MAPO DOUFU.

If you, like me, enjoy spicy foods, one of your favorite Chinese dishes is probably 麻婆豆腐 mapo doufu 'Pock-marked Grandma's Bean Curd'; if, like me, you enjoy mixing food and etymology, you'll be as pleased as I was to discover MMcM's latest entry at Polyglot Vegetarian, which investigates the names of some of his favorite dishes at Mary Chung's restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It turns out that the ma in mapo doufu is the same character as in 麻將 majiang and 麻雀 maque (literally 'sparrow'), the Chinese names for mah jongg. Furthermore, the 擔 dan in 擔擔麵 dan dan noodles (another of my favorite spicy dishes) is the same as the dan, written tan in the traditional Wade-Giles transliteration and thus in English, that is defined in the OED as "A Chinese unit of weight equivalent to approximately 110 lb. or 50 kg." (the more common word for this in English is picul, from Malay). So both of these food-related syllable/words are found in English dictionaries, though with different meanings! That's just one of the many fun facts to be found in MMcM's long and thoroughly researched entry (which also goes into the history of the restaurant which invented mapo doufu); I heartily commend it to your attention.

CAN GOOGLE DIGITIZE EVERYTHING?

All the books in the world, that is? They think so, and they have a pretty good track record (though not a perfect one). I was quite excited recently when I started getting lots of hits entering Russian search terms into Google Book Search. The latest stumbling block is a lawsuit filed by a group of publishers, but everyone seems to think it will be settled out of court. You can read all about it in Jeffrey Toobin's article "Google's Moon Shot" in the latest New Yorker. I won't try to summarize it; I just want to mention one very odd feature of the printed version. Where the online text says "Google has become known for providing access to all of the world’s knowledge...," the magazine itself says "Google has become known for 8; providing access to all of the world’s knowledge." I presume the "8;" is a remnant of some type of coding, but it's distressing that it managed to make it into print. Shape up, New Yorker!

CHARIVARI.

The word charivari "A serenade of ‘rough music’, with kettles, pans, tea-trays, and the like" (OED), the source of the fine American shivaree (Twain: "She turned on all the horrors of the ‘Battle of Prague’, that venerable shivaree, and waded chin-deep in the blood of the slain"), is from French, but beyond that the etymology is unknown; the OED says "various conjectures are mentioned by Littré." Well, the estimable Conrad H. Roth of Varieties of Unreligious Experience has posted seven, count 'em seven, such conjectures, including "Greek καρηβαρία, 'heaviness of the head', because a deafening charivari can cause headaches," "French hunting term harer, 'to rouse dogs,'" and "Low Latin caria, nut, κάρυον, because nuts are thrown and a great din is kicked up on a wedding-day." Anyone who enjoys picking through the detritus of the etymologist's workroom should go over and contemplate hypotheses. (And while you're there, immerse yourself in his tribute to the bridges of London.)

LIBRIVOX.

Bulbulovo links to LibriVox, a site which "provides free audiobooks from the public domain." The vast majority (689) of the currently available texts are in English, but there are some in German (27), French (11), Russian, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Latin, Hebrew, Old English, Portuguese, and Swedish (all less than ten items); there is also a "Multilingual" category that includes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights read in a bunch of languages (including Walloon), two "Multilingual Poetry Collections," and the Irish national anthem, "Amhrán na bhFiann." If you want to volunteer to read texts, go here; I especially hope Russian-speakers will do so, because I don't like the way the guy who does all the currently available texts reads (muttering quickly, with no discernable emotion, which is especially distressing with Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground": "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased....").

A HAT IN ARRAN.

In yesterday's post on the name Albany I mentioned in passing "the ancient Albania in the Caucasus." The Persian name for the Caucasian Albania is Arran. Today, when I leafed through the NY Times Magazine, I glanced at the serialized fiction in the Funny Pages, which I usually skip (life being too short), and I saw a new serial by Michael Chabon (pronounced, in his words, "Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Jovi") called "Gentlemen of the Road" whose first chapter bore the title "On Discord Arising From Excessive Love of a Hat" and whose dateline read "KINGDON OF ARRAN, in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, A.D. 950." I was immediately hooked. The first paragraph did not unhook me:

For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in 10 languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve. Engrossed in the study of a small ivory shatranj board with pieces of ebony and horn, and in the stew of chickpeas, carrots, dried lemons and mutton for which the caravansary was renowned, the African held the place nearest the fire, his broad back to the bird, with a view of the doors and the window with its shutters thrown open to the blue dusk. On this temperate autumn evening in the kingdom of Arran in the eastern foothills of the Caucasus, it was only the two natives of burning jungles, the African and the myna, who sought to warm their bones. The precise origin of the African remained a mystery. In his quilted gray bambakion with its frayed hood, worn over a ragged white tunic, there was a hint of former service in the armies of Byzantium, while the brass eyelets on the straps of his buskins suggested a sojourn in the West. No one had hazarded to discover whether the speech of the known empires, khanates, emirates, hordes and kingdoms was intelligible to him. With his skin that was lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle, and his eyes womanly as a camel’s, and his shining pate with its ruff of wool whose silver hue implied a seniority attained only by the most hardened men, and above all with the air of stillness that trumpeted his murderous nature to all but the greenest travelers on this minor spur of the Silk Road, the African appeared neither to invite nor to promise to tolerate questions. Among the travelers at the caravansary there was a moment of admiration, therefore, for the bird’s temerity when it seemed to declare, in its excellent Greek, that the African consumed his food in just the carrion-scarfing way one might expect of the bastard offspring of a bald-pated vulture and a Barbary ape.

I have not read anything of Chabon's before, but I will be reading this, and I figure there are bound to be at least a few of my readers for whom the conjunction of medieval Caucasian kingdoms, birds that spew indecencies in 10 languages, and hats will be as seductive as it was for me, so I am mentioning it here.

Also, my lovely wife pointed out to me a post at The Cassandra Pages that linked to a story by Irwin Block at The Gazette (Montreal) about 86-year-old George Butcher, whose "kitchen, bedrooms and hallways are stacked floor to ceiling with books covering every conceivable subject"—"15,000 is a fair estimate." I can't imagine what conceivable relevance this might have to me, but perhaps it will strike a chord with someone else out there, someone addicted to books. I don't have an addiction, nosirree. I can stop whenever I want. I just haven't chosen to stop yet.

ALBANY.

I just had one of those moments in which you discover a hitherto unsuspected gap in your knowledge and become confused and (if you're me) determined to get to the bottom of it. Our local radio station covers a wide area of the Northeast (and irritatingly insists on listing a dozen or so cities every time they do station ID), but their home base is in Albany, and this evening, hearing the word for the millionth time, I suddenly asked myself "Why is the capital of New York State called Albany?" I had a vague recollection that it was named for a Duke of Albany, but why would there be a Duke of Albany in England? Was I just thinking of Shakespeare's duke (married to one of Lear's daughters)? What was "Albany," anyway? Did it have something to do with Albania? Fortunately, the internet came to the rescue: the city was named for James Stuart, Duke of Albany, who later became James II; the Duchy of Albany, purely notional by his day, had originally been a Scottish title, first granted by Robert III of Scotland (who, incidentally, changed his name from the then unpopular "John" upon ascending the throne, and eventually asked to be buried under a dunghill) to his brother Robert in 1398. Albany is an anglicized form of Albania, itself a latinized form of Alba, "the ancient and modern Scottish Gaelic name (IPA: [ˈaɫəpə]) for the country of Scotland" as Wikipedia puts it, continuing: "It was used by the Gaels to refer to the island as a whole until roughly the ninth or tenth centuries, when it came to be the name given to the kingdoms of the Picts and the Scots (Pictavia and Dál Riata), north of the River Forth and the Clyde estuary... (it is unclear whether it may ultimately share the same etymon as the modern Albania or the ancient Albania in the Caucasus)." So the confusion isn't entirely cleared up, but at least I know why the city is called that, and what the Duchy of Albany was (there hasn't been a duke of that title since 1919, when "Prince Leopold's son, Charles, was deprived of the peerage... for bearing arms against the United Kingdom in World War I"; he later joined the Nazi Party and "spent the last years of his life in poverty and seclusion").

TEXT-TO-SPEECH DEMO.

OddCast.com has created a demo of their text-to-speech technology that's fun and a little creepy (the animated woman's eyes follow your cursor, and sometimes a male voice comes out of her mouth). You can pick from thirteen languages (Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish) and various voices (for Japanese, for example, Miyu [female] or Show [male]); just enter text in the language you pick and hit "Say it!" (Via MetaFilter, where one of the commenters indicates that you only get a certain amount of free access, so ration your experiments accordingly.)

LANGUAGE AND COLOR.

An Economist article on a perennial subject, how different languages divide up the color spectrum and what that says about human psychology.

Like many debates in psychology, this one pits congenital, fundamentally genetic, explanations against explanations that rely on environmental determinism. Psychologists in the former camp think people are born with ingrained ideas about how hues are grouped. They believe the brain is preconditioned to pick out the six colours on a Rubik's cube whatever tongue it is taught to think in. The other camp, by contrast, thinks that the spectrum can be chopped into categories anywhere along its length. Moreover, they suspect that the language an individual learns from his parents is the main explanation for where that chopping takes place.

As with most nature-versus-nurture debates, compromise seems in order. Two papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest where the middle ground lies.

In the more recent of the two, which appeared this week, Terry Regier, of the University of Chicago, and his colleagues, picked at the question of preconditioned language categories. They used a grid displaying all possible hues rolled into a globe, with black at the north pole and white at the south. In this model, colours stick out from the sphere according to how sensitive the visual system is to them... He thinks that useful languages should allot words in order to minimise the perceptual difference between colours of the same category, and maximise it between colours in different categories. Unlike national boundaries, linguistic boundaries should form only in the valleys of his colour globe, never over the hills.

Dr Regier therefore programmed his computer to find the best valley borders according to whether he told it to create three, four, five or six “countries” on the globe. Then, to judge whether people build languages around what their brains are best attuned to, he compared these theoretically best divisions with real-world dividing lines.

...The model closely fits some languages and points correctly to some details. For instance, three-colour language systems, which lump red and yellow together, generally exclude whitish yellow from that category—as does the model. But the results also explain where nurture gets its wiggle room. Real lexical boundaries tend to vary where Dr Regier's algorithm produced several options that were almost as good as each other.

The second study, comparing perceptions from the right and left visual fields, "suggests both sides are correct. There is a fundamental—presumably congenital—distinction, as shown by the fact that the non-linguistic side of the brain distinguishes between blue and green. But there is also a language-mediated one, as shown by the linguistic side's greater response." Interesting stuff, and I'll be interested to see what my commenters (almost all of whom will know more about it than I) have to say. (Thanks go to Paul and Trevor for the link.)

WNT ONLINE.

Mark Liberman at Language Log reports that the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT), the Dutch equivalent of the OED, will become freely available on the internet on January 27 (the site is here). The news came to him from Ruud Visser, whose blog has a full report on the development (including a translation of the account in the Leiden University newsletter), as well as a great follow-up on BabelFish's bizarre "translation" of the name Harm Beukers as "Harm tired cherry."

SAVING THE GROSCHENGRAB.

A Deutsche Welle article reports on one man's efforts to keep fine old German words alive:

Some words simply fall into the black hole of disuse. Some are forgotten because they no longer apply to modern life. Still others are eventually rejected for sounding old-fashioned or out-of-date.

The older, and more literal "Schutzmann" (protection man) has been updated as "Polizist" (police officer), for example, while "Spielautomat" (slot machine) has replaced "Groschengrab," which refers to the same thing, but in a more colorful manner. It literally means "penny grave."

Bodo Mrozek, a 38-year-old author from Berlin, has taken on the Sisyphean task of rescuing endangered words and even trying to reinstate some of them into modern German speech.

"If you grew up in the 1980s then you heard about forests being cut down and whales becoming extinct," said Mrozek in an interview with the Tageszeitung. "But no one lobbied for words and that's why I think it's important to take on this underestimated threat."

In his quest to find the most beautiful endangered German word, Mrozek has invited the public to suggest their favorites through Feb. 28, 2007.

The person who submits the winning word, selected by a panel of five well-known German authors, will receive a trophy shaped like a cheeseball adorned with toothpicks. In German this party appetizer is called a "Käseigel," which literally means "cheese hedgehog" and, appropriately, is among the many endangered words Mrozek is lobbying for. ...

According to Mrozek, German words are in greater danger than their English counterparts.

Germany's authoritative Duden lexicon is content to let words slip through the linguistic cracks. It simply omits those that have fallen out of use, Mrozek told Tageszeitung.

The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, sees itself as a documenter of the English language and still contains words from Shakespeare's time, added the author.

Here's Bodo's endangered-words website (the name Bodo, incidentally, pleases me immensely). We'll get 'em all back...

Thanks for the link, Trevor!

RUSSKII/ROSSIISKII.

Tom, the correspondent who sent me the Romani links posted earlier today, has a question to which I do not know the answer, and I am hoping some of my readers do:

Today the name of the Russian language in Russian is russkii, but the name of the country is Rossiia. I realize that it was Peter the Great who changed the name of his realm from Muscovy (Moskovskoe Tsarstvo) to the Russian Empire (Rossiiskaia Imperia) in 1721. In doing so he fell on the Greek translation of the Slavic name Rus, that is, Rosia. In line with Peter's choice, Lomonosov wrote about the Russian language as rossiiski, not russkii. But at the turn of the 19th century, the latter form had almost completely replaced the former. (The Latin translation of Rus was Ruthenia, which was preferred to the Greek version in Catholic and Protestant states west of Russia.)

I wonder why it happened and when exactly some official decision was taken to this effect.

The only inexact and vague hypothesis on the change I have drawn from books by the French Slavicist Danie Beavouis. Between 1772 and 1795, Austria, Prussia and Russia partitioned Poland-Lithuania. Russia got the entire Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose law was based on the 16th-century Lithuanian Statute. The statute was composed in Cyrillic-based Ruthenian (ruski), which was the official language in the Duchy then. Ruthenian was based on the local Slavic dialects of the Orthodox population, who dubbed themselves ruski (Ruthenian), an adjective derived from the name of the medieval polity of Rus. This written vernacular of Ruthenian came in two varieties shaped by the two ducal chanceries in Vilnius and Kyiv. In turn, Ruthenian influenced the development of the still heavily Church Slavonicized Muscovian chancery language, before the latter spawned Russian as we know it.

After 1697, Ruthenian ceased to be an official language, and the Lithuanian Statute was perused in a Polish translation. St Petersburg retained the statute as the basis of law in the territories of the former duchy until 1840, but turned to the Ruthenian-language original. The name of Ruthenian cropping up as ruski in the statute was interpreted as Russian. Until the imposition of the name Rossiia on Muscovy by Peter the Great, the polity's inhabitants referred to themselves as rus(s)kii. After the partitions this allowed St Petersburg to claim credibly that the ruski of Poland-Lithuania and the rus(s)kii of Muscovy/Russia were the same thing, namely Russian. This interpretation allowed for the legally based introduction of Russian as an official language in the erstwhile grand duchy. Because at that time there were more literate people in the area than elsewhere in the empire, St Petersburg was extremely interested in legitimizing its incorporation of the duchy into the empire in the eyes of the inhabitants of the erstwhile grand duchy. Their loyalty to the Romanovs was crucial for the modernization of the empire through the 1830s.

However, even if this explanation is true, I still don't know when St Petersburg officially changed the name of the Russian language from rossiiskii to russkii.

Any thoughts?

ROMANI LINKS.

Correspondent Tomasz Kamusella sent me a great collection of links relating to the Romani ("Gypsy") language and culture, which I hereby pass along to you all:
Цыгане России (Romani of Russia; in Russian)
Лилоро (dedicated to Romani language, culture, history, and literature; in Russian)
Romani muzika
Romano Vodi online journal (mainly Romani)
Dženo Association online bulletin (trilingual edition; for Romani click on Romani flag)
Rrommedia Network (in Romani)
Romano Centro magazine (in Romani)
Roma Rights Quarterly (in Romani)
TV Sutel Romani-language programme, Macedonia
Radio Multikulti Romanes (Romani-language broadcasts)
Romnet Romani-language news, Hungary
Radio rota Romani-language online radio, Czech Republic
Radio Romano/Cafe Romano Romani-language Radio online, from Sweden
BBC Kent's Romany Roots
Roma Decade Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005-2015
Radio Romano Centro (Vienna)
Romani (language site)
The Patrin Web Journal: Romani Culture and History
Unión Romaní (Spain)
European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC)
The Dream (A photographic essay among the Chergari Gypsies in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria)
Rroma (organisations, culture, and history)
Roma in the Czech Republic
RomNews Society

Finally, from the Wikipedia in Romani I learn that Romanes now has a Devanagari standard written form as well!

WINTER IS GOOD.

Winter is good — his Hoar Delights
Italic flavor yield
To Intellects inebriate
With Summer, or the World —

Generic as a Quarry
And hearty — as a Rose —
Invited with Asperity
But welcome when he goes.

   Emily Dickinson

(via wood s lot, and I'm glad it's finally started snowing here in the Berkshires)

CRAZY SPACE NAMES.

Robert Roy Britt discusses the "nomenclature wars" of astronomy at SPACE.com:

You might be surprised to learn that the outskirts of the solar system are loaded with Plutinos, Centaurs, cubewanos and EKOs. Astronomers didn't even know this a decade ago. In fact until 1992 they hadn't even invented three of the terms.

Now it seems they don't have enough of these crazy names.

During the past decade, hundreds of objects have been discovered in a bewildering range of locations and orbital configurations beyond Jupiter. During that same time, astronomers have invented a puzzling set of designations — some straightforward, some creative, some downright amusing — to describe their findings.

The result is a charming lexicon that unfortunately does not properly describe what's out there, according to some experts. More names are needed, one group of astronomers argues.

It's a longish article, and there wouldn't be much point trying to summarize it, so I'll let you examine the proposed words and classifications for yourself, but I can't resist quoting my favorite:

Objects near Plutinos that are not attracted into resonances with Neptune are called cubewanos. These make up the "classical" Kuiper Belt, a relatively thin region of space that corresponds to the same plane in which most of the planets orbit, Parker explained.

The origin of the word "cubewano" is perhaps the most extreme example of nomenclative amusement among astronomers.

The first KBO found was initially designated 1992 QB1, Parker explains. Its a name that denotes the year, month and order of discovery and is typical for newfound objects whose orbits are not pinned down. It was later learned that 1992 QB1 was a "main belt" KBO, not a Plutino, and so astronomers just began sounding out "QB1" and a new term was born.

My only complaint is that "cubewano" is a misleading spelling; the etymology implies it should be pronounced "cue-bee-wahn-oh" (Q-B-1-O), but it's hard to look at "cube" and not pronounce it as a monosyllable ("kyoob-wahn-oh"). A tip of the Languagehat hat to aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org for the link.

VAIN ORNAMENTATION.

A correspondent writes:

In a recent discussion on a economics and culture blog to which I contribute, a commentator noted:

> The Amish example is the "one-gallus Schwenkfelders", the sect that broke off from the orthodox Schwenkfelders because two overall straps were considered to be unneeded to hold the overalls up and therefore "vain ornamentation".

Would anyone amongst your readers and contributors know what the Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch phraseology would be for "vain ornamentation"?

I'm sure one of you learned folks knows the answer; share the info and James, my correspondent, will be grateful. Me, I'm grateful to him, for bringing the Schwenkfelders and their founder, Kaspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig, to my attention. He and they will go up there with Lodowicke Muggleton and the Muggletonians in my personal pantheon of pleasing religious eponyms.

TABELLION.

I mentioned a while back that I was reading Proust to my wife in the evenings (in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation), and I've come across a word so obscure and entrancing that I had to tell you about it. As Swann is ascending the staircase to the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's party (in the "Swann in Love" section, on p. 354 of my edition), he is followed by "a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like a Goya sacristan or a tabellion in an old play." Tabellion is taken straight from the French ("comme un sacristain de Goya ou un tabellion du répertoire"), but it turns out to be English as well; the OED says:

[ad. L. tabellio, -ōnem, one who draws up written instruments, a notary, scrivener, f. tabella tablet, letter, etc.]

A scrivener, a kind of subordinate notary; esp. in the Roman Empire, and in France till the Revolution, an official scribe having some of the functions of a notary. In 17-18th c. used as a recognized designation of a vocation in England and New England.

The citations go back to the fifteenth century; you can see the New England use in a 1735 quote from C. Hazard, Life T. Hazard (1893): "I Joseph Marion Notary and Tabellion Publick Dwelling in Boston in New England" (all the citations are quoted here). What a fine thing, to be a tabellion!

A couple of pages previously, Swann is examining "the scattered pack of tall, magnificent, idle footmen" in the entrance hall:

One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions, tortures, and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his "things." But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves, so effectively that, as he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat.

(For those who think there aren't enough hats in this blog.)

Addendum. Spammers seem to have latched onto this inoffensive entry, so I am (with deep regret) closing the thread. If anyone wishes to contribute further to it, please e-mail me and I will reopen it for that purpose.

MOROCCAN VOCABULARY.

A very nice site called Moroccan Vocabulary (new this month) lives up to its subtitle, "Moroccan Word a Day." Monday's word was zrbiyya 'carpet'; there's grammatical information (the undefined feminine plural is zrâbi, for instance), a sample sentence, and a picture. The author says "I am simply a Moroccan, trying to share the beauty of my dialect and culture," and he or she is certainly doing a good job. Many thanks to Liosliath of Morocco Time for the link!

FAIL BETTER.

A Guardian essay by Zadie Smith called "Fail Better" considers what writers try to do when they write and what readers should be doing in response. She says "somewhere between a critic's necessary superficiality and a writer's natural dishonesty, the truth of how we judge literary success or failure is lost," and she tries to remedy the loss. You probably won't agree with everything she says, but if you're at all interested in the subject you should find it a fascinating read, and it makes me (as it does Anatoly, from whom I got the link) want to read some of her fiction. (The title of the essay, by the way, is from Beckett.)

TRANSLATING MANDELSTAM.

Osip Mandelstam (I can never decide whether to write Mandelstam or Mandelshtam in English, so I do it both ways) is featured at wood s lot today, and one of the links is to an essay by Adam Kirsch that begins by focusing on M's relationship with his Jewishness (a vexed subject), then moves on to the difficulty of translating him. (Here's Auden, who should have known better: "I don't see why Mandelstam is considered a great poet. The translations that I've seen don't convince me at all.") Kirsch welcomes the republication of the 1974 Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown, then says:

But are they faithful reflections of what Mandelstam wrote? Joseph Brodsky, a formidable authority, insisted that they were not. In his essay on Mandelstam, "The Child of Civilization"..., Brodsky took aim at translators who turn Mandelstam's rigorously formal poems into free verse. "Calls for the use of 'an instrument of poetry in our own time,'" Brodsky insisted, mean stripping Mandelstam of his extremely dense verbal music; the result is "a sort of common denominator of modern verbal art." "The cavalier treatment" of meter and rhyme, Brodsky wrote hyperbolically, "is at best a sacrilege, at worst a mutilation or a murder." The Merwin-Brown translation is one of the sacrileges he had in mind...

Now, I yield to no one in my admiration of Brodsky as a poet, but as a theorist of translation he was as bad as Nabokov, and with worse results, since he controlled the (generally mediocre) English translations of his work so closely. (Daniel Weissbort's From Russian with love: Joseph Brodsky in English is devoted in large part to accounts of his unavailing attempts to convince Brodsky he didn't know what he was talking about when it came to English translations.) English is not constructed like Russian, its poetic traditions are different, and it makes no sense to try to reproduce Brodsky's rhyme and meter, as can be seen by the hideous example Woods quotes that begins:

The falling is the constant mate of fear,
And feel of emptiness is the feel of fright.
Who throws us the stones from the height —
And stones here refuse the dust to bear?

I don't like bad free verse translations any better than Brodsky did, but the answer is not to try to cram oneself into a rigid scheme of rhyme and meter but to try to give a feel for the swing of the original while availing oneself of the flexibility of the modern English tradition. I had a crazed plan, some years ago, of translating all of Mandelstam, but broke off after a few tries, of which at the moment I can only locate one, a version of his 1920 poem "Возьми на радость из моих ладоней":

Take—for the joy of it—out of my palms
a little sunlight and a little honey,
as Persephone's bees commanded.

The unmoored boat is not to be untied,
nor are fur-shod phantoms to be heard, nor—
in this dense life—is fear to be overcome.

The only thing that's left to us is kisses:
furry, like the little bees
who die in midair, flying from their hive.

They rustle in the night's transparent thickets,
their homeland the dense forest of Taygetus,
their nourishment: time, honeysuckle, mint...

Here, take—for the joy of it—my wild gift,
this necklace, dry and unattractive,
of dead bees who turned honey into sun.

No, I don't know what "The unmoored boat is not to be untied" means, but that's what the Russian says (or "Don't untie the unfastened boat," which doesn't help). What bothers me is the fact that dremuchii means 'thick, dense,' but is only applied to forests (as in the eleventh line), except that in the sixth line he uses it to modify zhizni '(in) life,' where you would really want to bring out the overtones of 'drowsiness, slumber' (which is what all other drem- words mean, and is probably the etymological origin of dremuchii), but there's no way to do that, since (by my own theory of translation) you have to use the same word as you use to render the same Russian word that turns up a few lines later in its basic meaning. Also, the cute but intrusive ambiguity added by the translation of vremya as "time" in the twelfth line (inevitably heard as "thyme" in the context of "honeysuckle, mint") is annoying but unavoidable. Conclusion: translation is hard, translating Mandelstam is particularly hard, and people really shouldn't lay down rules for translating into a language that is not their own.

Quote of the day, just to show off another internet discovery I made, the complete text of the Taittiriya Samhita of the Yajurveda (warning: large pdf file; provided by the amazing Sanskrit Web):

tasmād asāv ādityaḥ

sarvāḥ prajāḥ pratyann ud eti
tasmāt sarva eva manyate
"mām praty ud agād" iti

—end of TS. 6-5-4-1, start of 6-5-4-2

Which is to say: "Thus the sun rises for all, but each one thinks: 'It rises for me.'"

MOVIE JAPANESE.

Joel of Far Outliers has a typically detailed and interesting post sparked by a viewing of Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (硫黄島からの手紙); it's part of his "Wordcatcher Tales" series, in which he analyzes unusual Japanese words or expressions. He discusses the "Iwo" in the island's name, actually 硫黄 iou 'sulphur, brimstone' (the -w- hasn't been pronounced in quite a while, though I'd be curious to know just when it disappeared); 閣下 kakka '(Your/His[/Her]) Excellency,' the form of address for the commanding general (reminiscent of tsarist forms like ваше благородие vashe blagorodie, abbreviated by the men in the trenches to vashbrod' or the like), which leads to a discussion of Japanese ranks as compared with American ones; and 貴様ら kisamara, an insulting way to address a group (kisama 'you [derog.]' + -ra [impolite pl.]), which leads to a discussion of Japanese pronouns and an extremely useful link to the Yale Anime Society glossary, David Soler's list (last revised in 1999) of "the 100 words which I deem to be most common and/or essential in anime" followed by a discussion of personal pronouns. Some of the words are of particular relevance to movies ("nigeru to flee. Often used in the imperative form, Nigete! or Nigero!, in which case it's best translated as 'Run!' or 'Get away!'"), but many are just common words and expressions I well remember from my years in Japan as a kid (e.g., "baka an all-purpose insult denigrating the subject's intelligence").

BILINGUAL KARELIA.

There may be nobody out there as fond of multilingual maps as I am (I can't tell you how excited I was, years ago, to get hold of a trilingual map of Transylvania), but I'm going to blog this anyway: a Finnish/Russian map of the Karelian Isthmus (the region north and northwest of St. Petersburg that was taken from Finland after World War Two and added to Leningrad Oblast). It's in a dozen sections; click on any of them and it opens up in a separate window, and if you click on that it expands to the point where you can easily read the names of every little feature of the landscape. I had given up on trying to find out exactly where Mustamäki and Neuvola (or Neivola) were from other internet and printed sources, but this section locates them precisely (northwest of Roshchino/Raivola). I know I've said this many times before, but: I love the internet. (Found via this Russian page on the Yalkala Museum.)

Addendum. I've discovered a more detailed online map of the southern part of Karelia, also bilingual (Finnish/Russian).

DIE FACKEL ONLINE.

Karl Kraus, the great Austrian essayist, playwright, and cranky observer of mankind, is one of my favorite authors, so it is with great pleasure that I report to you, in the words of the Literary Saloon:

Karl Kraus died in 1936, and so as of this year his work is in the public domain in Austria — which also means they've now been able to open the doors to the Austrian Academy Corpus digital edition of his journal Die Fackel ('The Torch'):

The AAC digital edition of the journal Die Fackel, edited by Karl Kraus from 1899 to 1936, offers free online access to the 37 volumes, 415 issues, 922 numbers, comprising more than 22.500 pages and 6 million wordforms.

The AAC-FACKEL contains a fully searchable database of the entire journal with various indexes, search tools and navigation aids in an innovative and highly functional graphic design interface, in which all pages of the original are available as digital texts and as facsimile images.

Unfortunately, for some inscrutable reason they require you to register, but it's free and a relatively minor imposition considering the wealth now open to you (assuming you read German). Thanks, as so often, to wood s lot for the news.

NIKOLAI FEDOROV.

Every once in a while, in the course of my ever-expanding investigations into the history of everything, I run across some obscure figure who seems worth writing about. The latest is Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (or Fyodorovich Fyodorov, if you prefer); I gather he's not that obscure in Russia, but I'd never heard of him. He was born in 1828 (according to my reference books) or 1829 (according to various online sources), the illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Ivanovich Gagarin (as was customary in such cases, he was given the name and patronymic of his godfather); he had a decent education (though he was expelled from the Richelieu Lyceum of Odessa) and became a peripatetic teacher of history and geography before finding library work in Moscow in 1868. A decade later he joined the staff of the Rumyantsev Museum (now the Russian State Library), where he spent the next quarter of a century writing religio-philosophico-quasiscientific tracts that apparently impressed the likes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (though he published nothing during his lifetime—did they get manuscripts, or was it all word of mouth?). What he's best known for is his insistence that mankind must become immortal and bring everyone who ever lived back to life, which sounds like standard-issue kookery but was apparently taken seriously in the Soviet period, influencing "scientific research... and even government policy" (according to S.V. Utechin). But the details! James Billington, in his indispensible The Icon and the Axe, says (on p. 443): "He also returned periodically to the idea that the assertive, artificial world of men contains less wisdom than that of animals, and that of animals less than that of the composed and earth-bound vegetable world." So next time you eat a carrot, remember—it may be wiser than you! And according to the Russian Wikipedia entry, he refused to allow himself to be photographed or painted; the only existing representation was surreptitiously drawn by Leonid Pasternak, the poet's father.

What has this to do with language, you say? I'll tell you: according to Stephen Lukashevich's N. F. Fedorov (1828-1903): A Study in Russian Eupsychian and Utopian Thought (pp. 144 ff.), Fedorov thought language began as an attempt to communicate with the dead fathers in the sky, and writing was "another fictitious resurrection of the dead fathers":

As the evolution of mankind was accompanied by a process of secularization, the written language gradually lost its sacred, resurrectional character and its pictorial expression, until it became phonetic and alphabetical. Yet apparently this process of the secularization of the written language met with resistance, as witnessed by the fact that the writers and copyists of the Middle Ages continued to embellish their texts with a calligraphy and illuminations that often were as complex as the hieroglyphics and ideograms of the past. Moreover, their penmanship continued to retain its sacred character to the extent that it was possible to speak of a Gothic or of a Byzantine style of writing, just as one could speak of Gothic or Byzantine church architecture. But with the appearance of the cult of progress, which repudiated as evil all that was past, the written language lost its sacred, resurrectional character and became a means for preparing legal and commercial documents. Furthermore, as repudiation of the past and of the ancestors (fathers) was also a repudiation of fraternity, so too the written language, which helped the cause of progress, became a vehicle for the unfraternal relations that reigned in the modern world. Accordingly, the complex calligraphy and the intricate styles of penmanship yielded, first to plain, official writing, then to soberly efficient printing, and, finally to shorthand and stenography.

Fedorov called modern writing "the work of men who have stopped being human and who have become typewriters." The quote is from his (posthumous) magnum opus, Философия общего дела [The Philosophy of the Common Task], originally published 1906-13 and available in English in What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task: Selected Works, ed. E. Koutiassov and M. Minto (Lausanne, Switzerland: Honeyglen/L'Age d'Homme, 1990). Besides the Wikipedia articles linked above (the Russian one has links to many of his writings in Russian), this webpage has a convenient summary of his views. I don't know why, but I have an unreasonable fondness for these unaffiliated crackpots, burrowing away at their obsessive analyses of Life, God, and Meaning, glaring with half-seeing eyes at the world around them and scribbling, scribbling, scribbling. If his project for mass resurrection gets underway, I look forward to having a chat with Nikolai Fedorovich.

THIN RED LINE.

Yvonne Warburton, Online Publication Manager of the OED, writes about the trouble she had tracking down the first recorded occurrence of the phrase the thin red line: "It was generally believed to be associated with the Battle of Balaclava, which took place in 1854. It therefore seemed reasonable to assume that I would be able to find an 1854 first quotation, especially as the phrase was attributed in many later sources to Sir William Howard Russell, who was war correspondent for the Times during the Crimean War." But it wasn't nearly that simple, and the earliest citation they've found so far is from "a book by Russell called The British Expedition to the Crimea, published in 1887." Well worth reading if you're interested in the nitty-gritty of finding cites, and my thanks to aldiboronti at Wordorigins for bringing it to my attention!

POWERS, DICTATING.

One of my favorite novelists, Richard Powers, has an essay in the latest NY Times Book Review in which he says "I haven’t touched a keyboard for years": he just speaks into a microphone and lets his computer do the rest.

For most of history, most reading was done out loud. Augustine remarks with surprise that Bishop Ambrose could read without moving his tongue. Our passage into silent text came late and slow, and poets have resisted it all the way. From Homer to hip-hop, the hum is what counts. Blind Milton chanted “Paradise Lost” to his daughters. Of his 159-line “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth said, “I began it upon leaving Tintern ... and concluded ... after a ramble of four or five days. ... Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.” Wallace Stevens used to compose while walking to work, then dictate the results to his secretary, before proceeding to his official correspondence as vice president of the Hartford insurance company[...] The all-time champion of Xtreme Dictation, though, must be Thomas Aquinas. Witnesses report how he could relay four different topics to four secretaries at once, and even (Maritain writes) “lay down to rest in the midst of the dictation to continue to dictate while sleeping.” That’s what I really want from my tablet; I trust that technicians are working on the problem.

Why all this need for speech? Long after we’ve fully retooled for printed silence, we still feel residual meaning in the wake of how things sound. Speech and writing share some major neural circuitry, much of it auditory. All readers, even the fast ones, subvocalize. That’s why so many writers — like Flaubert, shouting his sentences in his gueuloir — test the rightness of their words out loud.

What could be less conducive to thought’s cadences than stopping every time your short-term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You’d be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow.

I should try it sometime, but being lazy and Luddish, I probably won't.

TETRAPLEGIA.

While editing a medical article I just came across the term "tetraplegia"; I assumed it should be quadriplegia, since it wasn't in my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, but a Google search led me to the relevant Wikipedia article, which says:

Quadriplegia, also known as tetraplegia, is a symptom in which a human experiences paralysis of all four limbs... The condition is also termed tetraplegia; both terms mean "paralysis of four limbs", however tetraplegia is becoming the more accepted term for this condition. Tetraplegia, used commonly in Europe, is the more etymologically correct version since both "tetra" and "plegia" are Greek roots whereas "quadra" is a Latin root.

I wasn't aware that anyone still cared about what used to be called "bastard words," and I'm very pleased to be proved wrong. Now if only they'd do something about television...

Of course, I'm not comfortable taking Wikipedia's word for it; does anybody know whether the tetra- form is in fact increasingly used in English?

THAI TO ENGLISH ONLINE.

I don't often have occasion to try to decipher a bit of Thai, but when I do, I'll be awfully glad to be able to simply type it into thai2english rather than having to leaf through Mary Haas's Thai-English Student's Dictionary trying to find the right string of characters. Once you've entered your text, you get this notice:

The transliteration for the text you entered is shown below. Moving your mouse over any underlined word will bring up a dictionary definition for it, or you can get a more detailed definition by clicking on the word. Clicking on the arrow at the start of each line will show a definition of every word in that line.

And it works! Thanks go to MMcM of Polyglot Vegetarian for linking to it in the course of a long and fascinating entry on a Boston Thai restaurant named Coconut Cafe, part of which is devoted to an examination of the words for 'coconut' in many languages; the only thing I would have added is the tidbit that Persian نارگیل nārgil, "from one of the Indian languages" (cf. Sanskrit नारीकेल nārikela), is the source of English narghile, since coconuts were originally used in making the things. (Oh, and I would have put macrons on the long a's. Picky, picky.)

TRANSLATION DISPUTE, 404 AD.

John Emerson of Idiocentrism has alerted me to a webpage presenting the correspondence of Augustine and Jerome concerning the Latin translation of the Bible: three letters from the former, one from the latter, and an excerpt from Book 18 of Augustine's City of God. Jerome slaps Augustine down pretty effectively:

... you ask why a former translation which I made of some of the canonical books was carefully marked with asterisks and obelisks, whereas I afterwards published a translation without these. You must pardon my saying that you seem to me not to understand the matter: for the former translation is from the Septuagint; and wherever obelisks are placed, they are designed to indicate that the Seventy have said more than is found in the Hebrew. But the asterisks indicate what has been added by Origen from the version of Theodotion. In that version I was translating from the Greek: but in the later version, translating from the Hebrew itself, I have expressed what I understood it to mean, being careful to preserve rather the exact sense than the order of the words. I am surprised that you do not read the books of the Seventy translators in the genuine form in which they were originally given to the world, but as they have been corrected, or rather corrupted, by Origen, with his obelisks and asterisks [...]. Do you wish to be a true admirer and partisan of the Seventy translators? Then do not read what you find under the asterisks; rather erase them from the volumes, that you may approve yourself indeed a follower of the ancients. If, however, you do this, you will be compelled to find fault with all the libraries of the Churches; for you will scarcely find more than one manuscript here and there which has not these interpolations.

LANGUAGE KEYBOARD EMULATOR.

The Gate2Home site "enables you to write in your language wherever you are in the world, with an online onscreen keyboard emulator":

The need for this site arose due to the lack of possibility to change the keyboard language at internet places around the world. These places usually allow you to view sites in your language due to IE language encoding, but don't allow you to type in your language (because of administrator or system limitations). Furthermore, even if you can change the language, you'll probably find yourself in front of a keyboard with a different language layout, and you'll have to guess the position of the keys.

However, this site solves those problems by allowing you to type in your language, and to view your language's keyboard layout on-screen in a virtual Semi-Real keyboard. It also allows you to simply type in a different language without messing with the operating system settings.

The languages included are: Albanian (Shqip) / Arabic (العربية) / Armenian (հայերեն) / Azeri (Azərbaycan) / Belarusian (Беларуская) / Bengali (বাংলা) / Bulgarian (Български) / Chinese (中文) / Croatian (hrvatski) / Czech (Česky) / Danish (dansk) / Devanagari (देवनागरी) / Divehi (ދިވެހި) / Dutch (Nederlands) / English (English) / Estonian (eesti) / Faeroese ( Føroyskt) / Farsi Persian (فارسی) / Finnish (suomi) / French (Français) / Gaelic (Gàidhlig/Gaeilge) / Georgian ( ქართული) / German (Deutsch) / Greek (Ελληνικά) / Gujarati (ગુજરાતી) / Hebrew (עברית) / Hindi (हिन्दी) / Hungarian (magyar) / Icelandic ( Íslenska) / Irish (Gaeilge) / Italian (italiano) / Japanese (日本語) / Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ) / Kazakh (Қазақ) / Korean (한국어) / Kyrgyz (Кыргыз) / Latvian (Latviešu) / Lithuanian ( Lietuvių) / Macedonian (Македонски) / Malayalam (മലയാളം) / Maltese (Malti) / Maori (Māori) / Marathi (मराठी) / Mongolian (Монгол) / Multilingual / Norwegian (Norsk) / Polish (Polski) / Portuguese (Português) / Punjabi (ਪਜਾਬੀ/पंजाबी) / Romanian (Română) / Russian (Русский) / Serbian (Српски) / Slovak (Slovenčina) / Slovenian (Slovenščina) / Spanish (español) / Swedish (svenska) / Syriac / Tamil (தமிழ்) / Tatar (Tatarça) / Telugu (తెలుగు) / Thai (ไทย) / Turkish (Türkçe) / Ukrainian (Українська) / Urdu (اردو) / Uzbek (Ўзбек) / Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt). All I can say is, this is truly wonderful. (Via MetaFilter.)

NOV SHMOZ KA POP.

Arnold Zwicky of Language Log posts a detailed exegesis of the words and phrases used in a recent Zippy cartoon: "Nov shmoz ka pop?" "Notary Sojac!" "Nize baby! Banana oil! Jeep!" "Potrzebie! Ferschlugginer! Axolotl!" I'm too young to remember The Squirrel Cage or Smokey Stover (though the phrase "Nov shmoz ka pop," from the former, does ring a faint bell, so I must have seen it used somewhere by someone quoting it, perhaps in my days in science fiction fandom), but the Mad Magazine flashbacks were a nostalgic thrill. I remember how bamboozled I was when I discovered that potrzebie was an actual Polish word, pronounced po-CHEB-yeh rather than POT-er-zee-bee; I still, however, use the latter pronunciation, because I speak Mad but I don't speak Polish.

SONETO XLV.

I was listening to Fresh Air the other day and was riveted by a segment on mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died last summer (bio, New Yorker piece by Charles Michener); not only was her voice gorgeous, but an excerpt from Sings Peter Lieberson: Neruda Songs sent me back to the poem (set by her husband, Peter Lieberson), Neruda's Soneto XLV, whose beginning is heard on the program. Spanish is not one of my favorite languages for poetry, but there are exceptions, and Neruda is one of them, particularly his youthful [Veinte canciones de amor y una canción desesperada and the later] Cien sonetos de amor; through some poetic alchemy, reading even a few lines of these sonnets can make my chest swell with the unbearable urgency of the kind of passionate love we are most likely to experience in our late teens or early twenties. Here is the text of the poem she sang:

No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.

No te vayas por una hora porque entonces
en esa hora se juntan las gotas del desvelo
y tal vez todo el humo que anda buscando casa
venga a matar aún mi corazón perdido.

Ay que no se quebrante tu silueta en la arena,
ay que no vuelen tus párpados en la ausencia:
no te vayas por un minuto, bienamada,

porque en ese minuto te habrás ido tan lejos
que yo cruzaré toda la tierra preguntando
si volverás o si me dejarás muriendo.

If you don't read Spanish, the Stephen Tapscott translation seems to be all over the internet, for instance here; it's not bad, but it doesn't have remotely the same effect as the original.

Totally unrelated except that it also has to do with music, of a sort, but I just ran across this on MetaFilter (from a thread on piano virtuosity) and wanted to share: if you've never experienced John Cage's 4'33" in performance, here's a Google Video record of a 2004 performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra (described here); if you get in the spirit of it and pay attention to the sounds around you, you may find it surprisingly compelling. In any event, it's a treat to watch the audience respond!

PORTOBELLO REDUX.

The last time we discussed the word portobello 'mature cremino mushroom,' the etymology was unknown despite a plethora of suggestions. Well, it may still not be exactly known, but at least we have an authoritative hypothesis; MMcM of the brand-new blog Polyglot Vegetarian ("Grazing through the world of words") had the excellent idea of looking for the word in the latest update to the OED, and (in the words of his latest post) "sure enough, they've got it":

Brit. /ˌpɔ:təˈbɛləʊ/, U.S. /ˌpɔrdəˈbɛloʊ/ Forms: 19- portabella, 19- portabello, 19- portobello. [Perh. alteration of Italian pratarolo meadow mushroom.]

More fully portobello mushroom. A large brown variety of the common edible mushroom, having an open flat cap and a distinctive musky smell.
1990 Doylestown (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer 28 Oct. C12/3 Out of darkness now emerge the cream-colored and fuller flavoured crimani.. the wild tasting portobello and the soft-for-soup oyster mushroom. 1998 Scotl. on Sunday (Nexis) 26 July 32 Before grilling, stuff meaty Portabello mushrooms with oil-soaked crumbs and grated Parmesan or crumbled goat's cheese. 2004 Phytochemistry 65 671/2 Tyrosinase, laccase, and peroxidase were detected in portabella mushrooms, a brown strain of Agaricus bisporus.

He adds "I am amazed that the earliest quotation they could come up with is from 1990," and so am I. I welcome the new addition to the blogosphere, and am encouraged by his scrupulous reproduction of the OED's formatting—too many people just paste in the text and ignore the itals and bolds; I recommend his earlier posts on vegan, okra, and burek.

ATHBHREITH.

Manchán Magan decided to take a trip around his country and speak its native language. Nothing remarkable about that? Ah, but he's Irish, in a country where 25% of the population claims to speak the language of that name but in fact... well, let him tell it:

I chose Dublin as a starting point, confident in the knowledge that in a city of 1.2 million people I was bound to find at least a few Irish speakers. I went first to the Ordnance Survey Office to get a map of the country. (As a semi-state organisation it has a duty to provide certain services in Irish.) "Would you speak English maybe?" the sales assistant said to me. I replied in Irish. "Would you speak English?!" he repeated impatiently. I tried explaining once again what I was looking for. "Do you speak English?" he asked in a cold, threatening tone. "Sea," I said, nodding meekly. "Well, can you speak English to me now?" I told him as simply as I could that I was trying to get by with Irish.

"I'm not talking to you any more," he said. "Go away."

He had similar experiences trying to get a drink ("'Did you not hear me, no?' the barman said menacingly"), information from the tourist office ("'You don't speak English, do you?' he asked coldly"), and so on, and he and the reader are getting pretty depressed, until:

I might have been tempted to give up the journey entirely had it not been for something that happened during the radio phone-in. I was rapidly approaching a point of despair when some children came on the line. I found they spoke clear and fluent Irish in a new and modern urban dialect. They told me how they spoke the language all the time, as did all their friends. They loved it, and they were outraged that I could suggest it was dead. These were the children of the new Gaelscoileanna — the all-Irish schools that are springing up throughout the country in increasing numbers every year. While old schools are being closed down or struggling to find pupils, the Gaelscoileanna are having to turn people away...

These children were reared on Irish versions of SpongeBob SquarePants and Scooby-Doo on TG4 . They had invented Irish words for X-Box and hip-hop, for Jackass and blog. They were fluent in Irish text-speak and had moulded the ancient pronunciations and syntax in accordance with the latest styles of Buffy-speak and Londonstani slang. I realised it was they I should have turned to for help on the streets. The children filled me with renewed confidence as I left Dublin and took to the road...

I found that unexpectedly moving, and the whole piece is wonderful and worth a read. I found it via a MetaFilter post, which also links to the website of the TV series, where you can see YouTube excerpts which are also well worth your time (especially the one where he starts out testing people's knowledge on the street with flash cards and then "goes out busking, using the filthiest, most debauched lyrics he can think of to see if anyone will understand"); the guy is cheerful and resilient, and makes you want to learn the language yourself. (Oh, and the title of this post means 'rebirth' in Irish; it's used at the end of the Guardian article. I'd pronounce it something like AH-vri.)

INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.

CopyrightWatch has posted a list of the authors (including musicians and other creators of art) whose works went out of copyright as of January 1—or rather, two lists, one of for those countries (the majority) where copyright subsists for fifty years after the author’s death (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev, Russian novelist; Pio Baroja, Spanish novelist; H.L. Mencken, American journalist and author; Art Tatum, American jazz pianist; Carl Brockelmann, German Semitic scholar; Walter de la Mare, English poet, short story writer, and novelist; A. A. Milne, English author...), and one for "the quarter or so of the world where the copyright term has foolishly been extended to life+70" (German historian and polymath Oswald Spengler; British ghost story writer M. R. James; Italian composer Ottorino Respighi; English author G. K. Chesterton; English scholar and poet A.E. Housman; pioneering American “muckraker” journalist Lincoln Steffens; Russian author Maxim Gorky; Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca...). As for Canada, unfortunately "there will not be another archival Public Domain Day for archivists, historians, genealogists, and others, to celebrate in Canada until January 1, 2049." To read about the "short-sighted 1998 amendments to the Copyright Act" there, go to the post. I got this link from Matt of No-sword, whose post adds a list of Japanese authors who are now free for all to use. As CopyrightWatch says, "Short live copyright! Long live the public domain!"

2006 BECKY AWARD.

The prestigious group of savants over at Language Log have created an award named for Goropius Becanus, a 16th-century Dutch humanist who "theorized that Antwerpian Flemish, or Brabantic, spoken in the region between the Scheldt and Meuse Rivers, was the original language spoken in Paradise." (I'm proud to say the very first LH post was about him.) The award goes to "people or organizations who have made outstanding contributions to linguistic misinformation," and Geoff Nunberg announced the winner today on Fresh Air:

But by a unanimous vote, this year's Becky goes to the psychiatrist Louann Brizendine, whose bestselling book The Female Brain argues that most of the cognitive and social differences between the sexes are due to differences in brain structure. It's a controversial thesis. The New York Times's David Brooks and others have hailed the book as a challenge to feminist dogma, and Brizendine herself has charged that her critics are angry because her conclusions aren't politically correct. Actually, though, you can leave out the "politically" part. The reviewers for the British science journal Nature described the book as "riddled with scientific errors." And in newspaper commentaries and posts on the LanguageLog blog, the University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman has been meticulously debunking Brizendine's claims about men's and women's language.

Brizendine claims that "differences between men's and women's brains make women more talkative than men, and goes on to say that women on average use 20,000 words a day while men use only 7000" and that "women on average speak twice as fast as men do." Both these claims are utterly and provably wrong (see the Log and the Nunberg link for details). Congratulations, Louann, and I look forward to your rapidly delivered, many-worded acceptance speech!

THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY.

I finally finished Sukhanov's The Russian Revolution 1917 (discussed briefly here)—it's a fascinating eyewitness account of momentous months, but he's a lot more interested in the theoretical infighting of various Marxist fractions than most of us are today, so some of it is heavy slogging—and was rewarded towards the end, during the dramatic account of the opening session of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on the night of Oct. 25 (November 7), 1917, with what is if not the first use at least the locus classicus of one of the great rhetorical cliches. The Mensheviks and SRs whom Sukhanov graces with the sarcastic epithet "the pure-in-heart" (чистые) have made the fateful decision, after the Menshevik leader Martov has placed before the congress a resolution (very popular, judging from the response of the crowd) opposing any military settlement of the ongoing crisis (i.e., the Bolshevik coup which was then underway), to walk out in protest, leaving the Bolsheviks unopposed. As they do so, to the jeers of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky makes a triumphant speech justifying the Bolshevik actions ("We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection, and not a conspiracy"), ending with this zinger: "To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to be—into the dustbin of history!" (Тем, кто отсюда ушел и кто выступает с предложениями, мы должны сказать: вы — жалкие единицы, вы — банкроты, ваша роль сыграна и отправляйтесь туда, где вам отныне надлежит быть: в сорную корзину истории!)

Sukhanov, by the way, is an interesting guy. At first, caught up in the story he's telling, you find him a likable and eagle-eyed observer, but after a while you start noticing that he must have been a pain in the ass to his acquaintances, what with his constant harping on theoretical disagreements and his sneers at anyone who doesn't follow the correct line (which is, of course, his); about that time, he lets you know that he's quite aware of it, mentioning his bad temper and (what we would now call) poor interpersonal skills. This comes to a head in the quite moving description of his relations with Lunacharsky (pp. 374-76):

After he arrived in Russia on May 9th, together with Martov, he at once, and quite naturally, came to the Novaya Zhizn [Gorky and Sukhanov's independent newspaper]. There we became personally acquainted and quite soon intimate... he was not yet in Lenin's party and had a rather 'soft' disposition; we still felt ourselves to be comrades-in-arms in politics as well as literary collaborators.

But we also became rather close friends on purely personal grounds. You might say I spent almost all my unoccupied time with Lunacharsky. He often spent days and nights with us in the Letopis, where my wife and I had a pied-à-terre. Sometimes at night he would come to see me at the printer's, to have a little more talk and look at the next day's edition. And when we were detained in the Tauride Palace we used to spend the night at Manukhin's and again talk away endlessly.

We discussed everything: regardless of the theme, Lunacharsky's talk, stories and repartee were interesting, clear and picturesque, just as he himself was interesting and brilliant...

It is said that when he became a Minister Luinacharsky more quickly and completely than others acquired a ministerial manner, with its negative qualities. I don't know. After the October Revolution I completely broke with him... For two and a half years, down to this very moment, I've only had a few fleeting encounters with him, and not very agreeable ones at that. He really took a ministerial air with me. But I don't know how much he was to blame for all this, and I know very well how much I was, with my rather disagreeable character. My continual polemics were really bitter and unendurable, when we ceased to be companions-in-arms and became political enemies.

The tragedy of a man who values friendship but is unable to keep friends because of his difficult character, of which he is well aware, shines through that passage; I think Sukhanov must have been lonely much of his life.

I understood his character a little better after I read the introduction to Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution (thanks, Amazon Search Inside!). Nikolai Nikolaevich Gimmer (he adopted the name Sukhanov in 1907) was born in 1882 to a minor railway official of German descent whom he never knew and a mother to whom he said (in a brief autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1927) he was never close. Well, it turns out his mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna Simon, was at the center of one of the most notorious Russian court cases of the late 19th century. In love with Stepan Ivanovich Chistov but unable to divorce her worthless, drunken husband and marry him because "the Moscow Ecclesiastical Consistory refused her application for a divorce on the grounds that the evidence proving her husband's 'marital infidelity' was 'insufficient'," she convinced Gimmer to fake a suicide: his clothes and a farewell note were left on the ice of the Moskva River, while he took a train to Petersburg with the money she'd given him. Unfortunately, the police figured out the deception, and she and her new husband were charged with bigamy, and the details of the case (fully reported in the papers) riveted the country (and became the basis for Tolstoy's play The Living Corpse, Живой труп). They were sentenced to seven years' exile in Siberia, but "thanks to their case being taken up by A. F. Koni, a well-known lawyer in the criminal appeals department of the Senate, in 1898 Tsar Nikolai II, acting on the advice of his minister of justice, commuted the sentence to one year's imprisonment." So the teenaged Nikolai spent a year of high school fending for himself while his mother was in Butyrki Prison. No wonder he became a difficult person!

STARTING THE YEAR OFF RIGHT.

My New Year's resolution was to be a nicer, more positive language blogger. No more slapping Safire around, no more holding journalistic slips up to public ridicule, none of that stuff; instead I'd praise the praiseworthy and let the broom of time sweep the rest away. Well, make 'em big and break 'em fast, I say, and having read Baloney Bill's year-end column, it's time to start slapping!

The Mooncalf Maven begins with a riff on the suffix -stan:

“Sometimes I get confused with all these stans,” said Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, then the military dictator of Pakistan, “but as long as I don’t say Hindustan” — a Persian name for India that once included what is now Pakistan — “I’ll be O.K.”

That 1982 citation of the suffix -stans in the form of a noun — rooted in the Persian for “home of” — was dug up by the phrasedick Paul McFedries of wordspy.com.

So far, so good; "home of" isn't exact, but it gives the general idea. ("Place of" would be better; it's from the Indo-European root *stā- 'stand,' and in Persian it's also used in words like registan 'place of sand, desert' and gulistan 'place of roses, rose garden.') But he goes on: "Zia picked up the suffix used by critics of South Africa’s proposed black African homelands in 1949; they had nicknamed the impoverished areas bantustans after the Bantu language spoken by the tribes." Why on earth would you link Zia's use of an old Persian name for India with a modern South African term Zia might or might not ever have heard of? Zia "picked up" a word that was lying around in his language; if you're desperate to make a transition to bantustans, make it yourself, don't foist it on Zia. Furthermore, since all other quotes in the column are from much later, Safire leaves the impression that 1949 is as far back as we can trace the suffix, whereas the first cite in the online OED is from considerably earlier:
1932 Times 7 Sept. 13/6 When all the land in the Stans is collectivized in cotton plantations, say the Soviet governors, then the wheat, meat and vegetables are to come over from the Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus.

Having confused everyone on that score, he moves on to surge, one of those temporarily popular words he loves to put into pun-filled contexts ("We are now inundated by the billowing wave of surge. Put the words Iraq and surge together in a splashy Google search and you can wade into nine million usages of that swell noun and verb..."). In the midst of that harmless fun, he perpetrates this incomprehensible piece of misinformation:

Surge may spring from spring, source of fountains, streams and seas, and in a mysterious undulation of the English language, seems to share a root with the Latin surgere, “to rise,” as the source of the French surgeon.

So (if I'm reading this magniloquent gibberish correctly) he's saying that the word surge "may" come from the word spring and "seems to share a root" with surgere; I've read the sentence multiple times and still can't figure out whether the last phrase says that the source of the French word is the English word or the Latin one, but let's be charitable and assume he meant the latter. Now, it's true that surge shares a root with surgere; this is because it's from surgere (probably via Catalan and French), so it "shares a root" with it in the same way sushi shares a root with Japanese sushi. Surge has nothing to do with spring. Why he mentions the extremely obscure French word surgeon, meaning 'sucker, shoot thrown out from the base of a tree or plant,' is beyond me unless he is under the impression that the French word is the same as the English word surgeon, which of course it's not (the French for that is chirurgien, and the ultimate source is Greek kheirourgos, literally 'hand-worker'). His eye presumably caught the OED's "the earliest examples (sense 1a, b) transl. OF. sourgeon (mod.F. surgeon)" and his magpie nature said "ooh, surgeon, what fun!" and he stuck it in without giving a moment's thought to what this "mod.F. surgeon" might be.

While I'm breaking my resolution, I might as well commit a multiple offense, so let me add a brief swipe at a sentence in Peter J. Boyer's "Downfall: How Donald Rumsfeld reformed the Army and lost Iraq" from the Nov. 20 New Yorker. In the context of discussing the "Revolution in Military Affairs" (a proposed reformation of the U.S. armed forces), Boyer writes: "But the last thing the Army was inclined to do while facing cutbacks under the Clinton Administration was tinker with its revered divisional structure, and the Navy was no less inclined to reduce the number of its aircraft-carrier battle groups." I think if you read that sentence carefully, you'll see that he should have said "the Navy was no more inclined..." This is an example of what Language Log calls "overnegation as obfuscation," and the crack editorial staff should have caught it.