BLIND TRANSLATIONS.

A few years ago I did a post about homophonic translations, where the translator tries to preserve the sound of the original poem; blind translations (from Cipher Journal, which publishes "creative works of art & literature that call attention to the process of translation") are superficially similar but turn out much better to my mind:

Blind Translations (elsewhere known as homophonic translations) are a fine blend of translation & creativity: the poet-translator can neither speak nor read the poem’s original language but has formed a translation nonetheless. The linguistic materials are laid bare as acrylic in an abstract painting, and the poetic result is at once a rigidly excising form poem and a tribute to Surrealism, an extension of avant-gardist poetic activity spanning many traditions.

I don't agree with the identification with homophonic translations, since in my experience the latter are done with an awareness of the original text's meaning and a stronger commitment to keeping the sound; these, at least from the examples they give, use the sound/look of the original as a springboard to inspire a new poem in English, and I think utter ignorance of the meaning is a help to producing good work. Here's a brief example; the original is by the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, the "translation" by John Bradley:

Yes, you, my angel.
You used to, possibly in a cradle
Slowly but always sooner.
A meadow talking in its sleep.

Barely gone no beetle pulls you.
I ravine your oxygen.

Just please slap me pretty hard.

My Slovenian is nonexistent, but with the help of a dictionary plus general knowledge of Slavic [plus bulbul's comment—thanks!] I can tell you that the original (below the fold) means 'You are my angel / mouth sprinkled with chalk / I am a servant of the ceremony. / Untouched [intact/virgin] // White mushrooms on a white field. / In a plain of fire. // I walk on golden dust.'

Ti si moj angel.
Usta, posuta s kredo
Služabnik obreda sem.
Nedotaknjen

Bele gobe na belem polju.
V ravnini ognja.

Jaz po zlatem prahu hodim.

(Via wood s lot.)

COME TO ME, FRANGIPANI.

And speaking of family names, I love this excerpt from They Call Me Naughty Lola, a collection of "witty and eccentric lonely hearts ads from the London Review of Books " (reviewed here—thanks, Nick!):

Stroganoff. Boysenberry. Frangipani. Words with their origins in people's names. If your name has produced its own entry in the OED then I'll make love to you. If it hasn't, I probably will anyway, but I'll only want you for your body. Man of too few distractions, 32.

I dunno, though: the OED says only "said to be from Frangipani, the name of the inventor" (emphasis added); this guy could get his heart broken by an imposter.

Update. The County Clerk has done a thorough investigation of all things frangipani/plumeria-related along with various enjoyable divagations, such as a long description of Septimus Piesse's odophone. Visit and revel!

PANCOAST.

An occasional feature here at LH is Family Names With Surprising Etymologies (e.g., Janeway), and today's is Pancoast. When my nonagenarian mother-in-law mentioned that somebody she'd known seventy years ago was called that, I thought she might be misremembering, but no, it turns out there is such a name, and furthermore, it's a chopped-down form of Pentecost! Man, I love etymology.

Totally unrelated, but in honor of an exchange between John Emerson and Aidan Kehoe in this thread, here's a good Penny Arcade. (Thanks, Songdog!)

THE NECESSARY TONE OF AUTHORITY.

Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat has come across a language textbook that sounds like a satirist's invention, but it's apparently all too real:

I'm researching Chadic imperatives at the moment, so I opened Angass Manual - written by H. D. Foulkes, Captain (late R. F. A.), Political Officer, Nigeria in 1915) to the appropriate section, and found it to consist solely of the following advice:

The Imperative is of the same form as the rest of the verbal forms, only uttered with the necessary tone of authority.

[...]I particularly like how he explains that Angass grammar is really simple:

"The language is so simple in construction that I am hoping a study of it may help in elucidating the groundwork of more elaborated Negro languages."

This is the best bit:

"The only difficulty - but it is a very real one - in the colloquial is the apparently capricious employment of a large number of particles, the use of which, though immaterial from a grammatical point of view, is, however, necessary in practice, for without them the sentence certainly loses its flavour, and seemingly some of its sense, in that an ordinary man cannot understand a phrase unless it is enunciated exactly in the way he is accustomed to hearing it, and the omission or transposition of a word bothers him considerably."

Truly, the mind boggles. We've come a long way, baby! (I presume "Angass" is the language Ethnologue calls Ngas.)

MISCELLANEA.

1) I'm excited about this. I may have to read it in hardcover. (Great, another thousand-page hardcover after November 1916—it will either strengthen me or kill me.)

2) There's an interesting AskMetaFilter thread about slang migrating westward across the Atlantic: "Are there any British / Australian / New Zealand or wherever phrases and words that have become commonly used by people in North America recently? Do Brooklynites ever exclaim 'Crikey!' or 'Bloody Hell!'?" A surprising number of Americans do seem to use bits of slang picked up from The Office or Harry Potter; as I say in my comment, "I always have to temper my irritation at Yanks tossing around Brit slang they picked up from watching TV with the reflection that it's just language change at work and I don't want to turn into a fuddy-duddy before my time."

3) A MetaFilter post linked to Street Use (featuring "the ways in which people modify and re-create technology"), which links to this wonderful Russian site, where not only can you see things like hangers made from insulators, but if you click on the audio icon at the bottom of the page you get a page with a transcript of someone (often the creator) talking about the object and how it came to be made (e.g., here's the page for the hangers), and if you click on the icon on that page you hear the voice itself (RealAudio, I'm afraid). It's great to hear these people reminsicing about the conditions under which they or their relatives came up with these creative solutions to Soviet shortages.

4) One of my linguistic heroes, Franz Bopp, gets extensive coverage at Varieties of Unreligious Experience: "It was for his brutal rigour that Bopp was admired ever since: the science he brought to perfection still survives, though many of his conclusions have been revised." I think the dryasdust stuff is overstated (in historical linguistics, quiet rigor is infinitely preferable to excitable speculation), and I could have done without the final paean to the linguistic genius of Joseph Stalin, but it's all forgivable beside the unexpected pleasure of seing Opa Franz celebrated here in the 21st century.

SHAM POO.

See back formation and morphological reanalysis in their full glory at this hilarious post (it would be worthless without the picture!) by Mark Liberman at Language Log. And while we're at it, has anybody ever heard/used "an ahundred" (from the second part of the post)?

ARABIC PAPYROLOGY DATABASE.

The Arabic Papyrology Database allows you to search Arabic documents on papyrus, parchment and paper from the 7th up the 16th century A.D. - there are now 414 (out of ca. 2,000) at your disposal. Use this database to locate relevant historical data, investigate linguistic peculiarities, find references and more. [The APD is for] papyrologists, historians, philologists, editors, professors, students: Specialists in Arabic studies, Islamic studies, history of the Middle East upt to the 10th/16th c., Islamic law, linguisits, historians in general - just anyone dealing with Arabic documents. Try it out!

Firefox only, so far; sorry, IE users. (Via wood s lot.)

A BIG BOTTLE.

In the "Talk of the Town" section of last week's New Yorker, there's a story about an incident in which rich person Steve Wynn decided to sell a Picasso to rich person Steven Cohen for $139 million, but in the course of showing off his prize possession to a bunch of other rich people he accidentally put his elbow through the painting and decided to keep it after all. This being a language blog, I don't have to try to express exactly how I feel about these rich people and their art deals, but I do want to comment on one phrase in the story, which I have put in bold: "Mary Boies ordered a six-litre bottle of Bordeaux, and when it was empty she had everyone sign the label, to commemorate the calamitous afternoon." Now, there is a well-established system of nomenclature for wine bottles, and the correct term for a six-liter* bottle of Bordeaux is imperial (image). I find it baffling that when the rare occasion arises for talking about such a bottle you would scorn the chance to use a wonderful word like imperial (not quite as imposing as methuselah, the word for a six-liter bottle of Burgundy or champagne, but splendid enough). I'm guessing that the rich person ordering the bottle did not use the mot juste ("Bring us your biggest bottle of Petrus!" is more likely), but it saddens me that the magazine did not choose lexicographic precision over the mathematical variety.

*Why on earth is the New Yorker using the British spelling of liter? Nothing against British spellings, but they do not belong in New York publications.

TRUE CYRILLIC.

Last year I posted about Glagolitic in Unicode; now I'm happy to report that Avva has created a gizmo that converts Cyrillic text into "true Cyrillic," or Glagolitic, in image form. He says you can copy the result into a blog post, but when I try to post the Glagolitic equivalent of истинная кириллица 'true Cyrillic,' I get: "The image “http://avorobey.dreamhosters.com/scripts/glagol.pl?text=[long string of code]” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors"; perhaps someone can explain to this neanderthal how to make it work.

BULL WHAT?

Language Log has been on a tear for some time now about the increasingly ridiculous insistence on the part of the NY Times on a figleaf of dashes to avoid the horrid appearance of words which it is virtually inconceivable any of their readers have not encountered; here is the most recent extended discussion, and here for your convenience is a full listing of all "Language Log postings on taboo vocabulary." It has rarely seemed so ridiculous as in Deborah Solomon's interview with Harry G. Frankfurt, author of a bestselling book whose title the Times gives as “On Bull—." Needless to say, the actual title is On Bullshit; you can read a description (and the first chapter) at the publisher's site, which also has a link to images of the covers of a number of translations (oddly, it's simply Bullshit in German; I'd be interested in the verdict of people who know Hebrew and Japanese on the titles used for those languages). The entire interview focuses on the book, the word, and the concept, and by my count the fig-hidden term "bull—" appears eight times in a very short talk. It's almost as if Ms. Solomon was deliberately highlighting the absurdity of the policy; if so, good for her. The Times routinely commits worse sins against language, but you'd think they'd want to avoid looking not only dumb but laughably out of it.

TRANSLATING BROPHY.

Brigid Brophy doesn't sound like my cup of tea, but Bernard Hoepffner (who's been working for a decade on a French translation of her In Transit that he can't get publishers interested in) has an interesting discussion of the problems of translating a novel full of multilingual puns—a novel, to make things worse, whose narrator is of indeterminate gender:

This creates different problems in English and in French, and it is of little importance to try to work out in which language the constraint is more difficult to overcome (e.g. personal pronouns in both languages, possessive pronouns in English, adjectives and participles in French); it is sufficient to know that when writing the book, the author, if faced with a particular problem which seems impossible to solve, can always choose an alternative formulation (decide to remove a word, a sentence, a paragraph, scrap the whole book even); this solution is not available to the translator, who must translate each sentence as it was written, more or less each word, but unfortunately not as it was written (Pierre Ménard was not a translator)... To take just one example, the adjectives applied to the narrator, innocuous enough in English, are gendered in French. To take a single instance, in the sentence «The problem was the more acute because I was alone in a concourse of people» «I was alone» would normally be translated by «j'étais seul» or «j'étais seule» depending on the gender; this being impossible, another construction had to be found: «Ma solitude au milieu d'une foule de gens ne faisait qu'aviver le problème», which would retranslate back into English as «My solitude in a concourse of people made the problem more acute.» A different sentence although not a mistranslation. Numerous examples show that, in the case of a translation of In Transit, the French text will rarely be, through the simple test of back-translation, a strictly faithful translation of the English original. A count of the adjectives used in the translation would certainly indicate that a great number of them (at any rate a greater percentage than is normally found in a text written in French) do not change according to gender (propre, aimable, etc.). In most cases, the passé composé was also ruled out as the auxiliary être requires a past participle with an «e» if the subject is a woman, or, if the verb is constructed with avoir, the object (if the object is the narrator) cannot not be placed before the verb («Il a regardé Patricia», «Patricia, quand il l'a regardée»).

He says "In Transit has been a frequent companion; in the same way that, in nineteenth-century novels, it was through the Bible that the children of the poor were taught to read and write, I somehow learned to read English «in transit»." Even if I'm not enthusiastic about the idea of reading the actual book, I enjoyed reading about his difficulties in wrestling with it. (Via wood s lot.)

TWO BLOGS AND SOME PEPTIDES.

Through the magic of Technorati, I've become aware of two blogs I want to bring to your attention, and through the kindness of a correspondent a news story only tangentially related to language, but what the hell. First the blogs:

Transient Languages & Cultures "covers many different projects and groups all with the common theme of endangered languages and culture"; it's hosted at the University of Sydney and has been going since June. The latest post, by Jane Simpson (it's a multi-author blog), is about an online course in Pitjantjatjara:

It's been very hard for ordinary city-dwelling Australians (i.e. most of us) to learn Indigenous Australian languages. Most universities don't teach them, and getting to Alice Springs for courses at the Institute for Aboriginal Development is out of most people's reach. Summer schools, such as the Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay ones mentioned in a previous post are rare. So it had to come, and it has, but in a rather unusual way. The first public online course in an Australian Indigenous language is run out of a demountable building in Alice Springs by the Ngapartji Ngapartji group...

All Mouth and Trousers has a more limited ambit: "Dedicated to preserving and promoting the great Northern English phrase 'All mouth and trousers' against barbarism and neglect." It has only one post so far, and for all I know it may never have another, but that one is enough to make it immortal in my eyes; he says his mission "requires defending this venerable phrase against the more recent Southern perversion 'all mouth and no trousers'" and goes on to quote Michael Quinion ("This strange expression comes from the north of England and is used, mainly by women in my experience, as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of a certain kind of pushy, over-confident male") and rail against "promulgators of the Metropolitan vulgarisation." Such extreme devotion to authentic local usage deserves our honor and respect.

Finally, Seth Borenstein of the AP reports "Grammar-based peptide fights bacteria":

Using grammar rules alongside test tubes, biologists may have found a promising new way to fight nasty bacteria, including drug-resistant microbes and anthrax.

Studying a potent type of bacteria-fighters found in nature, called antimicrobial peptides, biologists found that they seemed to follow rules of order and placement that are similar to simple grammar laws. Using those new grammar-like rules for how these antimicrobial peptides work, scientists created 40 new artificial bacteria-fighters...

So study that grammar, kids, if you want to fight disease! (A hat tip to Songdog for sending me the story.)

Update. Mark Liberman has blogged this story at Language Log; please proceed thither for actual scholarly discussion. It turns out the paper is Christopher Loose, Kyle Jensen, Isidore Rigoutsos and Gregory Stephanopoulos, A linguistic model for the rational design of antimicrobial peptides, Nature 443, 867-869 (19 October 2006).

PRICE/PRIZE/PRAISE.

This is one of those things I must have known at some point, but it came as a fresh shock to me when I ran across it today: price, prize, and praise are, historically, the same word. Here's what the OED has to say:

price, n.

[ME. a. OF. pris (mod.F. prix):—earlier *prieis (= Pr. pretz, Sp. prez, It. prezzo):—late L. precium, orig. pretium ‘price, value, wages, reward’; in OF. also ‘honour, praise, prize’. The long ī of ME. pris was variously represented by ii, ij, iy, yi, y, ie, and indicated later by final e, prise; but to avoid the z sound of s between two vowels (cf. rise, wise), prise was changed to price (as in dice, mice, twice). The pl. had, sometimes at least, the z sound (cf. house, houses) and was commonly written prises, prizes in 16-17th c.; but though ('praɪzɪz) is still common dialectally and with individuals, the standard pronunciation is now ('praɪsɪz) after the sing., prices being thus distinguished from prizes. ME. pris had all the OF. senses ‘price, value, honour, prize, praise’; it first threw off the last of these, for which in 15th c. the n. preise, PRAISE, was formed from the cognate vb. preisen, PRAISE. During the last 300 years it has also thrown off the fourth sense, for which the by-form PRIZE has been established. The sense ‘honour’ is obsolete, that of worth or value (‘a pearl of great price’) obs. or arch., so that price now retains only the primitive sense of OF. pris and L. pretium.]

That's the kind of thing that made me want to be a historical linguist. (Via Wordorigins.org.)

TUMBLING HOME.

The latest post on Far Outliers introduces me to a wonderful term which Joel cites (from his newly acquired Encyclopedia of Ships) as tumblehome, but which my own treasured copy of The Sailor's Word-Book gives as tumbling-home "The opposite of wall-sided, or flaring out." I decided to let the OED settle the issue; here's their entry:

tumbling home: the inward inclination of the upper part of a ship's sides; opposed to FLARE n.¹ 4: see TUMBLE v. 11. Also tumbling-in.
1664 E. BUSHNELL Compl. Shipwright 11 Then set off the Tumbling Home, at the Height of the two first Haanses. 1769 FALCONER Dict. Marine, Encabanement, the tumbling-home of a ship's side from the lower-deck-beam upwards, to the gunnel. 1832 Encycl. Amer. XI. 367/2 Nothing can be urged in favor of tumbling in.. but that it brings the guns nearer the centre. c1850 Rudim. Navig. (Weale) 157 The topsides of three-decked ships have the greatest tumbling-home, for the purpose of clearing the upper works from the smoke and fire of the lower guns.

So I'm going with tumbling home for my post title. [From the comments, I learn that the current form is in fact tumblehome; I'm keeping the older form as my post title because I like the ring of it, but I don't want to mislead anyone. If you have a boat you want to describe, you should mention its tumblehome if you want to be au courant.] Joel adds that the curve was "at one time designed to make room for projections at deck level to clear the wharf, or to make boats easier to paddle, but [is] also found in vessels like submarines designed to slice through the waves rather than ride over them" and asks: "Does anyone know the French, Dutch, Portuguese, or Japanese equivalent?" The French equivalent, as you can see from the second OED cite, is encabanement, but I too would be curious to see equivalents in other languages (especially Russian). Such specialized terms are not found in general bilingual dictionaries, of course, and it's possible that most languages don't have an equivalent term (simply saying "inward-sloping" when the need arises), but I just thought I'd ask.

It turns out, by the way, that the verb tumble can also be used in this sense; the OED's definition 11 is:

Of the sides of a ship: To incline or slope inwards, to contract above the point of extreme breadth; to batter. Usually tumble home. Opposed to FLARE v. 4a. Also transf.
a1687 PETTY Treat. Naval Philos. I. ii, Let the supernatant sides of a Ship so much tumble.. as that the said sides may remain perpendicular when the Ship stoops. 1711 W. SUTHERLAND Shipbuild. Assist. 165 Tumbling home; when the Ship-side declines from a Perpendicular upwards, or, as some call it, houses in. 1761 H. WALPOLE Let. to G. Montagu 28 Apr., Old Newcastle, whose teeth are tumbled out, and his mouth tumbled in. 1848 T. WHITE Ship Build. 39 The upper works usually incline towards the middle line, or as it is termed ‘tumble home’.

THE CONSONANTAL DIET.

I didn't realize the Weekly World News had moved into Onion territory (I thought their stories were, like professional wrestling matches, supposed to be taken as true by the hypothetical simple-minded consumer, rather than being obviously for laughs), but I much enjoyed FRENCH DIET SECRETS REVEALED: SWALLOW CONSONANTS, FEEL FULL ALL DAY by Elizabeth Morgan:

FLINT, Mich.--The French ability to remain slimmer than Americans despite a diet higher in fats and overall calorie density has puzzled nutritionists for decades. But a new study suggests that scientists are looking in the wrong place for the secret of Gallic leanness, and that staying svelte may have nothing to do with food at all.

"The answer is swallowed consonants," said Dr. Eric Gross, professor of biology at Lester College in Flint. "We're finding that the pronunciation of these sounds can induce a feeling of satiety in French speakers, and can lead, over the long-term, to lower body weight."

In French phonology, nearly all terminal consonants tend to be 'swallowed'—silenced via a complex sequence of mouth and throat movements. Researchers still debate the mechanism by which these movements result in feelings of fullness. Nevertheless, most scientists have focused their investigations on the flow and vibration of air in speakers' nasal passages. The hypothalamus—which regulates hunger—sits directly above these passages, and may be affected by air movements beneath.

Regardless of the cause, the salutary effects of French phonology remain certain. Dr. Gross' correlational study, soon to be published in the journal Nomos, reveals that university students enrolled in French language classes actually dropped four to six pounds during the course of a twelve-week semester.

"Obviously, the degree of weight-loss increases in language-immersion programs, like the Lester College Junior Year Abroad in Aix-en-Provence," Dr. Gross said.

Some scientists have rejected the new data, citing smaller portion size in French culture, or the effects of increased wine consumption, as the real determinants of Gallic thinness. But Dr. Gross predicts that these researchers will abandon their theories when faced with the flood of data from a global swallowed-consonant craze.

"They'll be eating their words, like everyone else," Dr. Gross said.

Thanks to Ben Zimmer at the Log for bringing this to the attention of the linguistic world!

FRANK SAMPERI.

I discovered Frank Samperi's poetry completely by accident in the late 1970s, hanging around an all-night bookstore and trawling the poetry shelves for unfamiliar names. I opened a tall, thin book called The Prefiguration, found a table of contents with no page numbers, turned a couple of blank pages and found the title "Song Book," turned a couple more blank pages and found:

On the night of my death
fires will lace
the shoreline
of some unknown beach—

and children
      in loose
          half-length
      blue gowns
will sing my dirge
as unknown vagrants
place my body
on a raft
     covered with lilies
     and seaweed—

and after they have
fastened down my body
with rope
     they (the vagrants)
and the children
will set
          the raft
     adrift

I was absolutely smitten. I'd never read anything like it, and I walked around the store muttering it until I knew the whole thing by heart. (They were used to me at the store, I played Jeopardy with them till dawn when I wasn't pacing and muttering.) Then I bought it and took it home and read it, and came back and bought the companion volumes, Quadrifariam and Lumen Gloriae. I couldn't believe no one had heard of this wonderful poet.

When I moved to New York a couple of years later, the first thing I did was look him up in the phone book, call him up, and ask if I could visit him in his Brooklyn apartment. He seemed bemused but invited me over. I had him sign my copies of his books and got him talking about the intellectual sources of his poetry, about how both Augustine and Aquinas were resolved in Dante and what their ideas meant to him (I still have the notes I scribbled: "Is society really concerned with unitive way or with way of differences? How is problem of persona solved? In Christianity (Dante) person is reward of reason. Boethius on Trinity: READ!"... and more obscurely: "regressive adhesiveness in Amer./ modern assumption of "earning"—/ won't give to squirrel—/ true work lies in word/ Bonaventure/ Bruno"). His young daughter Claudia brought us snacks and was clearly both proud of and amused by her passionately intellectual poet father. I left feeling I'd made contact with an unknown great of our time.

Just now I googled him and discovered he died in 1991—he didn't even make it to 60. And still nobody's heard of him, but at least John Martone and Station Hill Press have put out Spiritual Necessity: Selected Poems of Frank Samperi (there's a very nice review by Jack Foley). I recommend it to anyone who wants to expand their poetic horizons. And if Claudia comes across this post (not unlikely, since his name gets relatively few Google hits): your dad was a generous man and a superb poet. I wish he were still around.

ANOTHER RANT ABOUT SAFIRE.

It's been a while since I've gone after the affably ignorant William Safire and his weekly maunderings about language, but once again a remark of his is so dunderheaded that I have to point and scoff. Today's column is about the word rant. I'm used to his pretending that whatever word or phrase he's decided to pick on is "enjoying a boom" and having a "sudden, unforeseen blossoming," so that's not what bothered me. No, it was this, from his obligatory paragraph on etymology: "The German verb ranzen, 'to dance about gaily, to frolic,' was picked up in English in Richard Brome’s 1641 play, 'The Joviall Crew': 'The more the merrier, I am resolved to Rant it to the last.'" There are two species of idiocy here. The first, the Common or Garden Variety of Safire Idiocy, is the pretense that the first citation in the OED is the very first time the word was used in English, so the user (in this case Ben Jonson's pal Richard Brome, pronounced "broom," whose comedy A Jovial Crew was the last play performed before the closing of the theaters under the Puritans) is said to have invented it or personally imported it, whichever applies. The second is the claim that it is from German ranzen. Every dictionary I have says it's from the (obsolete) Dutch verb ranten, which (as you will note) looks and sounds a lot more like the English word; the OED (presumably where Safire or his assistant went for the information) adds "cf. G. ranzen to frolic, spring about, etc." Cf. means 'compare,' and the German is added as a related word; it clearly was not the direct source. And whatever the source, the word was presumably borrowed by somebody who hung out with foreigners and liked the word enough to start using it; it caught on and was used by an unknowable number of merrie olde Englishmen before Brome put it in his comedy and became the First Citation. Please, Safire & Co., use your heads before repeating this tiresome error!

By the way, speaking of OED citations reminds me that in my post about Dancing on Mara Dust I forgot to mention an achievement of Vivien's I envy even more than her getting a book published: she's cited in the OED! The June 2005 draft revision of the parcel entry includes this as definition 10.d.:

pass the parcel a children's game in which a gift wrapped in several layers of paper is passed around a circle of players to the accompaniment of music, the person holding the parcel when the music stops being allowed to unwrap a layer (more recently, a gift may be wrapped in each layer). Also allusively: a situation in which ownership of or (esp. undesired) responsibility for something is passed on frequently.

And among the citations is:

1955 V. SMITH Bk. about Browns (MS story) (O.E.D. Archive) xxi. 46 Then the party began. Molly, who always had good ideas said to every-one ‘Should we have pass the parcel?’ ‘That's what we're going to play,’ said Mr. Brown.

Now, that's what I call immortality! And the Book about Browns was written when she was eight, making her the youngest author to be cited in the OED.

FROM RUSSIAN WITH LOVE.

The mail brought a welcome surprise: a very kind reader took advantage of the Amazon wish list link tucked away in the right column to send me a copy of Daniel Weissbort's From Russian With Love: Joseph Brodsky in English. As any regular reader of LH knows, I love both Brodsky and discussions of translation, so this is an exciting acquisition. Weissbort returns over and over (as I can see from the table of contents) to the wonderful untitled poem "Я входил вместо дикого зверя в клетку," which he calls "May 24, 1980" from the date of composition, and I'll enjoy seeing what he has to say about it. Thanks, map!

GRIOT.

I'm as aware as anyone of the high percentage of words that don't have known etymologies (boy and dog, for instance), but every once in a while an example strikes me with particular force. Just now it was griot, in the words of the OED "A member of a class of travelling poets, musicians, and entertainers in North and West Africa, whose duties include the recitation of tribal and family histories; an oral folk-historian or village story-teller, a praise-singer." I was aware that the Mande languages spoken in the area don't use this word or anything like it (the Bambara word, for example, is jeli), but I was surprised to see the OED's "uncertain ulterior etym." Merriam-Webster simply says it's from French. So I went to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé and found that it went back to 1637 (as guiriot) and that the etymology is, yes, uncertain: "peut-être issu, par l'intermédiaire d'un parler négro-port., du port. criado « domestique »." Hmm. I don't much like it, but I guess it's possible. Why wouldn't they have adopted a local word for such a characteristic local phenomenon, though?

DANCING ON MARA DUST.

My friend Vivien Smith has sent me a copy of the book her mother, Nancy Mathews, wrote about her South African childhood, called Dancing on Mara Dust (Vivien wrote a concluding chapter bringing the story up to date). As the jacket copy says, "The book tells of lifestyles that have disappeared, of people and places who are but shadowy memories, interspersed with unique observations of animal life and with snapshots of royalty and famous names from long ago." Mrs. Mathews grew up in the 1920s and '30s on a farm in the sparsely settled north of the Transvaal, near the Soutpansberg ('salt-pan mountain'), and the work and ingenuity necessary to make a go of it there are amazing to someone who grew up decades later in easier circumstances. I enjoyed the loving descriptions of the land and its inhabitants, both human and animal (there's a splendid description of fish eagles on page 140), but of course I particularly appreciate the use of language: "zithering" is exactly right for the sound of cicadas, but it would never have occurred to me. And I've learned some new words, like inspan for 'to yoke, harness' (apparently only South African). To add to my pleasure, there are bits of Northern Sotho/Sepedi scattered through the book (and a helpful glossary in the front). I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in South Africa, growing up on farms, or just a good (if sometimes very sad) story.

SOME CHINESE GOODIES.

My inbox has brought me some Chinese-related material, which I will now share with you.

1) Lyn Jeffery at Virtual China has a post in which she discusses an article on "why you can't move web design for English language sites directly over to Chinese language sites." A summary:

1. Chinese characters leave too little empty space when compared to English language letters in the same design layout.
2. Chinese characters lack a wavy, up and down 起伏 rhythm.
3. The power return of Chinese characters is a serious limitation for design.

Result: If you're not careful, Chinese design can easily turn as a rigid as a bar of iron.

Thanks for the link, Mister Morris!

2) Matt (马特) says his site Sinoling is "a collection of Chinese (mostly Mandarin) resources, including ancient poetry and literature; a magnifiable list of Chinese radicals; photos... of signs containing Chinese characters; topical vocab lists; and other Chinese language- and culture-related materials. The site is in English and Simplified Chinese." He's also got a word of the day page and an English-Chinese name translator. It all looks very useful if you're studying Chinese.

3) Finally, John Emerson of Idiocentrism asks: "Do you have any insight on Chinese-language software for internet posting? I've been using Unicode HTML and it's clunky and slow." If you have such insight, please share it.

SHOCK-WORKERS AND LOAFERS.

I had heard about A Russian Course by Alexander Lipson but had never seen a copy until the excellent Songdog gave me his battered old coursebook. The first chapter starts off:

Как живут ударники?
Ударники живут хорошо.

How do shock-workers live?
Shock-workers live well.

It continues "Where do they work? They work in factories. How do they work? They work with enthusiasm. What do they do in parks? In parks they think about life. About what life? About life in factories. That's how shock-workers live!" The chapter continues with a discussion of бездельники, or loafers: "How do loafers live? At work they steal pencils. In parks they conduct themselves badly. Yes, comrades. That is how loafers live!" In later chapters there are choruses of male concrete-workers ("Our plant is a concrete plant. Our brigade is a concrete one. Our plant is a concrete plant. And our task is concrete. Concrete, concrete, concrete, concrete...") and discussions of philosophy ("What is life? What are people? I want to know what life is."). I suspect I would have learned more in college if I'd had this wacky text, except that its first edition came out in 1974, a couple years after I graduated. And in case you're thinking it's amusing but impractical, read what John has to say:

I respond well to linguistic approaches such as the one Lipson pioneered for Russian. Thank Bog I used Lipson's books for 2 years, I really, really understand the structure of Russian in ways that those who learned from Soviet sponsored texbooks do not. His choice of vocabulary was pretty weird, though. I learned the word for "concrete mixer" before I learned the word for "airplane", for instance, because one of the dialogues we had to memorize concerned a lazy construction worker. Lo and behold when I got to the USSR I wound up working on a construction site. Full of lazy (and drunk) construction workers. Working on - you guessed it - the betonomeshalka.

And what other textbook will teach you how to say "Comrade director, nobody loves me. Nobody understands me. I'm alone. I'm alone"?

YAKULT.

I once sort-of-followed Japanese baseball; I didn't keep up with it on a weekly basis, but I knew who was doing well and could have named most of the teams in each league. One of my favorite team names was the Yakult Swallows (my favorite name, of course, was the Nippon Ham Fighters); there's just something appealing about the combination of the lovely word "swallows" with the Cthulhu-like "Yakult." Now, years later, I have learned from an Ask MetaFilter thread that the team is named for Yakult, "a yogurt-like beverage made by fermenting a mixture of skimmed milk and sugar with a special strain of the bacteria Lactobacillus casei." And according to a Yakult FAQ, Yakult is derived from the word jahurto, meaning 'yoghurt' in Esperanto. How 'bout that! (The accepted word for 'yogurt' in Esperanto, however, is apparently jogurto.)

POLISH BELORUSSIA.

The current item on my WWI reading list is Solzhenitsyn's November 1916, a thousand-page tome that will probably give me massive biceps by the time I've finished lugging it around. People complain about its "long passages providing historical background," but I eat that stuff up; I'm probably the ideal reader at the moment, since I already know who all the historical characters are. What I'm complaining about is the bizarre set of choices made by the translator, H.T. Willetts, when it comes to rendering place names. The first chapter begins: "Birds don't like some forests. There were fewer birds in skimpy, stunted Dryagovets than in Golubovshchina, three versts to the rear." This is a perfectly decent rendering of the original: "Птицы любят не всякий лес. В жиденьком слабеньком Дряговце было их куда меньше и скучней, чем в Голубовщине, три версты в тыл." What I am here drawing attention to is the rendering of the Russian names as (transliterated) Russian. Normal, you say? Sure, but a few paragraphs later we get: "...allow the Germans to cross the Szara, occupy the Torczyc Heights, and convert the manor house on the hill at Michalowo into a fortress." The "Szara"? "Torczyc"? What the hell? I checked the Russian, and found "...а немцам дать перейти Щару, занять Торчицкие высотки и обратить в крепость возвышенный фольварк Михалово." Any sane translator would render the place names as Shchara, Torchits, and Mikhalovo. But the good Mr. Willetts has for some reason lapsed into Polish. From there on, it's what seems to be a random mix; "Baranowicze" (normally known as Baranovichi, where the Russian HQ had been earlier) and "Stolpce" (Stolbtsy) are followed by "Sablya," which is followed by "Lake Koldyczew," which is followed by "Melikhovichi." Sometimes he yokes the two in the same phrase: "No Stwolowicze [i.e., Stvolovichi], and no Yushkevichi." What is going on here?

Now, I grant that there are Polish names for all these geographical features in the part of the former Russian Empire that adjoined Poland, just as there are (say) Greek names for many places in Turkey and German ones for places in Eastern Europe. And I grant that Belorussia/Belarus (where these early scenes are set) was once part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). But that was many centuries ago, and during WWI the area was part of the Russian Empire, and the official language was Russian, and the local populace presumably spoke either Russian or Belorussian for the most part, and though there were doubtless Poles as well I'm completely at a loss to understand why a random sprinkling of place names should be given in Polish (which, among other things, makes them harder to look up). Any light that can be shed on this irritating mystery will be much appreciated.

BULBULOVO.

I've linked to it before, but I decided it was high time I gave bulbulovo ("bulbul's online notebook") its own post and added it to the blogroll—there's just too much good stuff to ignore. Thursday the "Philologist in making" listed some wonderful books he got at what sounds like a wonderful Bratislava bookstore; earlier he bitched about the poor quality of Slovakian translators while providing his own versions of some colloquial usages from Law and Order (a show I also enjoy) and explained the derivation of the language name Bislama from beach-la-mar, an edible sea slug much traded by the Vanuatu islanders who use the language (and may I add that the inhabitants of Vanuatu must get tired of jokes about their national anthem, "Yumi, Yumi, Yumi," continuing "...I've got love in my tumi"). And check out this post from last week, which not only links to a Swedish site for minority languages but gives his own analysis of the dialect features of "meänkieli (meidän kieli = 'our language'), also known as Tornedalen Finnish,... a dialect of Finnish spoken in the area around and including the twin-city of Tornio-Haparanda on the Swedish-Finnish border in Lappland." Keep it up, O Slovak songbird!

Apropos of nothing, by the way, here's a sign I encountered in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport last time I passed through there; it adorned the location that had apparently been 360° Gourmet Burritos (gourmet burritos??):
"This concept is closed at this time. For service, please visit one of our other concepts in the Marché."
What I want to know is, are these concepts a priori or a posteriori?

AND MANY MORE!

I'm pleased to report that wood s lot turns six today. I'm astonished at Mark's ability to keep up a steady stream of superb posts over so long a time; his is one of the very few sites I refuse to miss even when I'm having a busy day. He never, ever phones it in, and his coverage is both wide and deep. Hell, I'd go there for the photographs alone, and I'm not ordinarily a big fan of the photographic art. Congratulations, and keep it up!

Here's a wonderful (and seasonally appropriate) poem he quotes today:

End of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
the roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
that part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their population forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

- Stanley Kunitz

WADE VS. GILES.

Andrew Leonard has a Salon article called "Choosing Giles over Wade" (you'll have to look at an ad for a moment before the "continue to article" link appears in the lower right-hand corner) that begins with an amusing description of being "attacked as an imperialist for spelling the name of the Chinese province Sichuan as Szechwan" as a lead-in to the multiplicity of romanizations for Chinese ("Street signs in Taiwan are a mad mix of Wade Giles, and at least three other systems: Postal System Pinyin, Yale and Gwoyeu Romatzyh") and a very silly excursus on how wonderful it is that Chinese has such a complicated writing system ("It is not just the depth and richness of thousands of years of culture and history that are embedded in the many thousands of intricate ideograms. It is in the very fact that I am not sure which dictionary to reach for, or which method to use for identifying a given character. This is not the place to discourse on such techniques—the point is, there is no right or even sure way to proceed...") before getting to what is to me the most interesting part:

Anyone interested in the Chinese language, whether an expert or novice, would do well to read the transcript of a lecture that Herbert Giles gave at Columbia University in 1902. It is a fascinating introduction to the Chinese language that at once illustrates both its awesome complexity and its enduring powers of seduction. The occasion of the speech is Columbia's decision to endow a professorship in Chinese studies, something that Giles considers quite admirable, given the small number of scholars in the field at the time. He even notes that "Twenty-five years ago there was but one professor of Chinese in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and even that one spent his time more in adorning his profession than in imparting his knowledge to classes of eager students."

I sat bolt upright in my cubicle upon reading that statement. The only person Giles could possibly be referring to would be Wade—the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge, and the original creator of the Romanization system that Giles later modified into its enduring form. I immediately went looking for more information.

Alas, there are still limits to the Internet's capabilities. David McMullen's "Chinese studies at Cambridge—wide-ranging scholarship from a doubtful start", from the Magazine of the Cambridge Society, is not yet available online, and the initially promising "The Formation and Development of Sinology at Cambridge" by Que Weimin of the Department of History, Zhejiang University, turned out to be in Chinese, and I am currently without my dictionaries. But I did find a speech given by Giles' great grandson, Giles Pickford, in Taiwan in 2005, on the occasion of the founding of a new museum. Pickford observed that Giles had made many enemies in his life, including.... Thomas Wade.

The plot thickens! Thomas Wade may have been [a soldier] in the infamous Opium Wars, giving heft to any theories of Wade-Giles Romanization as a tool of neocolonialist ideological oppression. But Giles, apparently, was something else. According to Pickford, "Giles was also disliked by the Christian Missionaries whose work he despised. This antagonism was contrary to British Government policy, which saw the work of the missionaries as entirely legitimate and beneficial. Giles disagreed, and made his disagreement very open and public... Giles was also unpopular with the British traders because he opposed the overcrowding of emigrant Chinese on British ships. In 1881 he was presented with a Red Umbrella by the Hsiamen Chinese Chamber of Commerce in recognition of this service to the Chinese people."

All my adult life, the names Wade and Giles, the first two professors of Chinese at Cambridge, have been linked inseparably in my head, as I am sure is true for countless other students of Chinese. But how many know that the two men were enemies, or that one was opposed to missionary evangelization (also a sin in my book,) or was a powerful advocate for better treatment of Chinese by the British?

I didn't, and I'm glad to find out. (Thanks go to Language Log's Ben Zimmer for the link.)

GEUDA.

Last week's New Yorker has a Burkhard Bilger article called "The Path of Stones" about the gem industry in Madagascar. I was skimming through it when I hit a reference to "a low-grade sapphire known as geuda" that the Thais learned to turn into genuine-looking sapphire in the '70s. This word is not in any dictionary, as far as I can tell, so I have no idea how it's pronounced or where it's from. This irritates me. Once again, I turn to the assembled multitueds, with confidence in your collective experience of the world. Surely some LH reader has hung out with enough gem dealers to know how they say the word: gooda? gyooda? gee-ooda? If you know the etymology, that's definitely a plus.

WHAT VASYA SAID TO THE GYPSY.

As part of my ambitious attempt to understand what happened in Russia in the years before 1917, I'm reading The Years by Vasily V. Shulgin, the memoirs of an aged reactionary looking back on his Duma days from a distance of half a century. I thoroughly disapprove of his principles, but he's a charming writer and was probably a lot of fun to hang out with. In the chapter "War," he describes how he heard about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand on June 15(28), 1914; he was interrupted by a telephone call from the newspaper he edited while he was in the middle of a drinking bout at a Kiev cabaret. He had just been having the following interaction with one of the gypsy singers:

Then the gypsy with the high cheekbones, who was awfully nice, a stranger, but already a close friend, would smile broadly and repeat something over and over in the gypsy language.

Ah, in the gypsy language? I'm no worse than she. And I answered her in the gypsy language with the only phrase I knew: "Tu nadzhinəs someə takə norakirava. A mə takə ser-so səu mussel."

The first words mean: "You, dear friend, do not understand anything."

The rest is in such an old dialect that many gypsies nowadays do not understand it. And it is better that the reader not understand it. But Ducia, the gypsy with the high cheekbones, understood it, and Niura also. And they, and the others after them, began to carry on so, that I decided I must put an end to it....

I, dear friends, do not understand anything. And you can imagine my frustration. I know it's a long shot, between the "old dialect" and the octogenarian memory, but can anyone decipher those tantalizing sentences, with their oddly exact-looking schwas?

THE CELTIC MYTH.

A correspondent sent me a Prospect Magazine story by Stephen Oppenheimer about the ethnic origins of modern Britons. Now, I'm very suspicious of attempts to apply biology to linguistics, and I've bashed Oppenheimer before, but what the hell, I'll toss an excerpt up and see if anyone has anything useful to add:

So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar's time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul "the language differs but little."

The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.

Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.

A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

Oh, and he thinks Brits are really Basques: "But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots."

Thanks for the link, Paul!

WINE AND BOTTLES.

Just dropping by for a quick visit—I've managed to get myself stuck with too much work and too little time—but I wanted to call attention to Mark Liberman's exegesis of the phrase "new wine in old bottles" (and its confusing newer variant "old wine in new bottles"). Just keep the word "goatskins" in mind and your confusion should be minimized.

Also, if you have any interest in science fiction, don't miss the Tensor's discussion of Robert Sheckley's "Shall We Have a Little Talk?"—an early classic of linguistic sf, and funny as hell.