Another gem from wood s lot: Ithaka/Ιθάκη presents all the poems of Constantine Cavafy (Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης) in both English and Greek, many with audio files, as well as a biography (English, Greek), a gallery of images (including his passport, signed in both Greek and Roman script), and much more. I remember a drunken evening in Athens when I celebrated my birthday by reciting "Η πόλις" ("The City") in public and getting too much retsina bought for me as a result; it's still one of the most powerful poems of pessimism I know (right up there with "This Be the Verse"). The site does justice to a great poet.
Paul Blackburn has long been one of my favorite poets (he provided one of the first poetry posts at LH), and I'm happy to discover (via wood s lot) that back in 2000 Jacket magazine had a section devoted to him in their October issue, including his Statement:
My poetry may not be typically American, or at least in matter, not solely so: but I think it does make use of certain techniques which, even when not invented by American poets, find their particular exponents there in contemporary letters, from Pound & Doctor Williams, to younger writers like Paul Carroll or Duncan or Creeley.Techniques of juxtaposition.
Techniques of speech rhythms,
sometimes very intense,
sometimes developed slowly, as
one would have
conversation with a friend.Personally, I affirm two things:
the possibility of warmth & contact
in the human relationship :
as juxtaposed against the materialistic pig of a technological world,
where relationships are only ‘useful’ i.e., exploited, either
psychologically or materially.2º, the possibility of s o n g
within that world: which is like saying ‘yes’ to sunlight.On the matter of song: I believe there must be a return toward the
musical structure of poetry, just as there must be, for certain people at
least, a return to warmth within a relationship....
Language Log has been especially lively lately, and I wanted to share some of my favorite items:
1) Comments on the news story that "Mapuche tribal leaders have accused [Microsoft] of violating their cultural and collective heritage by translating the software into Mapuzugun without their permission": Mark Liberman, Geoff Pullum.
2) Mark Liberman's post on prescriptivism in literature, with glorious extended quotes from Thomas Pynchon, Mark Twain, and Stephen Fry, not to mention the immortal "Romanes eunt domus" sequence from Life of Brian.
3) Bill Poser's post of a wonderful map of South Asia that has the name of each region written in its own alphabet.
4) And Mark Liberman doggedly pursues his continuing coverage of the issue of whether women talk more than men: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Random finds while looking up other words in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
capoeira 'a Brazilian dance of African origin': Brazilian Portuguese, kind of martial art, ruffian skilled in this art, fugitive slave living in the forest, from capão island of forest in a clear-cut area, from Tupi ka'apáũ, from ka'á forest + paũ round
caponata 'a relish of chopped eggplant and assorted vegetables': Italian, from Italian dialect (Sicily) capunata, sailor's dish of biscuit steeped in oil and vinegar, chopped vegetables served similarly, from Catalan caponada dry bread soaked in oil and vinegar, perhaps from capó capon
trocar 'a sharp-pointed surgical instrument': from French trocart, alteration of trois-quart from trois three + carre edge
trona 'a gray-white or yellowish-white monoclinic mineral': Swedish, probably from Arabic natrun natron
For six months I read Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta to my wife at bedtime, and Friday night we finally got him to Jidda and a respite from dates and danger. To celebrate his, and our, deliverance, here are some quotes of linguistic interest from Vol. II (I quoted an earlier one here):
And there are phrases which, like their brand-marks, declare the tribes of nomads: these were, I believe, northern men. One, as I came, showed me to his rafik, with this word: Urraie urraie, hu hu! 'Look there! he (is) he, this is the Nasrâny.' — Cheyf Nasrâny? (I heard the other answer, with the hollow drought of the desert in his manly throat), agûl! weysh yúnsurhu? He would say, "How is this man victorious, what giveth him the victory?" In this strange word to him the poor Beduwy thought he heard nasr, which is victory. (p. 69)And there were all manner of unusual words and meanings to send me to the dictionary, such as anatomy 'skeleton,' nonage 'legal infancy,' and mawkish 'nauseating,' not to mention "the enigmatology of Solomon."...And opening the sheet, which was folded in our manner, I found a letter from the Pasha of Medina! written (imperfectly) as follows, in the French language; with the date of the Christian year, and signed in the end with his name, — Sabry. [Ad literam.] Le 11 janvier 1878 [Medine] D'après l'avertissement de l'autorité local, nous sommes saché votre arrivée a Khaiber... Mohammed asked 'What had the Pasha written? he would hear me read his letter in the Nasrâny language:' and he stood to listen with great admiration. 'Pitta-pitta-pitta! is such their speech?' laughed he; and this was his new mirth in the next coffee meetings. (pp. 221-3)
Finally the good Sherîf said, I spoke well in Arabic: where had I learned? (I pronounced, in the Nejd manner, the nûn in the end of nouns used indifferently, and sometimes the Beduin plurals; which might be pleasant in a townsman's hearing.) (p. 555)
The living language of the Arabs dispersed through so vast regions is without end, and can never be all learned; the colocynth gourd hámthal of the western Arabians, shérry in middle Nejd, is here [at Taif] called el-hádduj. (pp. 560-1)
Of historical rather than linguistic interest, this mistaken prophecy sent a shiver down my spine:
By the loss of the horses [in a battle with 'Uteyba] the Waháby rule, which had lasted an hundred years, was weakened to death; never — such is the opinion in Nejd — to rise again! (p. 454)Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud proved that opinion wrong in 1902.
After over 1,200 pages of Doughty, we thought about switching to some lightweight book to cleanse our palates, but then we decided no, the heck with it, let's go for broke. So last night we started on Proust.
Bridget Samuels, of the late lamented ilani ilani, has started a new project called LingNews.net, which she describes chez The Tensor (in response to his call for information about language blogs) as "a place where anyone can submit, comment on, and vote for linguistics-related news stories, sort of like Digg for linguists." If that sounds like a good idea to you, go on over and register; then
When you come across a cool linguistic story, go to lingnews.net and submit the link along with a brief description using the 'Submit a story' button on the sidebar... Each story can only go into one basic category. Right now there are categories for animal [communication] & [language] evolution, general linguistics, historical, morphology, phonology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax.I join her in hoping LingNews.net becomes a useful resource for the linguistics community.
Internet commerce is a wonderful thing, but there's nothing like spending time in an actual bookstore. Today my stepson and his wife treated me to a visit to the Book Mill, where I found all sorts of great books. Before I headed for the register, I managed to whittle my pile down to four: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-war Movement
Update. I wrote to Prof. Melancon to thank him for his superb book after I finished it, and of course I asked him about his name, and he replied that although "the South Louisiana way of saying it is indeed MeLAWso(n)," he himself pronounces it "the more proper French way... Mela(n)SO(N)."
In my journey through Russian history, I've finally gotten up to 1917 (having spent two months on Solzhenitsyn's November 1916—not a great novel, but a great portrait of a country on the verge of revolution). Imagine my delight when I discovered there was a book called A Brief History of 1917: Russia's Year of Revolution
Much has been written about the key figures—Lenin, Trotsky, Kerensky, and the rest—while the various political movements have been relentlessly analyzed. Yet there is another side to it, a more human story. What was life like for a peasant or a manual worker in Petrograd or Moscow in 1917? How much did a tram driver, his wife, or a common soldier know or understand about Bolshevism? What was the price of a loaf of bread or a pair of boots? Who kept the power stations running, the telephone exchanges, bakeries, farms, and hospitals working? These are just some of the details historian Roy Bainton brings to life, not through memoirs of politicians and philosophers, but in the memories of ordinary working people. As witnessed on the streets of Petrograd, Bainton brings us the indelible events of the most momentous year in Russian history.That sounded like just the ticket: I had plenty of serious histories and analyses, but a man-on-the-street perspective would provide an invaluable counterpoint. Thanks to the magic of the internet, a few clicks on Saturday brought the book to my door yesterday, and I tore open the package with high anticipation. Today, having read the first few chapters, I am filled with disappointment verging on rage, and I'm afraid I'm going to share it with you.
The author, Roy Bainton, according to the bio in the book "served in the Merchant Navy and has travelled around the world three times. He has written extensively for newspapers and magazines and has been a regular contributor to Radio 4." So not a historian, then, but so what? As long as he put together a good collection of reminiscences, he could be a professional ping-pong player for all I cared. I wasn't fazed by hitting a mistake on the very first page of the introduction: "I had paused at a pavement bar on Nachilnaya Street on Vasilievskiy Island for a much-needed cold beer." Hey, it's Nalichnaya, not "Nachilnaya," but he's just a reporter, took sloppy notes, so what? It's just the introduction; wait'll he gets to the good stuff! The introduction goes on too long and is full of cliches and potted history ("Russia's twentieth-century past is not the golden age socialists had hoped for. Within a few short years of Lenin's death, the blunt, expedient weapons of terror, mass arrest and imprisonment... a new historical zenith in organized cruelty... a dull, monochrome lifestyle... a giant slap in the face for the hopeful proletariat of 1917..."), but doubtless the publishers demanded a historical summary; wait'll he gets to the good stuff! Then I hit Chapter 1 and realized there wasn't going to be any good stuff. Or, more precisely, the good stuff, the actual reminiscences, were occasional tidbits plunked into the great doughy mass of his horrible journalistic prose and his appalling misunderstanding of Russia and its history. For some reason he felt the need to try to make this your one-stop shopping source for the year 1917 instead of a valuable supplement to real histories, ignoring the fact that he was as unqualified to write history as I am to play professional ping-pong. So we get tosh about Rasputin's murder ("That it should have come not at the hands of some ragamuffin revolutionary but those of Prince Felix Yusupov—an Oxford-educated transvestite in possession of an immense fortune... The Browning revolver which pumped that fatal bullet into the mad mystic was the starting pistol of the revolution...") and Petrograd ("Yet, this was still a city of contrasts...") and politics ("Revolution was the loftier aim among the intelligentsia who led the more radical elements in the plethora of political organizations which met daily in Petrograd...") that would be barely acceptable in a Sunday-supplement travel piece but is ludicrously inappropriate to a supposed book of history. But there was worse to come. On page 33 I hit the following farrago:
The Duma, struggling against all the odds to form some semblance of a government, was still dominated by argumentative factions of titled landowners, assorted gentry and political opportunists. Frequently, on the impulse of Alexandra, they had been dismissed on the smallest whim and replaced with even greater incompetents. A bizarre example was the Minister of the Interior, Alexander Protopopov, a man whose sanity was in some doubt...This man can't even tell the difference between the Duma and the cabinet of ministers! For my American readers, the above paragraph would be parallel to one that said "The Congress, struggling against all odds to [bla bla bla]... Frequently... they had been dismissed... A bizarre example was the Secretary of State..." I find it difficult to conceive of the depth of ignorance needed to write that paragraph. Bainton apparently skimmed through a few (probably popular and inaccurate) histories and cobbled together his hastily scribbled notes with as much alliteration and cliche as he could jam in, every once in a while remembering to toss in a paragraph or two of what I got the book for, memories which stand out from the surrounding dough by their vivid immediacy: "One night the servants were screaming in our kitchen. My father rushed in and found a demented working man brandishing a knife—he wanted to kill Father. A furious fight followed..." and then it's back to "Revolution was in the air..."
And to make matters worse, the book I set aside to read this one was Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution
The expectant period, which has lasted almost three days, during which it was possible for the main mass of the garrison to keep up friendly neutrality toward the insurrection, has come to an end. "Shoot the enemy!" the monarchy commands. “Don’t shoot your brothers and sisters!" cry the workers. And not only that: "Come with us!" Thus in the streets and squares, by the bridges, at the barrack-gates, is waged a ceaseless struggle now dramatic, now unnoticeable—but always a desperate struggle, for the heart of the soldier. In this struggle, in these sharp contacts between working men and women and the soldiers, under the steady crackling of rifles and machine-guns, the fate of the government, of the war, of the country, is being decided...He not only tells you what was happening, he makes you understand the psychology of everyone involved. I highly recommend both that book and his The Balkan Wars 1912-1913The worker looked thirstily and commandingly into the eyes of the soldier, and the soldier anxiously and diffidently looked away. This meant that, in a way, the soldier could no longer answer for himself. The worker approached the soldier more boldly. The soldier sullenly, but without hostility—guiltily rather—refused to answer. Or sometimes—now more and more often—he answered with pretended severity in order to conceal how anxiously his heart was beating in his breast. Thus the change was accomplished. The soldier was clearly shaking off his soldiery. In doing so he could not immediately recognise himself. The authorities said that the revolution intoxicated the soldier. To the soldier it seemed, on the contrary, that he was sobering up from the opium of the barracks. Thus the decisive day was prepared—the 27th of February.
, one of the best pieces of reportage I've ever read. If only he'd stuck to writing and left politics alone!
Eric Banks (of the excellent BookForum) directed my attention to an amazing NY Times story by Donald G. McNeil Jr. called "For Some, the Words Just Roll Off the Tongue":
Lexical-gustatories involuntarily “taste” words when they hear them, or even try to recall them, [Julia Simner, a cognitive neuropsychologist and synaesthesia expert at the University of Edinburgh] wrote in a study, “Words on the Tip of the Tongue,” published in the issue of Nature dated Thursday. She has found only 10 such people in Europe and the United States.That's the strangest thing I've heard in a while. (I wonder what "Languagehat" tastes like?)Magnetic-resonance imaging indicates that they are not faking, she said. The correct words light up the taste regions of their brains. Also, when given a surprise test a year later, they taste the same foods on hearing the words again.
(Synaesthetes are hardly ever described as “suffering from” the syndrome, because their doubled perceptions excite envy in many of us mere sensual Muggles.)
It can be unpleasant, however. One subject, Dr. Simner said, hates driving, because the road signs flood his mouth with everything from pistachio ice cream to ear wax.
And Dr. Simner has yet to figure out any logical pattern.
For example, the word “mince” makes one subject taste mincemeat, but so do rhymes like “prince.” Words with a soft “g,” as in “roger” or “edge,” make him taste sausage. But another subject, hearing “castanets,” tastes tuna fish. Another can taste only proper names: John is his cornbread, William his potatoes.
They cannot explain the links, she said. There is no Proustian madeleine moment — the flavors are just there.
But all have had the condition since childhood, so chocolate is commonly tasted, while olives and gin are not.
Josh Wallaert has had the wonderful idea of blogging "Found poetry from the first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). A new definition every day." I had no idea Webster was such a creative and lyrical lexicographer, from the short and sweet:
Crowd, n.orAn instrument of music with six strings; a kind of violin.
Holloa, exclam.to the more discursive:A word used in calling.
Among seamen, it is the answer to one that hails, equivalent to,
I hear, and am ready.
Badger, n.I've read that several times now, and I like it better each time: "Its skin is used for pistol furniture; its flesh makes good bacon, and its hair is used for brushes to soften the shades in painting." (By the way, Jill Lepore had an excellent piece in the November 6 New Yorker, "Noah's Mark: Webster and the original dictionary wars"; it's not online, but if you have access to that issue it's a good read.)A quadruped of the genus Ursus, of a clumsy make, with short, thick legs, and long claws on the fore feet. It inhabits the north of Europe and Asia, burrows, is indolent and sleepy, feeds by night on vegetables, and is very fat.
Its skin is used for pistol furniture; its flesh makes good bacon, and its hair is used for brushes to soften the shades in painting. The American badger is called the ground hog, and is sometimes white.
The latest entry in the annals of Prescriptivist Follies: when the Guardian used the phrase "his bitterest enemies," a reader wrote in to complain that "the correct English form is 'most bitter,'" upon which editor Ian Mayes added the following gem of stupidity: "One of the weapons in my arsenal is the wonderful Oxford English Dictionary on line, but it is at a total loss to find any recorded use of 'bitterest.'" As Ben Zimmer points out in the linked Language Log post: "With only a modicum of know-how in using the online OED's full-text search feature, Mayes could have quickly found no fewer than 41 citations throughout the dictionary featuring the word bitterest... To these we could add many hundreds of attestations in English poetry, drama, and prose from Chadwyck-Healy's Literature Online database." The word averages "about 40 appearances a year" in the Guardian itself. And neither Ben nor I can even figure out how the outraged correspondent came up with this cockamamie ukase, which is supported by none of the usual mavens.
A great post by Céline of Naked Translations about the way her brain works while she's doing simultaneous translation:
I was interpreting in a brewery a couple of weeks ago (yes, it was as fun as it sounds), and the person who was showing us around said: "The reason why this type of beer is produced in Kent is that, among other things, this region is excellent for growing barley." So I started conveying this to the French visitors, and while one half of my brain was busy with the converting/talking process (Ce type de bière est produit dans le Kent car etc.), this is what was going on in the other half:Personally, I'm much more interested in stories like this than in current theories about what might be happening in the brain, but if anyone knows of such a book, please let her know.
BARLEYBARLEYBARLEYBARLEY OH NO WHAT’S BARLEY IN FRENCH AAAAAAAAARGHThankfully, both parts of my brain came together exactly when needed, right at the end of the sentence... How is this possible? What actually goes on in an interpreter’s brain? Does anyone know if "The Idiot’s guide to the brain and language" has been written?
I have previously (I, II) lamented the absence of an Arabic etymological dictionary, and Andras Rajki very kindly wrote to inform me that he had put what he modestly describes as a "modest" one online. It may not be comprehensive, but it's quite good enough for my needs, and I'm very glad indeed to have it available. (I am a complete amateur when it comes to Semitic etymology, but if anyone is an expert and finds gaps or errors, I'm sure Andras will be glad to hear about it.) The dictionary is a simple text file, with each headword followed by an English gloss, an etymology in square brackets, and a list of words borrowed from it into other languages, for example:
asad : lion [Sem ’-sh-d, Akk shedu (demon), Heb shed, Syr sheda, JNA shedha] Ind asad, Per asad borrowed from Ar
The list of sources and language abbreviations is at the end. Bravo, Andras, and thanks! (Oh, and for you Esperantists, he's also got an Etymological Dictionary of the Esperanto Language.)
George Starbuck channels Ogden Nash (or should I say Aughdheghn Naiche?) in his paean to orthographic anarchy "The Spell Against Spelling," which begins:
My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.If you want to read the rest, and I know you do, head over here; my thanks to Mark Liberman for quoting it on Language Log, and to Sarah Bagby for painstakingly typing it up and sending it to him.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.Another student gave me a diagragm.
"The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth."Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time...
1) Nic Dafis of Morfablog alerted me to the BBC radio drama based on David Jones's In Parenthesis (which I discussed here, here, and here); it's an hour and a half long, and you can listen to it by following the link on this page. It's only online for a week from last Sunday, so I guess through this coming weekend; sorry about the delay, but at least it's still there. It's very well done, with lovely Welsh accents and restrained use of WWI sound effects; it was worth it for me just to learn that reveille is pronounced ruh-VALLEY Over There. (I followed along in my copy of the book, and noted some odd changes; "night woods" for "night weeds" is presumably just a misreading, but why did they change the song "Casey Jones" to "Tipperary" and "bull-shit" to "muck"??)
2) That great NYC institution Film Forum is currently showing my favorite movie of all time, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, and tomorrow will begin a two-week run of perhaps my favorite Godard movie, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, about which I wrote here. (The title in French is 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, which in idiomatic translation should be 'one or two things I know about her,' but the clunky literal version has become firmly embedded.) It's a rare chance to see these great movies (especially the Godard, for which I thought there were no longer any screenable prints); don't miss 'em if you can.
Jack Shafer has done a follow-up on the "bus plunge" piece I wrote about here; it turns out the headline for the "bisexual snail" story is probably unrecoverable:
Tina Orzoco of ProQuest valiantly searched the company's vast databases in an attempt to locate the hed for Allan M. Siegal's favorite K-hed of all time—"Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press." Orzoco failed, Siegal writes, because timeless filler such as the snail story ran in early editions only, "and was replaced thereafter by live news. And the microfilm edition of the Times—now the basis of ProQuest—was the final edition."But on the brighter side, Bernard Adelsberger guarantees that the old Philadelphia Bulletin once published this K-hed:
No Blood in Ants
Ants have no blood.
I want to recommend Geoff Pullum's thorough analysis in Language Log of the following cryptic statement from Simon Jenkins in the Guardian: "They are no longer the subject of that mighty verb, only its painful object." It cost him a great deal of effort even to figure out what the verb was, but it seems that Jenkins was trying to say that the personages under discussion were forced to react to events rather than initiating actions. Grammatical and terminological confusion doesn't make for clear statements.
And while I'm at it, let me heartily second Mark Liberman's recommendation that everyone acquire and consult a copy of Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage
The excellent Conrad has alerted me to the blogovial existence of Raminagrobis, a comparably learned and literate personage who began with a promise "to vent my rampaging egomania, register my disgust and rage at all those things that don't really matter to anyone, exercise my critical faculties, and fulfil a long-standing ambition to be a boorish old fool with too much time on his hands," but in fact writes about all manner of interesting things, most recently the Fagles Aeneid, jumping off from a dislike of the way Fagles rendered the famous line sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt and comparing many other versions before settling on that of my own favorite Robert Fitzgerald as the most satisfactory. The name, incidentally, is from Rabelais; the motto/URL "When her name you write, you blot" is from the Urquhart translation, but as far as I can tell nothing in the original corresponds to that particular line. Odd.
When I was growing up, the newspapers always carried tiny stories on the inside pages about world events that didn't really affect anyone in the U.S. and that garnered at most a bemused "Huh!" from the reader before he or she passed on to the wars and rumors of wars; you can see a 1959 NY Times page with such stories circled in red here. There were cabinet changes in far-off countries and ambassadorial appointments to far-off countries and extreme weather events in far-off countries, and one special subcategory of these one-paragraph items (which it turns out are known in the trade as K-heds) was the bus plunge, always so called: "Brazil Bus Plunge Kills 26," "10 Die in Colombia Bus Plunge," etc. Jack Shafer has done a wonderfully nostalgic piece about these filler items in Slate; it turns out that they were an artifact of bygone methods of newspaper production:
No matter what their editorial policies, newspapers of the era had a physical need for short articles. Typesetting was still a time-consuming industrial art, with craftsmen pouring molten metal into molds—"hot type"—to form a newspaper's words, sentences, and paragraphs. Because the length of a news story couldn't be calculated precisely until type was set, makeup editors would have to physically cut overlong pieces from the bottom to make them fit. If a story ran short, they would plug the hole with brief filler stories typeset earlier in the day.Once such holes no longer existed, thanks to computer typesetting, the need for filler stories vanished, and we no longer read about bus plunges in Peru and Nepal ("It was better when buses plunged in countries with short names") on a regular basis.
Here's one of my favorite bits from the piece:
"The great challenge was to edit those things as short as they could be and still have them make sense," Siegal says. Great acclaim came to the editor who could artfully reduce wire stories to their absolute essence. One of Siegal's favorite K-heds, which ran in the Times in the 1950s, read in its entirety:Surely in this age of complete electronic archives someone can retrieve the headline of that one-line wonder! (Via MetaFilter.)Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press.The piece's hed is lost to posterity, Siegal says.
I recently stumbled on the archive of what began as Dhumbadji! but ended its career as the more sedate History of Language, a publication of the (Melbourne) Association for the History of Language whose history is briefly reviewed here. It was exciting enough to have all these abstracts (in most cases) about topics like (from the second issue) An Introduction to Oceanic Linguistic Prehistory and (from the last one) Developing The Comparative Study Of The Histories Of Chinese Linguistics And European Linguistics and The Position of Etruscan in the Western Mediterranean Ancient Linguistic Landscape, but what really thrilled me was finding the best discussion of the "Chomskyan revolution" I've seen, Konrad Koerner's The Anatomy of a Revolution in the Social Sciences: Chomsky in 1962. He emphasizes an aspect to which I hadn't given enough thought, the financial; here's a very enlightening quote from James McCawley, one of the beneficiaries of the "revolution" and its lavish government funding:
I maintain that government subsidisation of research and education, regardless of how benevolently and fairly it is administered, increases the likelihood of scientific revolutions for the worse, since it makes it possible for a subcommunity to increase its membership drastically without demonstrating that its intellectual credit so warrants. The kind of development that I have in mind is illustrated by the rapid growth of American universities during the late 1950s and 1960s, stimulated by massive spending by the federal government. This spending made is possible for many universities to start linguistics programs that otherwise would not have been started or would not have been started so early, or to expand existing programs much further than they would otherwise have been expanded. Given the situation of the early 1960s, it was inevitable that a large proportion of the new teaching jobs in linguistics would go to transformational grammarians. In the case of new programs, since at that time transformational grammar was the kind of linguistics in which it was most obvious that new and interesting things were going on, many administrators would prefer to get a transformational grammarian to organise the new program; in the case of expansion of existing programs, even when those who had charge of the new funds would not speculate their personal intellectual capital on the new theory, it was to their advantage to speculate their newfound monetary capital on it, since if the new theory was going to become influential, a department would have to offer instruction in it if the department was to attract students in numbers that were in keeping with its newfound riches. And with the first couple of bunches of students turned out by the holders of these new jobs, the membership of the transformational subcommunity swelled greatly.And here's Chomsky himself, responding to a 1971 question about why Syntactic Structures and many other works of his contained acknowledgments of support from agencies of the U.S. Department of Defense:
Ever since the Second World War, the Defence Department has been the main channel for the support of the universities, because Congress and society as a whole have been unwilling to provide adequate public funds [...]. Luckily, Congress doesn't look too closely at the Defence Department budget, and the Defence Department, which is a vast and complex organisation, doesn't look closely at the projects it supports — its right hand doesn't know what its left hand is doing. Until 1969, more than half the M.I.T. budget came from the Defence Department, but this funding at M.I.T. is a bookkeeping trick. Although I'm a full-time teacher, M.I.T. pays only thirty or forty per cent of my salary. The rest comes from other sources — most of it from the Defence Department. But I get the money through M.I.T.But it wasn't just about the money; here's a description of tactics, again from a sympathetic observer, Frederick J. Newmeyer in his 1980 Linguistic Theory in American: The first quarter of transformational generative grammar:
The missionary zeal with which "the other guys" were attacked may have led some linguists, along with Wallace Chafe (1970), to be "repelled by the arrogance with which [the generativists'] ideas were propounded...," but overall the effect was positive. Seeing the leaders or the field constantly on the defensive at every professional meeting helped recruit younger linguists far more successfully and rapidly than would have been the case if the debate had been confined to the journals. [Robert] Lees and [Paul] Postal, in particular, became legends as a result of their uncompromising attacks on every structuralist [i.e., non-Chomskyan]-oriented paper at every meeting.Lenin would have been proud! And speaking of Lees, here's Koerner's account of how his influential "review" ("coronation" would be a better term) of the Master's Syntactic Structures was published:
That at least part of these funds was intended to convert young students to the new faith may be surmised from the acknowledgement printed at the bottom of Robert Lees' widely acclaimed 'review' of Syntactic Structures (Lees 1957:375), which was written and published while Lees was a close associate and, for all practical purposes, still a doctoral student of Chomsky's at M.I.T. ... owing to the godfatherly attitude that Bernard Bloch displayed ..., Lees' propaganda piece for Chomsky's ideas appeared in Language (still today the most widely circulated linguistics journal in the world) almost at the same time Syntactic Structures itself was published. (Under normal circumstances, a review would take two and more years to appear in print following the publication of a book; also one may wonder if Lees was indeed the sole author of the 'review', considering his employment situation at the time. But even if the arguments were all Lees' own, as Chomsky emphatically maintained in a letter to the present writer commenting on Koerner (1984b), it can be at least assumed that Chomsky — and probably Halle too — had seen and approved the text before it was sent to Bloch.Charming, as a former coworker of mine was wont to exclaim. If it hadn't been for this gang, I might have been a linguist today.
A couple of years ago I posted about a South African fish called snoek, the subject of a New Yorker article by Calvin Trillin about a man's obsession with it. That snoek is the Afrikaans descendent of Dutch snoek, which is the source of the English fish name snook, and oddly enough, the Oct. 30 New Yorker has an article (not online) by Ian Frazier on American snook and a man's obsession with it. Frazier writes well, but I care little or nothing about fish and fishing, so I suspect the reason I kept reading was the word snook itself, so odd and such fun to say. But I was taken aback when I got to this, on page 59: "This time when seeking a guide, I asked around for one with credentials for snook (which people there [in Everglades City, Florida] pronounce to rhyme with 'fluke')." Well, how else would you pronounce it? Then it occurred to me it could perfectly well be rhymed with cook, and sure enough, when I checked my trusty Merriam-Webster's Collegiate that was the first pronunciation given, though the one favored by me and Everglades City, Florida is also accepted—and is, indeed, the only one given in the OED. I suspect my assumed pronunciation (for I've never had any contact with the fish or those who love it) was based on the etymology; the Dutch say /snuk/, so I did too. My question, of course, is: if you are actually familiar with this denizen of the deep, how do you say it (and where do you hail from)? Fluke or cook?
Incidentally, his snook guy mentions catching a twelve-pound jewfish, then adds "You ain't allowed to keep jewfish anymore, anywhere in the state of Florida... You're not supposed to call 'em jewfish no more, neither. Their new name is the Goliath grouper. I don't want to offend nobody, so I try to remember. But I'm sixty years old and I been callin' 'em jewfish all my life, and I imagine I'll continue to." FishBase calls 'em itajara (which I presume is it-uh-JAR-uh, though it's not in any of my dictionaries and, as always, I welcome correction) and adds "Territorial near its refuge cave or wreck where it may show a threat display with open mouth and quivering body. Larger individuals have been known to stalk and attempt to eat divers." Yikes.
That's the burning question posed by Sarah Crown in a Guardian article:
Believe me, I've tried nearly everything. I used to favour the popular "by genre" approach: different shelves for poetry, plays, fiction, non-fiction, travel, cookery ... The problem there, though, is that the travel shelf ends up only half-full, and then you're faced with the problem of what to complete it with. So you pick cookery, but cookery spills over onto the next shelf ... and so it goes. Even if you decide that, despite its flaws, the genre system is for you, there are further choices to be made. Do you organise each genre alphabetically? Do you attempt the infinitely tricky but profoundly impressive, if you can pull it off, genre-bleed - science into sci-fi, history books into historical fiction? (Actually, the latter would be a non-starter in our house as my boyfriend is a historian and is sceptical - nay, contemptuous - of the entire historical fiction field).There are in fact people who arrange books by color; me, I use the traditional arrangement by subject, with history, travel, religion, language, and Russia-related books up here in my office; literature, poetry, music, and science down in my wife's office; and baseball, science fiction, Vietnam, and other miscellaneous topics down in the basement (having a basement at last was one of the joys of buying this house). Order within each genre depends; in literature, it's alphabetical by author, in history it's by region and period, and in travel... hmm, travel appears to be pretty chaotic. I do rearrange them from time to time: the growing pile of Russian-history books on the floor persuaded me to move a bunch of religion books elsewhere and allow an expansionist Russia to invade their former shelves. With over 5,000 books now, there's bound to be some pushing and shoving. (Thanks for the link, Glyn!)Perhaps you forsake genre altogether and go alphabetical. If so, does it offend your eye to see towering hardbacks pressed up against slim volumes of poetry? Does the resulting disjunction persuade you that you should abandon the alphabet and arrange your books entirely on aesthetic grounds, by size or - whisper it - colour? And is there any form of classification that won't break down within the first three months, leaving you surrounded by piles of books that you know, in your heart, will never come within striking distance of a shelf until the next time you move, when the whole process begins again?
A BBC News story by Sean Coughlan describes a new dictionary and the language it represents:
Are you a "badmash"? And if you had to get somewhere in a hurry, would you make an "airdash"? Maybe you should be at your desk working, instead you're reading this as a "timepass".For more on "prepone," see this old LH thread. And thanks for the link, Paul!These are examples of Hinglish, in which English and the languages of south Asia overlap, with phrases and words borrowed and re-invented.
It's used on the Indian sub-continent, with English words blending with Punjabi, Urdu and Hindi, and also within British Asian families to enliven standard English.
A dictionary of the hybrid language has been gathered by Baljinder Mahal, a Derby-based teacher and published this week as The Queen's Hinglish...
This collision of languages has generated some flavoursome phrases. If you're feeling "glassy" it means you need a drink. And a "timepass" is a way of distracting yourself.
A hooligan is a "badmash" and if you need to bring a meeting forward, you do the opposite of postponing - in Hinglish you can "prepone".
There are also some evocatively archaic phrases - such as "stepney", which in south Asia is used to mean a spare, as in spare wheel, spare mobile or even, "insultingly, it must be said, a mistress," says Ms Mahal.
Its origins aren't in Stepney, east London, but Stepney Street in Llanelli, Wales, where a popular brand of spare tyre was once manufactured...
Two words I never dreamed existed:
1) "The wooden library, or xylothek (from the Greek words for tree, xylon, and storing place, theke) ... is generally speaking a collection of simple pieces of wood specimens placed together in some kind of cupboard. In a refined form it is in the shape of 'books' where you can find details from the tree inside, everything arranged as a 'library'." More here, with pictures. It's not in the OED, but it should be. What a wonderful phenomenon! (Via wood s lot.)
2) "mongo (MAWNG.goh) n. Objects retrieved from the garbage." The earliest citation is from James Brooke, "Sanitation art showings brighten workers' image," The New York Times, September 10, 1984. (A couple of years ago, the Times reviewed a book by Ted Botha called Mongo: Adventures in Trash.) I ran across the word while reading a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece by Ben McGrath on the "san men" of New York City and Robin Nagle, who studies them:
Nagle’s interests lie more with the trash collectors than with the trash, although the two intersect on the subject of “mongo”—sanitation lingo for “redeemed garbage” or the act of collecting it. (Nagle consulted a lexicographer, looking for help in tracking down the etymology, to no avail.) “Within the department, if you mongo or if you don’t—there’s kind of a dividing line,” she said. “ ‘He mongos.’ ‘Do you mongo?’ ‘Oh, mongo, are you kidding? I wouldn’t mongo.’ ” She paused. “Hell, I mongo, absolutely. And I have some pretty nice things.”No, that one's not in the OED either, though they do have Mongo "A Bantu language spoken by an African people living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire)" and mongo "A monetary unit of Mongolia, equivalent to one-hundredth of a tugrik." I hope they're busy working on that etymology while they prepare an entry.
Unrelated to language, but a very sobering fact from later in the piece: "nationally, fatality rates for sanitation workers, owing to the risks associated with loading trucks in the midst of moving traffic, are roughly three times those for firemen and policemen." I tip my hat to sanitation workers everywhere, who never get enough respect.
A Financial Times story by Bertrand Benoit describes the insensate rage unleashed in language-loving Germans by the humble apostrophe:
For months, self-appointed language guardians have been hyperventilating about a rise in the indiscriminate use of the apostrophe. Those familiar with the old British discussion about apostrophes and greengrocers may be surprised to hear that Germans have their own version, sometimes referred to as the Idiotenapostroph (they are not big on euphemisms).I have had to correct the German spelling throughout, capitalizing nouns and clipping a final -e off the singular (the German noun is Apostroph, plural Apostrophe); you'd think they'd have at least checked the alleged URL "www.apostrophe.de" and discovered it didn't go anywhere. (There is a German word Apostrophe, but it carries the rhetorical meaning of 'direct address.') You'd think they'd have mentioned the site Idiotenapostroph, if not Rette’t de’n Apo’stro’ph!, which goes into great detail about form (straight or curved?), gender, morphology, and usage. And for previous LH apostrophic madness, go here.After all, one could write a three-tome novel in German without resorting to the said punctuation mark. Yet there are instances where it can be used under strict rules. Annoyingly for the purists, nobody seems to care much about these today...
Apostrophes may also work as shortcuts (Ku'damm instead of Kurfürstendamm). Utterly unacceptable are apostrophised plurals (foto's), Anglicised possessives (Oma's Strümpfe) and US-flavoured corporate names (Müller's Wurstwaren or Beck's lager). Also online are galleries that name and shame delinquents. The Kapostropheum on www.apostroph.de has photographs of store windows, labels, web banners and newspaper ads that desecrate genitives, abuse plurals and mistreat imperatives.
Globalisation is only partly to blame. Complete apostrophe chaos ruled in the German language up to 1901, when the Duden dictionary, the country's ultimate authority in matters of syntax and orthography, issued a blanket ban. For more than 50 years, the edict restored some sort of order. But the fact that Anglo-Americans had a hand in undermining the Duden's authority - to the point that the august publisher is now angering purists by sanctioning some borderline uses of the apostrophe - is beyond doubt.
The proof lies in the first issue of the Allied-sponsored Aachener Nachrichten daily, which on January 24 1945 proudly proclaimed: Alliierte Flugzeuge zerschlagen Rundstedt's Rückzugskolonnen (Allied aircrafts destroy Rundstedt's retreating columns), thus planting the seed that would yield today's bountiful crop of Idiotenapostrophe.
Update. Margaret Marks links to another site (with pictures) that uses another name for the dreaded phenomenon: Deppenapostroph.
(Thanks for the link, Paul!)
A BBC News story tells the story of a mysterious non-English-speaking burglar (an earlier story said "the authorities have no idea of his name, age, nationality, or even his language") who turned out to be Hassan Ibrahimi, from "a remote village in the Moroccan mountains." What particularly struck me (and the correspondent who sent me the story—thanks, Jim!) was this bit: "Having lost everything, he decided to try and leave Morocco and come to France because the Berber language is similar to French." Berber similar to French? As I told my correspondent, it's hard to know whether it represents a misunderstanding on the part of a reporter, a translator, or Ibrahimi himself—people do believe some odd things about language!
My recent post on blind translations has inspired a blog dedicated to retranslating the Spanish translation of Lolita into English, blind. It starts:
Lolita Lou, stay my vitals, forgo them strangers. Oh my peccadillo, ah my white. Lo-li-ta: the poon-tardy lollygagger by way of the Jedi, able ho hasty pussy on the terse dented boards: Lo. Li. Ta.Fun!Here Lo, sensual-mental Lo, poor lamental Lo Aucoin, does stab derecho with her metered-oak wintry-chawed stature. Sober and pine for Daddy, and call Satan. Here's Lo Aucoin leaving applestains on pants, here's Dolly to scale, here's Dolores Aucoin firmbaby.
A while back I posted about Tsotsitaal, a South African township dialect; here's Andie Miller's interview with Athol Fugard, who wrote the novel Tsotsi (along, of course, with the many plays that made him famous), and it has some interesting linguistic discussion:
On the subject of the term tsotsi, Stephen Gray reflects: "I'm interested in how the word has become so familiar since the Oscar. Now it's known to the whole world." A Google search yields 12 million results. "But in the late fifties it was a minor cult word that people had difficulty with... Drum [Magazine] saw the potential of the posed zoot suit. You know tsotsi's meant to be a corruption of zoot suit... fashionable clothes, Florsheim shoes, white hats that came from gangster movies ... By April 1956 there was a character that Drum launched, called Willie Boy, and then Alex le Guma took it up as well, for the first of his beautiful books. So it became a media feature, this juvenile delinquent tsotsi-boy. And now of course we have musicals about Sophiatown, and university presses publish dictionaries of tsotsitaal for academic scrutiny."...She ends the piece with a substantial selection of terms from Louis Molamu's Tsotsitaal: A dictionary of the language of Sophiatown (2003).Tsotsi, the winner of the 2006 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, introduced English-speaking audiences to an unfamiliar subculture and its language, Tsotsitaal, used on the streets of Soweto, a group of townships in Johannesburg, South Africa. The area was segregated (Black only) by the Apartheid government, and its population of some two million is still largely Black and poor. Tsotsitaal is a blend of Afrikaans, English, and African language stocks, and though the current version of it, "isiCamtho," is now spoken in the townships, it originated in Sophiatown, a multiracial/multicultural Johannesburg suburb which was bulldozed in the early sixties.
The other day my online pal fev wrote me via gmail asking about this statement in The Economist: "THE characters for 'Africa' in the Mandarin language mean 'wrong continent'"—true, or journalistic nonsense? I discovered the word for 'Africa' is 非洲 feizhou and went through the laborious process of looking it up in my Mathew's; as I told fev, the first character is literally a negative that can mean 'wrong, bad' as well as simply 'not' (its usual meaning in classical Chinese). But Mathews includes this use in a separate subentry 'used for foreign sounds'; the names of foreign places have always been rendered phonetically without much regard for actual meaning. I was just thinking that wasn't really a sufficient answer when I got an instant message via gmail from my online pal and occasional commenter xiaolongnu, who happens to be an expert on Chinese, so I asked her. She looked it up in a Big Dictionary (Cihai [辭海 'Sea of Words'], if I recall correctly) and told me it's short for Afeilijiazhou, which is clearly a phonetic rendering (jia being the Mandarin equivalent of what in other dialects is ka). She says "And it gets shortened to 'fei' rather than 'a' because 'a' is such a non-syllable." Problem solved, thanks to the miracle of the internet and the instantaneous communication it makes possible!
[Addendum. Bill Poser has posted an interesting Language Log entry about the Classical Chinese use of the character 非 'not.']
And xiaolongnu also gave me a link to this wonderful post by Alex Golub and Kate Lingley, "Colonialism in the Pacific Rim Themed Dinner for Eight," which she thought I might enjoy, and indeed I did: it's entertaining and educational, and I'm sure delicious too if one had the chance to eat it! Here's a sample:
Russian Intrusion into Central Asia Vodka Watermelon Before the Russians could become a credible force in the North Pacific they had to reach it. Throughout the eighteenth century the Czars swept across the steppe until they reached the ocean on the other side. This recipe memorializes the coming of Russian power to central Asia.1 Large Watermelon
1 bottle of orange flavored vodka (Van Gogh, for instance)Purchase your watermelon from the local store (remember: hollow and heavy. Hollow and heavy). When your guests arrive tell them you got it in Tashkent. Purchase also your vodka. When at the store you will be tempted to buy shit vodka, because you already know this recipe and know that I'm about to tell you to pour the vodka into the watermelon, and you consider this a much less honorable fate for quality vodka than, say, a decent martini. Nonetheless, you must purchase quality vodka, as the taste will be quite exposed due to the delicacy of the watermelon's flavor. Grand Marnier is typically used to compliment watermelon, but since you're already blowing real dough on the vodka, just get one with orange flavoring. Cut the watermelon in half. Open the vodka and pour them shits all up inside the watermelon. Every three or four hours you will add more vodka to increase the deliciousness of the watermelon. It's gotta soak, see? Shortly before your guests arrive, use a melon ball scooper to scoop out a bunch of watermelon balls (duh.) Then put them all back in the now-dimpled hollow watermelon. Serve to your guests with toothpicks so that their hands don't get sticky. This can be served in lieu of cocktails, or you may choose to reserve some watermelon juice and make martinis out of the remaining vodka, substituting the juice for vermouth. If you do this, you must take your martini with a twist. Watermelon and olives is gross.
It turns out that German has the same kinds of discussions about gender inclusiveness as English, and you can read something about them in this review by Tracy Wearn of Hildegard Gorny's "Feministische Sprachkritik":
Gorny’s article focusses on sexistische Sprachgebrauch, i.e. looking at semantic, structural and patriarchal markers in language use, as opposed to the different ways in which men and women use language. Feminist linguistics doesn’t see language as a gender-neutral mode of communication, but as reflecting social reality... Feminist linguists do not simply want to describe language use but to criticise and modify it.What particularly strikes me is the Binnen-I (German link), as in RadfahrerInnen 'bicycle riders,' where the interior capital I ("Binnen-I") indicates it's to be taken as Radfahrer und Radfahrerinnen 'male and female bicycle riders.' It's apparently quite controversial, and I can see why, but it seems like a fairly elegant solution in a language that already strews capital letters around freely.
Incidentally, I forget where I ran across this Binnen-I thing; if you recently wrote me about it or blogged about it, let me know and I'll be glad to credit you.
Arnold Zwicky at Language Log has a fine, detailed post about the reasons for the absurd "rule" about not starting sentences with and or but, the No Initial Coordinators (NIC) rule. As he says, "A point of usage and style on which Liberman and I and the AHD and the MWDEU stand together with Brians and Garner and Fiske (and dozens of other advice writers) is, truly, not a disputed point. NIC is crap." He speculates, sensibly in my view, that it originated in attempts by elementary-school teachers to get their kids to stop stringing clauses together in the monotonous fashion that comes naturally to them: "It was cold, and my mom made me put on a coat, and I went outside and I saw two dogs, and they..." He comes to this depressing conclusion:
Once NIC is out there, it will persist. Any fool with a claim to authority and either students or a publisher can get a rule ON the books, but there is absolutely no mechanism for getting rules OFF. People think that rules are important, and they are reluctant to abandon things they were taught as children, especially when those teachings were framed as matters of right and wrong. They will pass those teachings on. They will interpret denials of the validity of such rules—even denials coming from people like Garner and Fiske, who are not at all shy about slinging rules around—as threats to the moral order and will tend to reject them. I've had some success convincing some students and friends that some of the rules they were taught are not good rules to live by—but my success depends on their willingness to listen to me and their willingness to question their beliefs, two qualities that are not widespread in the general population.(Here's his first post on the subject, "If they do it too much, they should be told not to do it at all.")
A nice collection of links about Romansh:
Less than one per cent of the Swiss population speak Romansh. Yet this endangered Latin-based language, spoken in parts of the eastern canton of Graubünden, is still very much alive. To coincide with the parliamentary session in Romansh-speaking Flims from September 18-October 6, swissinfo took a look at the fourth Swiss national language, which is almost as little known inside Switzerland as outside its borders.Thanks, Paul!
