's shoes, the term is used widely to refer to cooked sheep or pigs' trotters.

Tsotsi itself means '(young) thug, criminal' and is said to be "tied to the 'zoot suits' worn by Americans in the early 1940s"—interesting if true.

HABANERO.

From the Jon Lee Anderson New Yorker article "Castro’s Last Battle" (July 31 issue, now online): "Many of the police are drawn from Cuba’s rural eastern provinces, where the government has strong support, and are held in contempt by many of the comparatively cosmopolitan habañeros." OK, listen up, people, I'm only going to say this once: there is no such word as "habañero." Regardless of the fatal attraction the tilde appears to possess for Anglophones, the Spanish adjective meaning 'of or pertaining to the city of Havana' (said city being La Habana in Spanish) is habanero, pronounced a-va-NEH-ro. No tilde, no -ny- sound. That goes for the pepper as well. And New Yorker, you should be ashamed of yourself. We've discussed your slipping standards before, and I know you're aware of the problem. Hire back those fact-checkers and get some editors who know what they're doing, stat.

MOOSE/ELK.

The latest post at Sauvage Noble has me extremely interested in "Mallory, J. P., and D. Q. Adams. 2006 [forthcoming]. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and The Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University Press." I hope I get a chance to peruse the actual book; in the meantime, Chapter 9 “Indo-European Fauna” is online (pdf; no Google cache available). There's a fascinating introductory section on the history of the words elk and moose that I wanted to quote, but alas, the Select Text feature doesn't work (probably for the same reason there's no cache), so I'll have to type in some and summarize the rest:

When the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain from their continental homes, they were familiar with both Alces alces (the 'elk' of European English and the 'moose' of North American English) and Cervus elaphus (the 'red deer' of European English and the 'elk' of North American English) and applied those designations to members of the same two species which were also present in Great Britain. By about AD 900 Alces alces was extinct in Great Britain [but the word was still used because the English were familiar with the animal in continental Europe]. However, for most speakers the referent was pretty vague, something like 'large deer' or the like. By 1600 or so the inherited designation for Cervus elaphus had been replaced by the innovative and descriptive red deer [and around the same time the species pretty much disappeared from southern Britain]. At that point for most speakers of southern British English there were two terms for large deer, 'elk', and 'red deer', without well-known referents.

When some of these southern British English speakers emigrated to New England at the beginning of the seventeenth century [they found both species there] and they needed names for both. 'Red deer' was not suitable for either since neither... was noticeably red. However, 'elk' was available and was assigned to the commonest large deer in the new environment, Cervus elaphus, while a borrowing from the local Algonquian language, 'moose', was pressed into service for Alces alces.

Of course, that's relevant to Indo-European only as an example of how semantic shift can operate, but I find it extremely interesting in its own right. I always knew there was something funny going on with moose and elk, but I'd never taken the trouble to get it straight. Now I know.

MORE JABBERWOCKY TRANSLATIONS.

I posted about a Jabberwocky-translation site over three years ago, but because I know you can't have too many Jabberwocky translations, here's another one (hot off the presses: NEWEST November 1998!). A tip of the Hatlo hat to V. for the link!

Update. Adam Rice has, as promised, posted Japanese translations of "Jabberwocky"; you can read informed commentary on how they're done at No-sword.