I know no better quote for the turn of the year than the Robert Louis Stevenson one I posted two years ago, so here it is again:
To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy—there goes another Faithful Failure!And once again I wish you all the very best of years. May 2007 bring us more joy than sorrow and more wisdom than forgetfulness.
Aaron Haspel of God of the Machine is on a quest, and I'm here to hold his coat, cheer him on, and offer the services of my variegated readership. His latest post begins:
“Sentence first — verdict afterwards,” says the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland; and the trial of the Knave of Hearts has justly remained the literary standard for injustice, since the book’s publication in 1869.He traces it back, in the form of "Lydford Law," to "the early 17th century poet William Browne":Being an idiot, I thought the expression originated with Lewis Carroll, until last night. I was reading Macaulay 1830 essay on Lord Byron, and ran across the following passage, on Byron’s failed marriage: “True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation.” The term “Jedwood justice,” also new to me, implied that the concept is proverbial, and led to a slightly earlier citation, in 1828, from Walter Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth: “Jedwood justice — hang in haste and try at leisure.”
I oft have heard of Lydford Law,But there the trail runs cold: "My patchy scholarship, abetted by some desultory Googling, can take me no further. Can my readers supply earlier citations, in English or another language?" Aaron and I await any enlightenment you can provide.
How in the morn they hang and draw,
And sit in judgment after:
At first I wondered at it much;
But since, I find the reason such,
As it deserves no laughter...
I got a number of presents of linguistic interest, including foreign movies (La Meglio gioventù and Akarui mirai—thanks, Eric!) and Russian opera DVDs (Glinka's A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, The Gamblers, and War and Peace, and Shostakovich's The Nose—thanks, Elias!), but certainly the two most directly connected with the concerns of this blog are Тень русской ветки: Набоковская Выра [Shade of a Russian branch: Nabokov's Vyra], by Aleksandr Alexandrovich Semochkin (apparently there's an English edition, Nabokov's Paradise Lost: The Family Estates in Russia, whose description applies equally well to my Russian 2002 second edition: "This album consists of photographs from the family archive of the Nabokovs, as well as pictures of the family estates near St. Petersburg where Vladimir Nabokov spent the summers of his boyhood and youth. Together with the quotations from his works, they make a fascinating background to the novels based on his early experiences: Speak, Memory, The Defense, and The Gift")—thanks, Tatyana!—and Anthology of Old Russian Literature by Adolf Stender-Petersen, which I owe to the generosity of Songdog and his lovely wife (and of course their excellent son, who at two years eight months may not have had much intellectual input into the choice of gift but whose affection is clearly attached to it); the Life of Archpriest Avvakum alone (excerpts here, in three languages) should give me hours of pleasure. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the LH readers who sent cards and other holiday communications, books, and (in one case) actual money—your words of encouragement and tokens of esteem mean more to me than I can say. If it weren't for the enthusiasm and responsiveness of my readership, I'd have given up the blog long ago.
In a 1997 essay, Joe Amato compares one of my favorite poets with one of my favorite novelists:
In what follows, I compare the work of a (very much alive) novelist with that of a (very much dead) poet. Specifically, I compare a recent (long) novel to a not-so-recent (long) poem. In doing so, I read what some will call "content" across two distinct literary genres. My reason for reading Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations over and against Louis Zukofsky's "A" is to help bring into clearer focus why we might do well to turn more of our critical and creative attention to perhaps the most neglected literary form of this century in North America — the long poem (and I am not the first to make this observation). At the same time, I hope to give some indication of why we might do well to continue to turn our critical and creative attention to the ways in which the literary constitutes a valuable site through which to understand our works and days.There's a certain amount of jargon, but it's worth it for the quotes and insights, and I like the idea of breaking down the wall between criticism of prose and poetry. (Via wood s lot.)Richard Powers is an accomplished novelist whose five (soon to be six [nine as of 2006—LH] novels plumb the controversies, latent and teeming, inherent to our highly technological milieu. I daresay that, for most of my readers, Louis Zukofsky, though an equally accomplished poet, will be a somewhat less recognizable, and more inaccessible, figure. I hope to show why both authors warrant continued scrutiny, why the work of literature, and of reviewing literature as I propose, may be vital to sustaining our social ecologies...
Every once in a while I run across some linguistic usage so bizarre that I have to poll my readership to see 1) if it's used by more than the one person who brought it up, and 2) if so, whether anybody knows its history. Today I present to you elvissinatra in AskMetaFilter:
Anybody else grow up calling a pacifier, a "goots"? I'm not sure if I'm spelling it correctly, but that's how it sounds (rhymes with boots). I'm not Jewish, but that word sounds Yiddish to me. Now I've got a kid of my own, and everybody thinks I'm crazy because I call it a goots. Is it a name brand? West Michigan Polish/Italian slang? Or what?The Yiddish idea has been shot down in the comment thread (though I suppose it could be a dialect word); other terms mentioned are nookie, binkie, dummy, zooba, padiddle, geegee, bubble, and perhaps ish (if that person was serious). All suggestions, other words, thoughts, and jokes are, as always, welcome. Me, I've never called it anything but a pacifier.
I'm using the spelling of the holiday given in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, but there are many, many more—Mark Liberman says "a new survey by Language Log labs has found that Hanukkah is second only to Muammar al-Gaddafi in public spelling uncertainty"; if you want to know the horrifying details (and the entropy of the distribution), visit his Language Log post on the subject. And I hope those of my readers who celebrate it are having the best of Christmases.
Frankly, I'm not sure I've ever used the phrase on all fours except in its literal sense of 'on hands and knees,' but I was vaguely aware that it had a technical/metaphorical meaning, which Orin Kerr explains as follows in a post on the history of the phrase: "One of the legal profession's stranger expressions is that a case is 'on all fours' with another case. It means that the former case raises the same facts and legal principles as the latter and is therefore highly relevant as a precedent." He cites Michael Quinion's explanation that "presumably the image is of two animals standing together, both on all four legs, hence in closely similar situations," but he himself suggests "the visual image is more an animal running alongside the observer than two animals standing next to each other. If an animal is running on all four legs beside you, the thinking might be, it means that it remains close to you and goes where you go." For much more on the subject, including copious citations, see Mark Liberman's recent Language Log post, which is where I learned all I know about it.
I have to return the Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution
Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has an intriguing post about "a Mauritanian Arabic-based pidgin recorded by the medieval geographer Al-Bakri" that he says "may well be the earliest attested passage in a pidgin, and certainly the earliest Arabic-based pidgin reported."
The near-absence of morphology, the apparent presence of tense particles, and the simplification of the phonology are all suggestive of a pidgin, and a pidgin is exactly what one would expect given the nature of the trans-Sahara trade. Phonetically, the substitution of ' for qāf is characteristic of lower Egypt and the Levant, but also of several city dialects in the Maghreb and of Maltese; the substitution of d for j is widespread in upper Egypt, but I know of no modern dialect that has both features.See his post for the passage in Arabic, in Lameen's suggested transcription, and in Thomason and Elgibali's tentative translation (it's a variation on the old joke about the man and his son trying to ride a camel with the least amount of flak from passersby), and for the frustrating facts of its publication. I hope the manuscript source turns up someday!
A CNN story informs us that Georgia's Department of Transportation has issued a new official map that's been sadly simplified:
Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Due West and Po Biddy Crossroads. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too...What you call illegible, I call a linguistic feast, dammit!Gone are such places as Dewy Rose, Hemp, Experiment, Retreat, Wooster, Sharp Top and Chattoogaville, a spot in far northwestern Georgia that consists of little more than a two-truck volunteer fire department, a few farmhouses and a country store where locals fill up their gas tanks.
"We're not under obligation to show every single community," department spokeswoman Karlene Barron said. "While we want to, there's a balancing act. And the map was getting illegible."
I'm reading N. N. Sukhanov's The Russian Revolution 1917
The full Sukhanov quote in Russian reads:
Он предлагает немедленно дать директивы и районы через присутствующих делегатов о назначении каждым заводом милиции (по 100 человек на тысячу), об образовании районных комитетов и о назначении в районы полномочных комиссаров для руководства водворением порядка и борьбой с анархией и погромами [Между прочим. М. А. Броунштейн у нас первый ввел в употребление это слово "комиссар" которым без нужды так злоупотребляли впоследствии].
In The Guardian, Simon Armitage discusses his new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
Naturally, to the trained medievalist the poem is perfectly readable in its original form; no translation necessary. And even for the non-specialist, certain lines, such as "Bot Arthure wolde not ete til al were served", present little problem, especially when placed within the context of the narrative. Conversely, lines such as "Forthi, iwysse, bi zowre wylle, wende me bihoues" are incomprehensible to the general reader. But it is the lines that fall somewhere between those extremes - the majority of lines, in fact - which fascinate the most. They seem to make sense, though not quite. To the untrained eye, it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalisingly near yet frustratingly blurred. To a contemporary poet, one interested in narrative and form, and to a northerner who not only recognises plenty of the poem's dialect but detects an echo of his own speech rhythms within the original, the urge to blow a little warm breath across that layer of frosting eventually proved irresistible.I'm not quite sure why he felt he needed to see the original manuscript in the British Library or to witness the actual gralloching of a deer (though I do love the word, which I wrote about here), but the sample at the end of the article is appealing, and I like his daring—he's not afraid to toss in "never mind being minus his head!"
For a very different perspective, this time from the point of view of the translatee, see Thomas Bernhard's remarks in a 1986 interview; asked "What happens to your books in other countries," he responds:
Doesn't interest me at all, because a translation is a different book. It has nothing to do with the original at all. It's a book by the person who translated it. I write in the German language. You get sent a copy of these books and either you like them or you don't. If they have awful covers then they're just annoying. And you flip through and that's it. It has nothing in common with your own work, apart from the weirdly different title. Right? Because translation is impossible. A piece of music is played the same the world over, using the written notes, but a book would always have to be played in German, in my case. With my orchestra!(Via wood s lot.)
Kerim Friedman alerted me to a post at Prince Roy’s Realm about "why Taiwanese (and apparently only Taiwanese) refer to Western cabbage (as opposed to Napa Vally cabbage, or 白菜 bok choy) as 高麗菜 instead of the more orthodox Mandarin usages 洋白菜, 包心菜, or 捲心菜." There is apparently a popular theory that the word (which a commenter renders as "Gao Li Cai") derives from the name of Korea, but much more likely to me seems the idea that it's a borrowing from a Germanic language (cf. English cole, German Kohl); if you have information or ideas about this, by all means share them. (The comment thread is worth your attention as well; Mark Anthony Jones points out that Cato the Elder claimed "every illness... could be cured by eating loads of boiled cabbage. The reason why Romans survived six centuries without the need for doctors, he said, was because of their habit of eating boiled cabbage three times a day!")
Céline of Naked Translations has a post beginning "Frequent commenter bathrobe has a site on the translations of Saint Exupéry's Le Petit Prince"; since Bathrobe (who now, to avoid excessive identification with that item of clothing, sometimes signs himself 小王子 'the Little Prince') is also a frequent commenter here, I should really have pointed you before now to his excellent site cjvlang, "an armchair excursion into three fascinating languages of the Orient: Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese (CJV)." Besides the Little Prince section, he discusses days of the week, birds, Harry Potter translations (which has subsections on Those Magical Books and Their Titles, Translation of Puns and Word Play, Names of People and Places, Mistranslations, Names of Shops, serious translation errors, and Names of Owl Species, inter alia), and the writing systems. From the Little Prince section, his page on "the fox's secret" compares the versions of a short passage of three sentences ("Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux") in 45 Chinese translations, four Vietnamese translations, and 16 Japanese translations (not to mention four English ones). Here are Shī 1991:
這就是我的秘密，一個很簡單的秘密：只有用心靈，一個人才能真正看得明白；單是透過雙眼看不見事情的真像。And Mǎ 2006:
Zhè jiù shì wǒ de mìmì, yīge hěn jiǎndān de mìmì: Zhǐ yǒu yòng xīnlíng, yīge rén cái néng zhēnzhèng kàn de míngbái; dān shì tòuguò shuāngyǎn kàn-bu-jiàn shìqíng de zhēnxiàng.
'This is my secret, a very simple secret: only with the spirit, a person can truly understand; just looking through the two eyes cannot see the true image of things.'
现在告诉你我的秘密，一个非常简单的秘密：只有用心去观察，才能看的真切；最根本的东西用眼睛是看不见的。If you like comparing translations, you'll want to spend some time chez the Blogger Formerly Known as Bathrobe.
Xiànzài gàosu nǐ wǒ de mìmì, yīge fēicháng jiǎndān de mìmì: Zhǐ yǒu yòng xīn qù guānchá, cái néng kàn de zhēnqiè; zuì gēnběn de dōngxi yòng yǎnjing shì kàn-bu-jiàn de.
'Now I will tell you my secret, a very simple secret: Only observing with the heart, can see distinctly; the most basic thing with the eyes cannot see.'
The multifarious Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience, dissatisfied with Latin's "lexical conservatism" and "resistance to fancy," has dug up "two attempts to make Latin interesting—the first in seventh-century Ireland, the second in High Renaissance Italy." The Italian stuff is well worth looking at ("the legendary 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii" and "Teofilo Folengo, aka. Merlin Coccaius, a favourite of Rabelais's"), but the one that caught my fancy was "the work of the mysterious Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, a grammarian of sorts from 7th-century Britain or Ireland":
His treatises, the Epitomae and Epistolae, are full of odd collocations and deliberate perversions and obfuscations. He has been commonly taken as a parodist, though Vivien Law reads him rather as an arcanist. Words in his text are like gnostic spellwords, little observing Latin morphology—at one point he lists Twelve 'Latins', his jargon spewing out in a torrent of letters: assena, semedia, numeria (nim, dun, tor, quir, quan, ses, sen, onx, amin, ple), metrofia (dicantabat, bora, gcno, sade, teer, rfoph, brops, rihph, gal, fkal, clitps, mrmos, fann, ulioa, gabpal, blaqth, merc, pal, gatrb, biun, spadx), lumbrosa, sincolla, belsavia, presina, militana, spela, polema. Elsewhere he deliberates about the declension of ego, and specifically about its vocative case (how do you say "O I"?). He writes of word-scrambling, scinderatio fonorum—as if from Greek φωνη—Somehow I'm not at all surprised that a speaker of Old Irish, the weirdest language I've ever studied, came up with those delightfully mad inventions.Scinderatio autem litterarum superflua est, sed tamen a glifosis sensuque subtilibus recipitur; unde et fona breuia scindi magis commodius est quam longa, ut Cicero dicit: RRR SS PP MM N T EE OO A V I, quod sic soluendum est: Spes Romanorum perit.
Incidentally, it seems to me that some blogger I read regularly recently discussed the first-person vocative ("O I"), but I can't remember who it was. Step forth in the comment thread and I will link to you forthwith.
The first-person vocative was recently discussed by Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat, who quotes Eco, who is referring to none other than the mad Irishman quoted above.
I'm sure many of you have wondered, as I have, what the "correct" pronunciation of Pinochet's family name is. Well, Eric Bakovic has not only wondered, he's thoroughly researched it, and this post on Phonoloblog (a follow-up to his earlier Language Log post) has everything you will ever need to know on the subject. Short answer: you can pretty much say it however you like and be correct (in the sense that there are Chileans who say it like that). There are northern dialects in Chile where ch is realized as [š], but more important is the social element; Bakovic quotes a Slate Explainer article by Daniel Engber as follows:
The confusion starts with the ch sound, which can serve as a marker of social class in Chilean Spanish. In educated speech, the Spanish ch is similar to the English pronunciation, as in the word chess. But popular dialect turns the ch into something more like sh. A high-class Chilean would probably pronounce the country’s name as “chee-lay,” while someone with less status might say “shee-lay.” Likewise, the same two people might describe the ex-dictator as “pee-no-chay” and “pee-no-shay.” ...Bakovic points out that it's not actually all that clear how he's saying it in that video because the sound quality is so poor, and also that "Pinochet’s Wikipedia entry says his father was a 'descendant of Breton immigrants who arrived in Chile during the 18th century', and Brittany’s quite a way from the Basque country." Final -t is pronounced in Breton, for what that's worth, but I'd love to get the actual etymology of the name if anyone knows it.It gets more complicated with the final t. As a general rule, the whole syllable—"chet"—should be spoken aloud. But in casual conversation, Chileans tend to drop the final sound. Someone who pronounced Pinochet as "pee-no-chet" would be correct, but he'd also be speaking in a formal (and perhaps a bit uppity) tone. On the other hand, some Chileans are inclined to use the French pronunciation of Pinochet, since the name is of French Basque origin. In that case, they'd drop the t and go back to "pee-no-shay" or "pee-no-chay."
Finally, there are those who forgo the other options in favor of the somewhat-derogatory nickname "Pinocho." When graffiti artists scrawl Pinochet's name, they sometimes render it as "Pin" alongside the number eight, or "ocho" in Spanish. Thus, "Pinocho."
Chileans point out that however you say the name, you're unlikely to be corrected. ... It wouldn't be awkward for two people to have a long discussion about the ex-dictator using two different pronunciations.
How did Pinochet himself say it? Three different sources told the Explainer they knew or remembered how the general or his family pronounced the name. And they gave three conflicting answers. You can hear Pinochet utter his own name two seconds into this video clip from 1980—it sounds a lot like "pee-no-chay." If you've come across another audio or video clip in which Pinochet or a member of his family pronounces the name, please send it to the Explainer.
Bakovich goes on to provide much more information about South American dialects (in particular, my beloved porteño); I recommend the whole post to your attention.
Last year I had a post about the complex system of Malay pronouns; now Jordan F. MacVay of MacVaysia has posted an extensive if not exhaustive list sent him by Nizar Ismail. Here's the (comparatively short) list of 1st person plural pronouns, just to whet your appetite:
Kami - “we”, plural of “I”, listener excluded.The list of 2nd person pronouns is truly mind-boggling; the most common in Malaysia is awak, but Nizar says:Kita - “we”, “you + I”, “you all + I”, listener(s) included.
Kema - “kami/kita”, in Perak.
Sēpa - “kami”, in Kedah/Penang.
Iboq - “kami” in Semang (an aborigine tribe in Pahang/Terengganu).
Manira - classical “kami/kita”, probably from Sanskrit.
Kita orang or simply kitorang - informal, broken, very common, daily speech. Not used in Indonesia/Brunei.
Jordan was right about “awak” being a nasty choice when talking to someone older. It’s most suitable for someone in the same level, husband and wife, friends that are not so close. To the children, you can use “kamu” instead. You won’t have much problem like this in Indonesia, but in Malaysia, I suppose you can try using “pakcik” (uncle) and “makcik” (aunty) when talking to someone old enough to be your parents, or just “abang” or “akak” to someone who is old but not old enough to be your parents. Confused? Heck, me too!The comments are full of additional information, unfortunately much of it in Malay. But the post is quite enough to try to assimilate. Thanks for posting it and letting me know, Jordan!
Christopher Culver at Безѹмниѥ has a post on a "theory" so terminally silly you'd think it would have to be the invention of a satirist, but apparently it's real (in the sense that people actually believe it). Chris begins by quoting Brent Brendemoen on "the so-called Güneş Dil Teorisi, the ‘Sun-language Theory’":
According to this theory of language development, Turkish was the mother of all languages. Thus it was no longer necessary to search for pure Turkish words to replace Arabic and Persian ones, since the ultimate origin of these words and languages was Turkish anyhow.He goes on to quote Geoffrey L. Lewis in the first issue of Turkic Languages:
The theme was that man first realized his own identity when he conceived the idea of establishing what the external objections surrounding him were. Language first consisted of gestures, to which some significant sounds were then added. Kvergić saw evidence for his view in the Turkish pronouns. M indicates oneself, as in men the ancient form of ben ‘I’, and elim ‘my hand’....I can understand how people could have believed this sort of thing in the 18th century, but two centuries later you'd think even language reformers would have a little more sophistication.[The theory] saw the beginning of language as the moment when primitive man looked up at the sun and “Aaa!”
That vocable, ağ, was the “first-degree radical of the Turkish language”. It originally meant sun, then sunlight, warmth, fire, height, bigness, power, god, master, motion, time, distance, life, colour, water, earth, voice. As man’s vocal mechanisms developed, other vowels and consonants became available, each with its own shade of meaning. Because the primeval exclamation was shouted, and it is obviously easier to begin a shout with a vowel than with a consonant, any word now beginning with a consonant originally began with a vowel, since abraded. The words yağmur ‘rain’, çamur ‘mud’, and hamur ‘dough’, for example, are compounded of ağmur ‘flowing water’, preceded by ay ‘high’, aç ‘earth’ and ah ‘food’ respectively. (The reader is urged not to waste time searching the dictionary for the last four words.)
… [The reformer] Dilmen began the next day with a lengthy outline of the theory, proving, among other things, the identity of English god, German Gott and Turkish kut ‘luck’. The proof is simple enough: Gott is oğ + ot, god is oğ + od, kut is uk + ut. He avoids explaining the second t of Gott by spelling it with only one t.
Those of us who make a living correcting other people's writing have long been familiar with the standard proofreader's marks; now Eve Corbel has come up with some useful additions. The world has long needed a symbol for "remove permanently from your lexicon." (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
Last year I did a short post about the allusive Darmok language used on an episode of Star Trek. I should have waited, because the Tensor has done a thorough analysis that will leave you convinced the idea wasn't even half baked. His conclusion:
It's not that a language made up entirely out of allusions is unworthy of fictional exploration. Raphael Carter suggests Tamarese is similar to the language of the Ascians in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, and I wonder if either of these might have been inspired by the four-character idioms that famously give students of Chinese so much trouble. But stories about such a language-of-allusions just don't fit into the Star Trek universe because it can't be squared with the Universal Translator.See his post for details, which you will enjoy if you (like the Tensor and myself) are an aficionado of both sf and language—speaking of which, see this post at The Millions if you're interested in my books-of-the-year recommendations, one of which is Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction
. (Note to self: must read Gene Wolfe's novels.)
From VeryRussianTochkaNet, a funny account (with pictures) of an AI glitch that had a young man reading his own obituary:
Yandex, the largest Russian search engine, has an AI script that automatically creates media profiles of politicians and other prominent people by analysing news stories which mention them. It’s a great idea, I haven’t heard of something like that existing elsewhere. However, it’s still in beta, and a few days ago, the AI made a spectacular mistake when it listed the youth political activist Ilya Yashin as having committed suicide. Yashin himself was the first to discover that, according to his Yandex media profile, he had died on November 23...What Yashin and Gaidar were hanging was actually a banner attacking Putin; you can read about it here. (N.b.: puns in headlines are not just a Russian thing.)Underneath the date of his “death”, there’s a snippet of a news story that says he and Maria Gaidar hanged themselves under a bridge in Moscow... the mistake wouldn’t have occurred if the reported hadn’t tried to be funny. Puns and twists of meaning in headings and first paragraphs are a common thing in Russian journalism; it often makes news more interesting to read, though it gets annoying when overdone. Saying they hanged themselves, povesilis’, is whimsical, stretching the Russian language for the sake of effect. You can’t explain that to an AI script, of course.
My wife took this the way it was intended, so I guess it's not as bad as I first thought, but when I saw the NY Times headline:
Some Made Men Struggle to Make Ends Meet
I took made as a transitive verb and read it as "Some [people] made [=forced] men struggle to make ends meet"; I assumed it was about exploitative bosses or the like. Turns out it's about "made men," i.e. mobsters, having economic problems. Bad headline writer! No biscuit!
I was in the process of disentangling the "Nikolai Nekrasov" entry in the index for Harrison Salisbury's excellent history of Russia's revolutions from 1905 to 1917, Black Night, White Snow
Nekrasov was arrested in 1938, and accused of being "an organizer and leader of a fascist, espionage, terrorist organization of Esperantists". For this crime he was shot to death on October 4, 1938. His archive and library were obliterated; presumably many of his unpublished works and translations thus perished.I'm sure you'll be as happy as I was to learn that he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957. (His "Soneto Pri Esperanto" is online, if you want a sample of his work.)
A very nice visual joke using Chinese characters—don't worry, you don't have to know Chinese, everything is explained by John of Sinosplice. (Thanks, Ravin' Dave!)
Some tidbits from recent Language Log posts I can't resist sharing:
1) In Ben Zimmer's post on Apocalypto, he points out that Michael Phillips, in his Chicago Tribune review of the new Mel Gibson movie, says "Gibson and company chose to translate the Greek word 'apocalypto' as 'new beginning,' which has raised linguistic hackles, since the word is a verb meaning 'uncover' or reveal,'" and speculates that Phillips took that from my post about the movie, since it's the second hit on a Google search. My raised hackles are quivering with pride! (Also, he reports that linguist John Lawler saw the movie last week with the University of Michigan Linguistics Club and suggests: "Read the Popol Vuh and skip the movie.")
2) Geoff Pullum mentions the little-known fact that some of the royalties from the song "Happy Birthday To You" go to the Linguistic Society of America! I will henceforth sing it with even more gusto.
3) John McWhorter discusses the increasingly sophisticated use of foreign languages in American popular culture; whereas these days they're generally treated with some degree of plausibility, in the Bad Old Days... well, I'll let John tell it: in Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 Foreign Correspondent, "well-travelled peace activist Laraine Day meets a Latvian ambassador at a reception. For one, the ambassador speaks neither English, French, nor German — I see. But then, never fear — Day's character turns out to know 'enough Latvian to get by'! For the record, the character is not depicted as having had any particular reason to get her feet wet in Latvian. It's apparently just that, well, you know — she's travelled a lot over there, and so she just knows a little of all of 'those languages,' even Latvian, and one imagines, Occitan, Sorbian and Friulian when they come in handy." (Later in the movie, a supposedly local girl speaking Dutch to policemen in Amsterdam "is plainly an American girl reciting the sentences phonetically, with an accent that is pure Cleveland.")
In the course of my editing this afternoon I hit the word, or rather non-word, incalcitrant. I thought perhaps it was some arcane medical term, but a little googling convinced me it was simply an error for recalcitrant; furthermore, there was an entire webpage about it (created by Jeffrey K. Parrott, Ph.D. candidate in linguistics, member of Punks in Science and, if that's actually his picture, a fellow hat-wearer):
Summarizing, naïve Modern English speakers encounter the opaque recalcitrant, with the meaning 'stubborn, etc.' They semantically reanalyze -calcitrant as meaning something like 'cooperative, etc.' and replace the semantically unrelated prefix re- with the semantically relevant negating prefix in-. This yields the fully transparent new word incalcitrant, meaning 'stubborn, etc.,' literally 'not cooperative, etc.' The reanalyzed derivation of incalcitrant seems clear enough, and it should dispel any notion that English speakers are stupid or ignorant. The successful reanalysis of recalcitrant requires sophisticated (unconscious!) knowledge of morpho-lexical semantics, morphological constituency, morphotactics, and morphophonology (this latter because English speakers never mistakenly use the wrong variant of in-, e.g. *ilcalcitrant, *ircalcitrant, *imcalcitrant).Elsewhere on the morphological-analysis front, Erin O'Connor has a post about the English reanalysis of the plural tamales as tamale + -s, creating a new singular tamale to replace Spanish tamal; she compares "those crazy Latin and Greek words like stadium/stadia and octopus/octopodes, which may have English pluralization rules." As I said in her comment thread:One question remains: why is the less productive prefix in- used instead of the fully productive prefix un-? That is, why don't we ever see *uncalcitrant (a Google search on this non-word brought back one single result, compared with 193 results for incalcitrant)? The answer is simple, but has a fascinating implication. As noted above, the prefix in- attaches to Latinate vocabulary. Because -calcitrant is a Latin root, it will be negated with in- and not un-. But that means that naïve Modern English speakers have unconscious knowledge about the Latinate/non-Latinate distinction in their vocabulary items! They retain this knowledge in spite of the fact that the Latin meaning of -calcitrant is not only lost, but changed in the reanalysis. So speakers of Modern English are much smarter than they are portrayed by prescriptivists and their ilk. The English language is in no danger of decay, whatever that would mean.
I used to have the same reaction to "tamale," but then I relaxed and accepted that it's the English singular, while tamal is the Spanish singular, and there's no more point trying to get English speakers to use it than there is trying to get them to say Ciudad de México instead of Mexico City. (Also, note that even the Greeks and Romans often got the declined forms of octopus and other -pous words wrong according to Justin the Mad Latinist.)And now for something completely different: wobsite! (Thanks to Songdog for the link to Randall Munroe's xkcd, "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.")
One of my favorite threads from 2006 was this one, about (among other things) the history of the word Yoruba. Unfortunately, I had to close it, like so many old threads [insert rant against spammers], so a reader named Hugh was unable to add a comment and instead e-mailed me. With his permission, I am reproducing portions of his e-mail here:
In my research, I also came across the following explanation...So: can anybody help Hugh out? (No political rants, please!)"The word 'Yoruba' metamorphosed from a derogatory phrase the Igbos had used for the Oyo people. Before Oduduwa and his Obas put the whole Southwest to rout, the Oyos, who thought they were enjoying Oduduwa's civilisation, would call the Igbos 'bush people.' The Igbos, to pay them back their insult, would call them 'Oyo Oru Oba' (Oyo, slaves of the Oba). That is how the name Yoruba came about".The point of my online research was to find an appropriate equivalent to the American prejorative "Uncle Tom" for a specific application... The phrase "Uncle Tom" exists as a pejorative, intended to describe a certain kind of black man deemed subservient to whites for which the term "ebonekhui" in the Edo language will work.But another phrase needs to be identified or invented, to describe the black man who is subservient to Arabs and to Muslims. For the long history of Arab Muslim enslavement of black Africans... Perhaps someone knows that such a word or phrase already exists, most likely in Swahili, but possibly in one of the Kwa languages of West Africa, or in Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa. Anyone out there have suggestions for the Muslim equivalent of "Uncle Tom"?
I've been very impressed by YouTube's ability to provide musical gems from the past (as in y2karl's amazing MetaFilter posts: blues (plus Bob Wills, etc.), "cult music" (Jonathan Richmond, Captain Beefheart, Burning Spear, et al), gospel, rockabilly), but Avva has given the most convincing demonstration of its value for linguistics I've seen. You can read all the descriptions of the famous Bulgarian head gestures for 'yes' and 'no' you like, but nothing beats the brief (less than 20 seconds) clip provided here for making it clear exactly how they work. I had assumed the negative nod was like the Greek one, a backward tilt of the head, but no, it's exactly like our nod for 'yes.' Confusing! (There seems to be some doubt, judging by his comment thread, as to how widespread this usage still is; it may be that young/urban/Westernized Bulgarians use the traditional Western gestures.)
OK, I'm going to try not to be too hard-nosed about this, because it's about babies and mothers, and why be mean? But... well, here's the story (reported by the New Zealand Herald):
Researcher discovers universal baby languageWell, all I can say is, I've achieved a new understanding of what "researcher" can mean. Also: eh, eairh, heh. (Thanks for the link, Simon!)
A newly discovered baby language is helping infants sleep through the night and mothers bond with their babies.
After eight years of research, Australian mother Priscilla Dunstan says she has discovered a universal baby language, comprised of five distinct sounds.
Dunstan says babies produce the different sounds depending on their needs. 'Neh' means the child is hungry, while 'owh' indicates he or she is tired.
Other sounds include 'eh', 'eairh' and 'heh', which mean the infant needs burping, has wind or is uncomfortable....
Dunstan, who has always had a sharp listening skills, identified the five key sounds after spending hours listening to her own son and other infants.
A long Wikipedia article on West Country dialects ("any of several English dialects or accents used by much of the indigenous population of ... Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Bristol, Gloucestershire, and Wiltshire") has some very interesting tidbits, like this:
In the Bristol area, a terminal "a" (realised as [aw], c.f. Albert as "Awbert", cinema as "cinemaw") is often perceived to be followed by an intrusive "l". Hence the old joke about the three Bristolian sisters Evil, Idle and Normal — i.e., Eva, Ida, and Norma. Also the name "Bristol" itself (originally Bridgestowe, variously spelt).And this:
The West Country accent is probably most identified in American English as "pirate speech" — cartoon-like "Ooh arr, me 'earties! Sploice the mainbrace!" talk is very similar. This may be a result of the strong seafaring and fisherman tradition of the West Country, both legal and outlaw. Edward Teach (Blackbeard) was a native of Bristol, and privateer and English hero Sir Francis Drake hailed from Tavistock in Devon. Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Pirates of Penzance may also have added to the association. It has also been suggested that Westcountryman Robert Newton's performance 1950 Disney film Treasure Island may have influenced people's preconceptions of what accent a pirate "should" have.Unfortunately, as the Masters of Wiki say in a box at the top of the page, "This does not cite its references or sources," and I imagine it is not devoid of misstatements; if anybody has corrections to make, please do so (and you can, of course, edit the Wikipedia article yourself).
Thanks for the link, Betsy!
I'm a little late in informing you, but the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society ("Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible — anything that Father Kircher might find cool if he were alive today") has been having a Language Week, featuring the Chromatographic Writing of the Edo, Victor the Conversational (and Visionary) Budgie, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Alternate Alphabets (check out Betamaze, "which turns every text into a unique maze"), and Speaking Backwards: A Case Study. The last reports on an article of the same title, originally printed in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Volume 67, Issue S1 [1980], p. S94):
A 31-year-old male philosophy professor (Prof. B) who can speak backwards fluently, at a normal rate, was studied. To define Prof. B’s ability, recordings, spectrograms, and phonetic transcriptions were obtained. In an impromptu backwards monologue and in passages, sentences, and isolated words translated into backwards speech from written and spoken input sources in real time, Prof. B maintained the original word order but reversed the order of phonemes within each word. These reversals were not always phonetically complete, e.g., diphthongs were not reversed. Forward intonation was preserved. Although reversals were primarily phonologically based (e.g., silent consonants were rarely pronounced), there was a partial reliance on orthography even with spoken input (e.g., “xerox” was reversed as [ksɔriks], not [skariz])...They link to an amazing YouTube video of Ari Gorman, "a contemporary master of the esoteric art of backwards speaking," with subtitles (and played backwards afterward so you can see he's not cheating). Thanks to John Emerson for the tip!
You all know about Odysseus and the winnowing-fan, right? He comes home, and kills half the people on Ithaka, and finally gets to go to bed with his initially suspicious wife, and he tells her all about his travails in stupefying detail, including how Poseidon said... well, I'll let Jamie Rieger retell it in his imitiable way:
He said I have to go build him an altar in some foreign land where they're never seen the sea. And the way I know that is, I walk around with an oar on my shoulder until people stop saying "Nice oar, dumbass!" and start saying "Where are you going with that oddly shaped winnowing fan?" And then I make an altar right then and there. And then I live happily ever after. Not too shabby, eh?Well, Conrad Roth of Varieties of Unreligious Experience, after an introductory riff, has posted a discussion of the history and attributes of the winnowing fan (which, it turns out, comes in two varieties, the liknon or basket-fan and the ptuon or shovel-fan), with philology and pictures of Francis Darwin's gardener and a mediaeval capital and citations of Jane Harrison and the Bible and references to a useless art object and the extremely useful pizza peel, all served up with his usual impeccable style and engaging rhetoric. Go, learn, enjoy.