Mark Liberman at Language Log has a post discussing political blogs in France. He makes a number of interesting observations; here's the meat of the post:
The first thing that struck me about this phenomenon was that no one is paying any heed to the decision of La Commission générale de terminologie et de néologie at the French Ministry of Culture, back in the spring of 2005, that the proper French word for blog ought to be "bloc-notes" (i.e. "writing tablet"), or "bloc" for those in a hurry. In all the newspapers, as well as in the blogs themselves, the blogs are just "blogs".(See his post for the many links he's attached to those paragraphs.)To an outsider, it seems typique that the French government has an official neologism commission, rostered with an all-star cast of academicians, university presidents and the like, and supported by 18 specialized sub-commissions to do the real work. The neologism commission itself is one of the many activities of the délégation générale à la langue française (DGLF), which "élabore la politique linguistique du Gouvernement en liaison avec les autres départements ministériels" ("elaborates the language policy of the government in liaison with the other ministerial departments"), and acts as an "organe de réflexion, d'évaluation et d'action" (an "organ of reflection, of evaluation and of action")...
The second thing that struck me about these new political weblogs is how small their readership is, by American standards. The blog of Michel Onfray is the most popular of those hosted at Le Nouvel Observateur, (blogs.nouvelobs.com), which an article in Le Monde calls "la plus spectaculaire car la plus massive et la plus prestigieuse" ("the most spectacular because the most massive and the most prestigious"). Onfray's name was featured in large type on special news-kiosk posters everywhere I looked. But according to the article in Le Monde, Onfray gets less than half the traffic that Language Log does, and thus less than 5% of the traffic at Instapundit, and less than 1% of the traffic at Daily Kos.
I'm struck by the same things he is: "bloc-notes"?! Donnez-moi un break. No wonder everybody ignores the commission. And 3,000 visitors a day is massive et prestigieuse? Le tout Paris is a small place.
A Times article by Dalya Alberge discusses the sad state of movie subtitling:
Films are being lost in translation because subtitling is increasingly being done in countries such as India and Malaysia to cut costs.The article has further horrid examples, like a film where the line "Jim is a Vietnam vet" became "Jim is veterinarian from Vietnam." Shame on you, movie industry cheapskates! (And thanks for the link, Pat!)British subtitlers say that the original dialogue in some films is being distorted so badly by bad translations that they do not make sense.
They cite examples such as My Super Ex-Girlfriend, starring Uma Thurman, whose line, “We have a zero-tolerance policy for [sexual harassment]” was translated for Taiwanese audiences as, “We hold the highest standards for sexual harassment”. In The Princess Diaries 2, which stars Ann Hathaway, a reference to Sir David Attenborough during a discussion on insects was subtitled for Chinese speakers as Sherlock Holmes...
Britain’s subtitlers, who are compiling a list of errors, say that their job is not straightforward translation, but involves editing and rephrasing dialogue succinctly and with flair. They say that the domestic industry is in crisis, claiming that film studios are putting pressure on them to accept lower rates of pay or leave the industry altogether.
Still reading Durrell (and now almost done with Balthazar
< Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French, French parc large enclosed area of land or woodland where one keeps and raises animals for the hunt (1160-74), enclosed place planted with fruit trees, orchard (c1220-78), mobile enclosure where one keeps livestock when they sleep in the fields, area thus enclosed (1269), large enclosed area of land or woodland maintained for the decoration of a castle or country house, or for pleasure or recreation, etc. (1337), fortified camp (end of the 15th cent. ...), collection of vehicles which an army makes use of (1823 ...), prob. < post-classical Latin parricus fence (8th cent. in Ripuar. Laws as parracus, but prob. earlier: see below), pen for animals (9th cent.), park, enclosure (12th cent. in a British source; from 13th cent. as parrocus), prob. < an unattested *parra pole, rod (cf. Spanish parra artificially supported vine, Catalan parra (type of) vine, Portuguese parra grapevine leaf; perh. ult. related to the base of Old French barre BAR n.1) + -icus -IC suffix. Cf. post-classical Latin parcus park, enclosure (freq. from 9th cent. in British sources), fence (12th cent. in a British source), pen for animals (freq. from 13th cent. in British sources), Old Occitan, Occitan pargue, parc, Italian parco ..., Spanish parque ..., Portuguese parque ..., German Park (from early 17th cent. in travel writings, after English and French; 15th cent. in Middle High German in sense ‘compound, enclosure’; < French). Cf. PARC n.
Currency of post-classical Latin parricus earlier than the date of its first recorded attestation is suggested by the probable early West Germanic loan represented by PARROCK n., and also by the widespread currency of reflexes in Gallo-Romance dialects and in northern Italy. Most (although not all) recent commentators have regarded it as less likely that the word is a borrowing from Germanic into Latin (as frequently suggested in the past), on account of: (1) the initial p- (which is very rare in Germanic (see P n.), although it might be explained if the word were an earlier borrowing in Germanic from another language and not an inherited Indo-European word; this might also explain the fact that the word is recorded only in West Germanic); (2) the lack of evidence for a corresponding simplex in Germanic (although see PARROCK n. for discussion of PAR n.2 and PAR v.1); (3) the Latin suffix (although it is uncertain whether the vocalism of the last syllable in the continental West Germanic forms rules out the Germanic suffix -OCK suffix); (4) the possibility of Celtic cognates for the Latin word (although it is unclear what, if any, evidence there is to support the forms posited, e.g. Welsh parr enclosed place, Breton par plot of land); and (5) the possible connection with the base of Old French barre BAR n.1 There is thus no completely convincing argument for either a Latin or a Germanic origin. In favour of a Germanic origin, J. Corominas (Diccionario Crítico Etimológico de la Lengua Castellana (1985) s.v. parra) argues that Occitan parran enclosure, garden (a1168) is likely to be a borrowing from Germanic on formal grounds, and hence that the same is likely to apply for the other Romance words.Any other dictionary would replace almost all of that by the statement "There is no convincing argument for either a Latin or a Germanic origin," but the OED lets you peer into the etymologist's workshop and (if you are so inclined) decide for yourself where the probabilities lie.
Welsh parc and Irish páirc are either < English or directly < French; Middle Breton, Breton park is < French.
Yet another Yank/Brit difference I never knew about. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why a cross-bar suspended by ropes for acrobatic purposes was called a trapeze. I went to the OED, which said "Prob. orig. applied to a kind in which the ropes formed a trapezium (in sense 1b) with the roof and cross-bar." So I went to trapezium and found:
1. Geom. a. Any four-sided plane rectilineal figure that is not a parallelogram; any irregular quadrilateral. (The Euclidean sense.)What a mess! The etymology, after explaining that the Greek etymon trapezion is a diminutive of the word for 'table,' trapeza, has a long small-type paragraph that describes the shift in meaning from Euclid's (a above) to Proclus's (b) and then adds:b. spec. A quadrilateral having only one pair of its opposite sides parallel. (The specific sense to which the term was restricted by Proclus.)
The specific sense in Eng. in 17th and 18th c., and again the prevalent one in recent use.c. An irregular quadrilateral having neither pair of opposite sides parallel. (The usual sense in England from c1800 to c1875. Now rare. This sense is the one that is standard in the U.S., but in practice quadrilateral is used rather than trapezium.)
This is the trapezoid (τραπεζοειδές) of Proclus: see TRAPEZOID A. 1a.
This nomenclature is retained in all the continental languages, and was universal in England till late in the 18th century, when the application of the terms was transposed, so that the figure which Proclus and modern geometers of other nations call specifically a trapezium (F. trapèze, Ger. trapez, Du. trapezium, It. trapezio) became with most English writers a trapezoid, and the trapezoid of Proclus and other nations a trapezium. This changed sense of trapezoid is given in Hutton's Mathematical Dictionary, 1795, as ‘sometimes’ used—he does not say by whom; but he himself unfortunately adopted and used it, and his Dictionary was doubtless the chief agent in its diffusion. Some geometers however continued to use the terms in their original senses, and since c 1875 this is the prevalent use.I'd sure like to know what Hutton was up to. Was he mischievous, or just dyslexic? The only saving grace is that we don't have much occasion to talk about trapezoids and trapezia, so not too much confusion results. Still, what a mess.
A couple of years ago I posted about the well-worn cliche that "crisis" in Chinese is "danger + opportunity." At that time I had no timeline for the use of the trope, but Language Log has been on the case for some time, and recently Ben Zimmer traced it back to a 1959 speech by John F. Kennedy. Now (through clever tweaking of GoogleBooks) he's found it in the January 1938 issue of the Chinese Recorder, a journal for missionaries in China, and made the plausible suggestion that its wider spread was due to a 1940 Washington Post column by Dorothy Thompson. It's a fine job of research, and it includes some interesting discussion of the extent to which the analysis of the Chinese character can be considered mistaken (discussion to some extent anticipated in the comment thread to my 2005 post, linked above).
Note to Google: Please do something about the stupid "snippet view" Ben complains about, which has been frustrating me as well lately.
The Times (U.K.) has a nice obit for Mordkhe (Mordecai) Schaechter, "indefatigable and prolific champion and scholar of the Yiddish language":
Mordechai Schaechter, known by his own wish as Mordkhe, spent a passionate lifetime seeking to resuscitate the Yiddish language of Central European Jewry into a daily means of communication....Alevasholem. (Thanks for the link, Paul.)When Schaechter began his relentless crusade, the market for Yiddish had shrunk to academia. And there he played a key role in cementing a language that had for centuries been dismissed as no more than a folk dialect, into a subject worthy of academic status on the same level as any other language, be it English, Russian, Arabic or Chinese.
For 12 years until his retirement at the age of 66, he was senior lecturer in Yiddish studies at Columbia University. He taught the language into his seventies at Yeshiva University in New York, at the prestigious Jewish Theological Seminary in that city and at a joint programme run by Columbia and the Yivo Institute for Jewish research in New York; and his academic writings remain on the compulsory reading list of every university Yiddish course...
Apart from Yiddish, Schaechter was fluent in English and German, and had a working knowledge of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Hebrew.
The New York Times also ran an obit, with a sadly typical error involving language for which they had to append a correction: "An obituary on Feb. 16 about Mordkhe Schaechter, a leading Yiddish linguist, misidentified the language in which his doctoral dissertation was written. It was German — not Yiddish, which was the subject of the dissertation."
Bulbul's latest post is about shibboleths he's "recently encountered in works of fiction" (and may I point out, enviously, that this Slovak who blogs in excellent English reads novels in Dutch and Polish, and I'll bet several other languages as well, without batting an eye). The first, from Paul Verhoeven's Soldaat van Oranje, involves two guys (dressed in tuxedos) trying to get into the Netherlands to help fight the Germans in 1940; suspicious border guards make them say Scheveningen [sxe:vənɪŋə] to prove they're Dutch. The second, from Andrzej Sapkowski's Narrenturm, has the Silesian protagonist having to prove his Polishness by saying soczewica, koło, miele, młyn [sot͡ʂeviʦa, kowo, miele, mwɨn], apparently a traditional shibboleth; he retaliates by telling the ferryman to say stół z powyłamywanymi nogami [stuw s povɨwamɨvanɨmi nogami], a Polish tongue twister. Fun stuff, and you'll want to read bulbul's explications and additions.
Unrelated, but in case anyone in interested in the acoustics of the theater at Epidaurus (I was there, and you really can hear a whisper from the stage in the back row), Nature has an interesting article on the subject (via Anggarrgoon).
Conrad has a new post up about an ancient mystery which, if I was ever aware of it, I had forgotten:
In the pronaos (vestibule) of the ancient Oracle of Delphi, so it is said, were three inscriptions on the walls. The first of these, and the most famous, read Gnothi seauton—'Know thyself'—while the second read Meden agan—'Nothing in excess'. The third was merely the letter E: a capital epsilon. Plutarch's essay on the meaning of the E, in which various thinkers propose different explanations, is our only literary source for the object. Not much is clear about the E...Conrad goes on to summarize the various explanations that have been given, by Plutarch (his Plutarch link does not work for me, but here's one that does) as well as by later scholars: a misunderstood Minoan symbol? a ΓE (ge 'earth') from which "the Γ fell off the wall"? He concludes that "The constant in these explanations, and others, is that the E was once a communicating sign, but then ceased to be. It became rather a fetish, something left over from before and venerated out of context. It acquired new meaning as a sign purely because the old meaning was no longer there..." and promises to return to "this notion of the remnant object," a return which I anticipate with pleasure.
Great Scott! Back in mid-2005 I posted about the British comedy show A Bit of Fry and Laurie, but missed the perfect sketch for LH. Nothing wrong with "Gordon and Stuart eat Greek," mind you, but Language Conversation is... well, let me quote the final exchange:
Stephen: Imagine a piano keyboard, eighty-eight keys,As enjoyable as it is to read, it's a thousand times better to see and hear (just seeing Fry trying desperately not to burst out laughing is worth the price of admission); fortunately, in the age of YouTube, you can do just that, either here or at the post from Lemuel Kolkava's non-nihilist "blog about nothing" Deleted by Tomorrow, where I discovered it.
only eighty-eight and yet, and yet, new tunes,
melodies, harmonies are being composed upon
hundreds of keyboards every day in Dorset alone.
Our language, Tiger, our language, hundreds
of thousands of available words, frillions of
possible legitimate new ideas, so that I can
say this sentence and be confident it has never
been uttered before in the history of human
communication: "Hold the newsreader's nose
squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand
my trousers." One sentence, common words, but
never before placed in that order. And yet, oh
and yet, all of us spend our days saying the same
things to each other, time after weary time, living
by clichaic, learned response: "I love you", "Don't
go in there", "You have no right to say that", "shut
up", "I'm hungry", "that hurt", "why should I?", "it's
not my fault", "help", "Marjorie is dead". You see?
That surely is a thought to take out for a cream
tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.Hugh looks at camera, opens mouth as if to speak,
decides against it. Speaks to Stephen instead.Hugh: So to you language is more than just a means of
communication?Stephen: Er, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is.
Language is a whore, a mistress, a wife, a pen-
friend, a check-out girl, a complimentary moist
lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-
up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the
dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust
that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you
pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of
erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine
on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered
childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a
spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm
wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk
of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite
boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of
a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun
by an old Wellington boot.
I'm rereading Lawrence Durrell's Justine
'Damn the word', said Justine once, 'I would like to spell it backwards as you say the Elizabethans did God. Call it evol and make it a part of "evolution" or "revolt". Never use the word to me.'I suppose most people just accept it without thinking about the linguistic situation, but I always get stuck on these things. None of that makes any sense in French. I see this sort of thing in movies a lot, where the characters make jokes or puns in English when they're supposed to be Germans or Russians, but somehow it seems worse in a book. Couldn't he have had her say "Damn the word amour, it always makes me think of mort," or something?
Scott Carney, a journalist living in Chennai (Madras), has an amazing post about "one small ink-stained corner of Chennai where the world's last hand written newspaper still churns out 20,000 broad sheets a day":
I was walking through Tripplicane late last week looking for someone who might be able to teach me the Urdu script when a local fakir led me into a small gully off a main road and introduced me to Syed Fazlulla who has edited "The Musalman" for the last 18 years.There are pictures of the editor, the press ("The off-set printing press is an artifact of the 1920s and has been in continuous operation since the paper's inception"), and the finished product; it all makes me wish I read Urdu so that I could fully enjoy this glorious anachronism. (Thanks go to Dinesh Rao for the link.)The newspaper employs three full-time calligraphers who painstakingly handwrite and manually typeset the paper the same way they have since 1927. Fazlulla says that they have never switched to computers because he wants to keep the art of calligraphy alive in the secular world. The news room only has three computers—none of which are used for editing or typesetting, and for all intents and purposes are little more than e-mail terminals for the one computer-savvy employee.
Every once in a while I realize I've been unconscionably neglecting that portion of the mission of this blog that relates to headgear; fortunately, what brings me to realize this is usually running across links that will remedy the situation, and such is the case today. From the cuniculous warrens of MetaChat, I bring you From bunny to brow: a step by step guide to how we make fur hats (from the fine folks at Akubra), as well as a collection of old hat ads; the latter includes a fine visualization of the "bunny to brow" concept.
I was going through a pile of stuff from my distant past, and I came across an errata slip I seem to have acquired in the late '70s. There's no indication of the book it came from, and most of the half-dozen items are perfectly normal typos (p. 129, line 1, read "Gongbo" for "Gangbo"). But the first and last items are:
p. 57, line 14, read "pornographic" for "pomographic";That's what's wrong these days: too much pomographic illiterature!
Back cover, line 3, read "literature" for "illiterature".
Michael Montgomery, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina, who edited the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English
I've mentioned Archipelago magazine before, but that was just to highlight a single item, and besides, it was several years ago. Now that they've got their final (and 10th Anniversary) issue online, it's time to feature them again. There's poetry and fiction and autobiography and criticism (Laurie Calhoun's The Irrevocable Consequences of Cruelty, about Elia Kazan’s Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Milos Forman’s Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and an essay by Jeffrey H. Matsuura on Thomas Jefferson and Intellectual Property Law and Helena Cobban's Amnesty After Atrocity? (which "examines the effectiveness of different ways of dealing with the aftermath of genocide and violence committed during deep intergroup conflicts") and other things as well—they cast their net wide; the ones that particularly appealed to me were Tracy Robinson's amazing story Open Your Eyes, Red! (I don't even care what a story's about when its language is this vivid: "There was a short, lean, bald son of a whore, born in a trailer near a dirt road in Sooke. Son of a welder whom his mother said was the WBA Welterweight Champion of the world. Through public school he showed alacrity, above-average intelligence, mild dyslexia, and a type of AD/HD, only the teachers gossiped that he was a snoopy, fidgety, slow little bastard who might fell trees if there were any left and if he didn’t wind up dead of some foolish stunt, or in jail...") and Kevin McFadden's group of poems titled Anticism!, from which I regretfully choose only "Loan, Glasgow" to present here:
Where I first learned to say things, Ohio, my accent(Via wood s lot.)
was the local legal tender: good in Edinburg
as Dublin or London. Then came Glasgow (proper).
One year abroad in broad Glaswegian, the notes
brought from home bouncing everywhere, overdrawn.
Want a wild time? In Glasgow time was tame.
See the town? You had to hear the tune. New loans,
including my name; I began saying Cave-in
if I wanted the right introduction in a pub. The road
was rude, the power sometimes poor. My voice
skim milk in that butterchurn of gutturals, Scots vowels
clotted and spread like cream, I learned to hear
everything twice and nothing the same. Glasgow
still hasn’t left me alone: it’s left me a lane.
1) Chinese Village Struggles to Save Dying Language by David Lague (NY Times, March 18, 2007) discusses the imminent demise of the Manchu language, a situation of which I was not aware. A century ago the Manchu ruled China, and all Imperial documents were drafted in both Manchu and Chinese; now only a few aging villagers remain. A sad story. (Don't miss the video clip, which has a couple of minutes of conversation and a lullaby, all subtitled.)
2) Philistines, but Less and Less Philistine by John Noble Wilford (NY Times, March 13, 2007) describes archeological discoveries about the Philistines and says that "not only were Philistines cultured, they were also literate when they arrived, presumably from the region of the Aegean Sea, and settled the coast of ancient Palestine around 1200 B. C."
The discovery is reported in the current issue of The Israel Exploration Journal by two Harvard professors, Frank Moore Cross Jr. and Lawrence E. Stager. Dr. Cross is an authority on ancient Middle Eastern languages and scripts. Dr. Stager, an archaeologist, is director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, a Harvard project.I'd be curious to know what the evidence is for this non-Semitic language, if anybody's familiar with their work.In the report, the two researchers said the inscriptions “reveal, for the first time, convincing evidence that the early Philistines of Ashkelon were able to read and write in a non-Semitic language, as yet undeciphered.”
HeiDeas is having its second anniversary, and hh is celebrating with her Third Annual Simpsons St. Patrick's Day Linguistic Round Up. One of my favorites, from Principal Charming (1991):
Bart has written his name in 40-foot high letters of dead grass on the school field, in sodium tetrachloride. Skinner is outraged. He says, "The sheer contempt demonstrated by this incident makes me wish I could pull the trusty board of education out of retirement." His gaze falls wistfully upon a paddle in a case behind glass.(Category: pun.)
While googling around in a (fruitless) effort to find any information about Jarrold Baedeker, the putative author of so many latter-day "Baedekers" (the mystery was solved by the primitive expedient of consulting an actual copy of a guide, which informed me that the original German edition was copyright Baedeker, the English-language one copyright Jarrold and Sons Ltd), I discovered a history (pdf; HTML link, without photos) by Edward Mendelson (originally published in the Yale Review of Books) of Karl Baedeker and the firm he founded; it was of great interest to me as a frequent user of old Baedeker guides (and a proud owner of the 1905 edition of the Austria-Hungary
Under Fritz Baedeker’s direction, the handbooks’ prose grew more efficient and compressed, and by far the most striking element of the new style was a device that deserves to be recognized in handbooks of rhetoric as “the Baedeker parenthesis.” One of its many functions was to juxtapose, without irony, the poetical and the practical. The best example of a Baedeker parenthesis was written not by Baedeker but by E. M. Forster in imitation of Baedeker. In Where Angels Fear to Tread, while Mrs. Herriton “was not one to detect the hidden charms of Baedeker... Philip could never read ‘The view from the Rocca (small gratuity) is finest at sunset’ without a catching at the heart.” Philip might have been overcome had he read these sentences about the Frankenburg, near Aix, in the 1878 edition of The Rhine:The essay continues with an anecdote about legal troubles caused the firm by one such parenthesis which (to borrow a standard phrase from a rival guidebook) vaut le détour. (And yes, that Rhine quote says "his lust consort"—a most unfortunate, or fortunate if you prefer, typo.)The pond surrounding the castle was once a large lake, in which, according to tradition, was sunk the magic ring of Fastrada (p. 130), the last wife of Charlemagne. Attracted to this spot by its influence, the monarch is said to have sat here for days, gazing on the lake, and mourning for his lust consort. - (As far as the Gillesbach, near the Frankenburg, ordinary cabfare is charged.)Baedeker used the parenthesis most often as a rapid indicator of the quality of hotels and restaurants, as in these descriptions of small towns chosen at random from the 1896 Southern Italy: “Pescara (Alb. Rebecchino, near the station, with trattoria, clean; Railway Restaurant, mediocre), a fortified town with 5000 inhab., is situated in an unhealthy plain”; or “Sala Consilina (Alb. Morino, dirty; cab to the town, 50 c.), the seat of a sub-prefect, picturesquely situated on a slope, overlooked by a medieval castle and the wooded summits of the Monte Cavallo.” It was this sort of economy and precision that Bertrand Russell had in mind when he identified Baedeker as one of the two major influences on his prose style. (The other was Milton.)
Roberto Ugoccioni's Kalendae program converts between modern and Roman dates. I learned about it at Bill Poser's Language Log post, where you will also find a discussion of whether Caesar said "Et tu, Brute" or "καὶ σὺ τέκνον" to his old friend Brutus, who was in the process of murdering him, as well as an appeal to social historians to help him (Poser, that is, not Caesar) decide on the extent to which upper-class Romans routinely spoke Greek with each other, a question about which I too am curious.
It has long been a fixture of my mental furnishings that the longest entry in the OED was for the verb set. I don't know how many times I've trotted out this bit of trivia, but I'll have to try not to do it any more, because I learn from the Revisions page of the OED newsletter that it is no longer true, and has not been for some years: "For many years the verb to set has been cited as the longest entry in the OED. But a recheck shows that it has at last been toppled from this position. The longest entry in the revised matter is represented by the verb to make (published in June 2000)." However, they reassure me that "it is quite possible that set will regain its long-held position at the top of the league of long words when it comes itself to be revised." If you're curious, and I know you are, "the longest entries currently in the online Third Edition of the OED are: make (verb - revised), set (verb), run (verb), take (verb), go (verb), pre- (revised), non- (revised), over- (revised), stand (verb), red, and then point (the noun - revised)."
Last month, the proprietor of the excellent language blog bulbulovo began (part 1, part 2) a series of posts about the Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka (SSSJ), "the first comprehensive (a.k.a. 'large-sized') dictionary of the Slovak language ever," whose first volume has just been published. His latest post, though labeled as part of the SSSJ series, is actually a long and fascinating analysis of the history and current state of Standard Slovak, and what that phrase (and the Slovak sort-of-equivalent spisovná slovenčina) can be taken to mean. I'm going to resist the temptation to excerpt huge hunks of it, and just quote a bit dealing with the issue of prescriptivism:
You see, although the long war is finally over and we are finally independent (whatever that's worth), some linguists still fight for the purity of Slovak not so much for linguistic reasons, but for political ones: borrowings from Czech are therefore shunned altogether, because /insert_history_lesson_here/. Latin roots and words, on the other hand, are OK even if we have perfectly good native words to use in their stead, because Latin does not carry any negative political connotations and is generally considered cool (see Geoffrey Pullum's "Classicism"). Those same linguists fail to understand that, to use a metaphor, Slovak is no longer a proprietary project. It's been open-sourced for at least 60 years. It's a child that has grown up long ago and no longer needs protection. And yet, some still insist it wear a coat when going outside even in May and some others even try to forbid it to stay out after 10pm and date that cute tall kid that just moved in next door. People like that suffer from a dangerous delusion: they believe they can actually control a living thing like a language (and, for that matter, its speakers). To them, codification is not a completed process, but something they can repeat over and over again. Moreover, they detest any behavior they do not approve of and either try to pretend it does not exist, or, worse, claim that any action (words or phrases or usage) not conforming to their expectations is an aberration and should be swiftly and decidedly suppressed. And what's worse, some people actually buy all of that crap...I hope this whets your appetite for the whole thing; it's the best and most impassioned discussion of the concept of "correctness" in language and what's wrong with it that I've read in a long time.[After quoting an absurd statement by professor Ábel Kráľ:] In other words, to hell with the speakers and their silly ideas of communication effectiveness and intelligibility! Who the hell do they think they are? Who died and made them the custodians of Slovak? Screw them, we have a system to maintain! They will eat what we cook and serve them and they will LIKE IT!
My friends, seldom have I heard a more fitting description of prescriptivism and no one has ever summed up the attitude of certain Slovak linguists to their language and her speakers better than this.
Linguarium aims at the creation of an "on-line version of the first comprehensive Atlas+Catalogue for all world's languages in Russian," comparable to Ethnologue. The site is bilingual in English and Russian, with links to various pages, of which one of the most interesting to me is Language maps and map-making. The site is run by Yuri Koryakov, who is also trying to "[get] linguists organized to fill in the many gaps in linguistics coverage in the Russian-language wikipedia, both in biographies of linguists and in content articles," according to Mark Liberman's Language Log post (from which I got to the Linguarium project). I wish him the best in both endeavors!
A Vancouver Sun story by Karenn Krangle discusses a worthwhile lexicographical project:
The rewriting of Canada's historical dictionary begins not with the letter A but with C. For Canuck.The new edition has a website here. Thanks for the news link, Marja-Leena!That quintessentially Canadian term, which defines us, makes fun of us, sometimes brings joy to sports fans and has a history older than Confederation, is a starting point for lexicographer Stefan Dollinger, who hopes Canadians will get to know their language a little better.
Dollinger leads a University of B.C. project to revise the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, which lists 10,000 words of significance to Canada, each with its own history.
The 927-page, one-volume dictionary was published in 1967 out of the University of Victoria and hadn't been updated. But with 40 years of explosive technological change, economic growth and significant shifts in the population, the dictionary has become outdated....
As mentioned in the thread that wouldn't die (where even as we speak le Cimentier Martien is leading a dubious group of revelers in some sort of catered affair), I am reading Proust to my wife in the evenings, and we recently hit the following in our passage through Mme. Swann's house (also frequently the scene of dubious gatherings):
But at the same time, to these animated dresses the complication of their trimmings, none of which had any practical utility or served any visible purpose, added something detached, pensive, secret, in harmony with the melancholy which Mme Swann still retained, at least in the shadows under her eyes and the drooping arches of her hands. Beneath the profusion of sapphire charms, enamelled four-leaf clovers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, ruby chains and topaz chestnuts there would be on the dress itself some design carried out in colour which pursued across the surface of an inserted panel a preconceived existence of its own, some row of little satin buttons which buttoned nothing and could not be unbuttoned, a strip of braid that sought to please the eye with the minuteness, the discretion of a delicate reminder; and these, as well as the jewels, gave the impression—having otherwise no possible justification—of disclosing a secret intention, being a pledge of affection, keeping a secret, ministering to a superstition, commemorating a recovery from sickness, a granted wish, a love affair or a philopena.(It says something about Proust that that is the minimum amount of context needed to understand how he was using the last word. The original French is in the extended entry.) We had no idea what philopena might mean; fortunately, I keep the Cassell Concise Dictionary
by the bed, so I was able to learn at once that it was "a game in which two people share the double kernel of a nut, the first being entitled to a forfeit, under certain conditions, on the next meeting with the other sharer; the kernel so shared; the forfeit." The etymology given was "corr[uption] of G[erman] Vielliebchen, dim[inutive] of viellieb (viel, much, lieb dear)." The next day, I checked with the OED and discovered both the sense and the etymology were more complicated:[Immediate origin unknown. Cf. French philippine (1869 in the phrase Bonjour, Philippine! (see note below), 1898 denoting the game, c1900 denoting an almond or nut with a double kernel), Dutch filippien (1883 or earlier denoting the game; also in sense ‘nut with a double kernel’; now usu. filippine), Danish filippine (1851 as philipine denoting the game, a1883 in sense ‘nut with a double kernel’; also as philippine (1868-73 or earlier)), Swedish filipin (1881 denoting the game, 1920 in sense ‘almond or nut with a double kernel’), and German Vielliebchen (1822 denoting the game, also denoting an almond or nut with a double kernel; also as Filipchen, Philippinchen (now regional; cf. German regional (Rhineland) Filipche, Filipke, Philippche, etc., (Luxemburg) Philippchen)). The relationship between these words is unclear (see note). Later forms in -paene, -pena, -poena app. show folk-etymological alteration after PHILO- comb. form and POENA n. or its etymon classical Latin poena.Now, that's some hardcore etymology. A rather prim look at the game is displayed in a century-old Sears Roebuck catalog (quoted in David Lewis Cohn's The Good Old Days
Both the French and German words app. represent folk-etymological alterations, but it is unclear whether the French word was borrowed from the German or vice versa. Luxemburger Wörterbuch (1950) I. 370, s.v. Philippchen, suggests that the German word is ult. < VALENTINE n., via French valentin or its corresponding feminine valentine, which was altered to philippine and thence borrowed into Mosel Franconian dialects of German, and etymological dictionaries of French and German have largely accepted this view. However, there are serious difficulties: the motive for folk-etymological alteration within French is unknown (and without folk-etymological influence, the development of French valentin or valentine into philippine is impossible), and only the sense ‘sweetheart’ or ‘suitor’, not ‘Valentine's Day present’, appears to be recorded for valentin and valentine in French.
The traditional greeting in the German game (see sense 1) is Guten Morgen, Vielliebchen!; in the French game it is Bon jour, Philippine!]1. A game or custom, originating in Germany, in which a gift or forfeit may be claimed by the first of two people who have shared a nut with two kernels to say ‘philopena’ at their next meeting; an occasion on which this is done; a gift or forfeit claimed in this way. Also: a nut with a double kernel, or a kernel from such a nut.
: History of American Morals and Manners as Seen through the Sears Roebuck Catalogs), which says:Another and highly reprehensible way of extorting a gift is to have what is called a philopena with a gentleman. This very silly joke is when a young lady, in cracking almonds, chances to find two kernels in one shell; she shares them with a beau; and whichever calls out 'philopena' on their next meeting, is entitled to receive a present from the other; and she is to remind him of it till he remembers to comply. . . .And Frank R. Stockton's story "The Philopena" begins by describing a particularly drastic forfeit:There is a great want of delicacy and self-respect in philopenaism, and no lady who has a proper sense of her dignity as a lady will engage in anything of the sort.
There were once a Prince and a Princess who, when quite young, ate a philopena together. They agreed that the one who, at any hour after sunrise the next day, should accept any thing from the other—the giver at the same time saying "Philopena!"—should be the loser, and that the loser should marry the other.
The original Proust quote:
Mais en même temps à ces robes si vives, la complication des «garnitures» sans utilité pratique, sans raison d'être visible, ajoutait quelque chose de désintéressé, de pensif, de secret, qui s'accordait à la mélancolie que Mme Swann gardait toujours au moins dans la cernure de ses yeux et les phalanges de ses mains. Sous la profusion des porte-bonheur en saphir, des trèfles à quatre feuilles d'émail, des médailles d'argent, des médaillons d'or, des amulettes de turquoise, des chaînettes de rubis, des châtaignes de topaze, il y avait dans la robe elle-même tel dessin colorié poursuivant sur un empiècement rapporté son existence antérieure, telle rangée de petits boutons de satin qui ne boutonnaient rien et ne pouvaient pas se déboutonner, une soutache cherchant à faire plaisir avec la minutie, la discrétion d'un rappel délicat, lesquels, tout autant que les bijoux, avaient l'air — n'ayant sans cela aucune justification possible — de déceler une intention, d'être un gage de tendresse, de retenir une confidence, de répondre à une superstition, de garder le souvenir d'une guérison, d'un vu, d'un amour ou d'une philippine.
From Far Outliers, a news report on the establishment of a Kanak language academy:
NOUMEA, February 27 (Oceania Flash) - New Caledonia's government has officially appointed late last week its Vice-President, Déwé Gorodey, to the position of Chairman of the newly-created indigenous Kanak language academy.It's nice to see such recognition for indigenous languages, though I hope the Academy doesn't emulate the French version.The cabinet decision follows the inception, late January, by New Caledonia's legislative assembly, the Congress, of the French territory's first indigenous Kanak languages Academy.
The main aim of the Kanak languages Academy is to preserve New Caledonia's rich cultural indigenous heritage of up to 40 indigenous known languages and dialects...
A couple of successive posts at the always worthwhile Jabal al-Lughat ['mountain of languages'] make for an interesting contrast. Arabic threatened in Qatar? says "an educationalist is warning that Arabic is threatened in Qatar":
Qatari children's exposure to English often begins soon after birth, with the hiring of a nanny who is unlikely to speak much if any Arabic, and certain not to speak the Gulf dialect... It continues at school, where about two-thirds of their fellow students are non-Qatari...; English is a mandatory subject from first grade up, and the many American universities opening campuses in Qatar are commonly English-medium (for instance, CMU.) In short, it's easy to lead a fairly full life in Qatar with little Arabic, and easy to envision Qatari kids of this generation acquiring English natively.Then Destroying Harsusi quotes a call from Al Watan to eradicate "one of the more endangered South Arabian languages," Harsusi, in favor of "correct Arabic."However, apart from other issues like not giving any statistics or details, the article suffers from the common conflation of classical and colloquial Arabic. "In addition, parents would rather talk to their children in the dialect of their country of origin rather than in classical Arabic, a factor which is also contributing to a general decline in the understanding of the classical language" - as if parents have ever talked to their children in classical Arabic for the past millennium, or as if it were desirable that the children should grow up not speaking their own dialects!
Scott Esposito, a writer and editor, runs a fine online journal called The Quarterly Conversation. There are a lot of internet sites that discuss books, but I don't know of any that has such consistently interesting and readable essays. Yes, readable, no matter how long they are (and some of them are quite long); Esposito is clearly not of the school that believes intelligible discourse is a capitalist/colonialist plot and must be subverted out the wazoo to achieve ideological respectability. On the front page at the moment are links to, among other things, an interview with Zak Smith, the guy who made a pen-and-ink drawing for every page of Gravity's Rainbow; an essay by Elizabeth Wadell on rereading Catch-22; and a review by Scott Bryan Wilson of Amulet, the translation of a novel by Roberto Bolaño, whom I had never heard of but now want to read:
Bolaño's voice is more distinct here, more undeniably and specifically Bolaño. Whether this is due to my having read four of his books in a short period of time, and finally "hearing" Bolaño's voice, or because translator Chris Andrews is becoming more and more comfortable with Bolaño's prose (and hearing the author's voice in a different way), or because it's just a wonderful book I can't say. But, as with any great work of literature, Amulet continues to haunt, puzzle, and nag at me.Indeed, much of the material on the site makes me want to go read something, which is what such a journal should aim for (rather than showing off the critical chops of the reviewers: "I've read Derrida and now I'm going to make you suffer for it"). I'm not sure what the doubled letters in the "Suggested Reads" list are about (Boldttyype, BookkFForum, TThhe Guardian Book Review, The Neeww York Review of Books, The NNew Yorker, The Raaiin Taxi Review of Books...), but what the hell, they've earned their eccentricities. A tip o' the hat, as so often, to wood s lot.
1) From xkcd ("The blag of the webcomic"), Washington’s Farewell Address Translated into Everyday Speech:
I’ve often heard that Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’ — the speech he sent out (in written form) to a bunch of papers at the end of his second term — is important... Having never read the whole thing, I thought it would be interesting to go through and try to transcribe it into some sort of casual modern speech. I wouldn’t try to recreate the prose and would probably miss out on subtleties and shades of meaning (and no doubt occasionally miss the point completely), but at least I’d get the idea of what he was talking about.It's perhaps a little more casual than it needed to be ("Sup" is not a promising beginning), but on the whole it's a good read, and let's face it, the original can be a slog. (Via Mark Liberman's Language Log post.)
2) The Climatological Database for the World's Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) has put out the CLIWOC multilingual meteorological dictionary, An English-Spanish-Dutch-French dictionary of wind force terms used by mariners from 1750-1850 (abstract; here's the pdf file of the whole book):
This dictionary is the first attempt to express the wealth of archaic logbook wind force terms in a form that is comprehensible to the modern-day reader. Oliver and Kington (1970) and Lamb (1982) have drawn attention to the importance of logbooks in climatic studies, and Lamb (1991) offered a conversion scale for early eighteenth century English wind force terms, but no studies have thus far pursued the matter to any greater depth. This text attempts to make good this deficiency, and is derived from the research undertaken by the CLIWOC project1 in which British, Dutch, French and Spanish naval and merchant logbooks from the period 1750 to 1850 were used to derive a global database of climatic information.It's one of those insanely specific projects that warms my heart even if I'll never have any actual use for it, and I love the first entry in the English section: "baffling airs" (which "refers to winds of changeable direction"). (Thanks, Charles!)
3. Nizo's Blog is "The musings of a Palestinian living in Montréal" who writes entries in English, Arabic, French, German, and Hebrew. I'm awed; I can read a number of languages, but I'd never dare blog in anything but English. I particularly call your attention to his entry "Naughty Grandma Expressions," which describes how he infuriated his grandmother by inadvertently sitting on "un-baked manakeesh, pizza-like pastries topped with olive oil, zaatar, cheese, peppers," eliciting an angry "koom! koss immak!" [Get up! your mother's vagina!], and ends with a list of the "colorful and uncouth" idioms he's heard from his grandparents over the years, such as:
"As (small as) a scorpion's vagina" Ad Koss el Akrabeh(Thanks, Kobi!)
Used when complaining about a tight space such as a small room.
Illustration: "Get out of my kitchen; can't you see it's as small as a scorpion's vagina?"
"The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers." From the About page:
The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers...They include "a phonetic transcription of the sample, a set of the speaker's phonological generalizations, a link to a map showing the speaker's place of birth, and a link to the Ethnologue language database," as well as a set of native language phonetic inventories. The archive is a project of the Program in Linguistics, the Technology across the Curriculum Program, and the Center for History and New Media of George Mason University. (Thanks for the heads-up, Bonnie!)All of the linguistic analyses of the accents are available for public scrutiny. We welcome comments on the accuracy of our transcriptions and analyses.
Addendum. KanTalk, a "space to practice spoken English or any other languages," has a collection of recordings (currently 248) of the "Please call Stella" paragraph read by people from all sorts of linguistic backgrounds; you can record your own version if you like.
The Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative is located in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University; it's a treasure trove of texts, recordings, and who knows what all. The first dip I took into it got me an article by H.B. Paksoy on "Literature in Central Asia"; the main archives include 73 volumes of oral narratives, and there's a music section as well. I look forward to exploring it further. (Via wood s lot.)
My wife and I often do crossword puzzles in the evening, and recently we ran across the clue "chuddar." We thought it might be a misprint, but I looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary (which happened to be handiest), and there it was:
chuddar (chŭd'ər) 1. A chador. 2. A cotton shawl traditionally worn in India by men and women. [Urdu chaddar, cloth, from Sanskrit chattram, screen, parasol, from chadati, he covers, protects.]
There are several problems here. To dispose of the minor ones: it seems arbitrary to call chaddar "Urdu" when it is common Hindustani (the OED, equally arbitrarily, calls it "Hindi"), and there is no Sanskrit verb "chadati" except in dictionaries—the present tense of the root chad- 'cover' is chādayati. With that out of the way, my main concern is the relations between (or, if you prefer, among) this Hindi/Urdu word, the alleged Sanskrit etymon, and the Persian word چادر chādor 'chador.' (Another complicating factor is that Steingass's Persian-English Dictionary has an entry chaddar 'A sheet; a table-cloth; a veil' which I assume is borrowed from Urdu—it is not in any of my Persian dictionaries—and Platt's Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English has ćādar 'A sheet; a table-cloth; a covering; [etc.],' but that is marked as a borrowing from Persian.)
It seems extremely unlikely that chādor and chaddar are unrelated, but it also seems unlikely that one is directly derived from the other, or that the Persian word is from Sanskrit. The Platts entry for chaddar marks it with "H" for Hindi but adds "(P[ersian] ćādar, ćadar; prob. akin to S[anskrit] छद्)," which seems to hedge all bets, and the Steingass entry for chādar (sic; modern dictionaries give chādor) gives no indication that it is anything but native Persian. The OED's etymology for chuddar says simply "Hindi chadar a square piece of cloth," with no attempt at deriving the Hindi word from Sanskrit or anything else. Vasmer's entry for the Russian word чадра [chadra] 'veil' says it's borrowed from Turkic and suggests that we compare шатер [shatyor] 'tent,' which he says is an ancient borrowing from Turkic, adding "Первоисточником является перс. čаtr 'заслон, палатка', др.-инд. chattram 'заслон' [the original source is Pers. čаtr 'screen, tent', Skt. chattram 'screen']," muddying the waters even further. If anybody has any information that would help in clearing up this etymological morass, please share it.
Yesterday's post was on the jokey side, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it elicited a lot of "pet peeve" comments; people do love to complain about language use. As Mark Liberman points out in that Language Log post I just linked, "millions of people are intensely interested in speech and language, but have no outlet for their interest except for prescriptivist complaints, and no model for linguistic analysis other than the display of invented 'rules' by popular language mavens." I'm going to get more serious for a moment, and explain what I think is wrong with those complaints, and why I'm trying to get past my own versions of them to the extent I can.
It seems to me there are two basic reasons for the loud griping against misspelling, "bad grammar," and the like. One is that the gripers have expended a great deal of time and effort in learning the "rules," and they are (not unreasonably) proud of having done so; furthermore, such mastery is of considerable value in getting ahead in the world—and, of course, to admit that the "rules" frequently are unnecessary or wrong would be to devalue their own education. The pride is natural and, up to a point, harmless; the problem comes when it spills over into a contempt for those who have not mastered the rules, which brings us to the second, less attractive, reason: the need to feel superior, to set oneself apart from the "lesser breeds without the Law." I can be wrily amused when people simply gripe about the evils of misused apostrophes, but I can't take it lightly when they go on to say (as they frequently do) "I would never date/befriend/hire anyone who said/wrote [insert pet peeve here]." This is blatant elitism, exactly parallel to Victorians who sniffed "not our sort, dear" of anyone who wore the wrong sort of coat to dinner or spoke with too much enthusiasm or the hint of an accent. And of course it carries with it the perpetual fear of going wrong oneself; when, as so frequently happens, someone commits a faux pas in the very act of mocking another's "error" and has it pointed out to them, the facade of superiority collapses and the mocker becomes abjectly apologetic—not for mocking, of course, but for having failed to clear the high bar of utter perfection of speech and writing.
The claim, of course, is that it is not simple elitism at work, that "bad grammar" reveals incoherent thought, impedes communication, and degrades the language. All of this is nonsense. I have never had the slightest problem understanding someone who split infinitives, used "hopefully" as a sentence modifier, or perpetrated any of the million other alleged crimes against English that fill the books (and the wallets) of the language mavens, and I don't believe the gripers have either. When I have had problems understanding pieces of writing, and have had to go back and reread to figure out what is being said, it's because the writers have expressed themselves badly in standard English. There is such a thing as bad writing, but it has nothing to do with split infinitives. And there is such a thing as a grammatical mistake, but such mistakes are made by children or foreigners who have not fully mastered the language. "That man bad" is bad (Standard) English; "to boldly go" is not only good English, it's good writing (as proved by the fact that the Star Trek motto is instantly memorized by everyone who hears it).
As for degrading the language, it should suffice to reflect on the fact that a universally acknowledged high point in the written history of English was the period of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, at which time there was no such thing as spelling and grammar (in the maven sense). People slung words around as the spirit moved them, inventing them, jamming them together in unheard-of ways, verbing nouns and nouning verbs with enthusiasm, and generally wreaking havoc. But since there were as yet no mavens to tell them they couldn't do that, they simply went on creating masterpieces. If anything, the list of rules and infractions that began growing in the 18th century has worked to stifle creativity, and the best writers have always been willing to break the rules. Of course, when you point out in grammar school that Shakespeare or Twain or whoever violated some commandment, you're told that they're allowed to do what they want because they're great. You, on the other hand, are just a foot soldier on the muddy battlefield of language and had better keep your head down and do as you're told. Fie, I say! Speak as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, and damn the cramp rays!
I have more than once had occasion to point out that being a descriptivist does not exempt me from having feelings about language, and knowing that language inevitably changes does not keep me from resenting some of those changes. I'm human, all too human. But the absurdity of repeatedly feeling the same outrage at usages that are becoming more and more prevalent, the embarrassment of knowing myself to be repeating the idiocies of those who in days gone by objected to the house is being built (see this entry from the late lamented Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey) or thought the word decimate should be restricted to meaning 'reduce by a tenth,' have led me to make a conscious effort to conquer my aversion to some of these developments, just as I have conquered my aversion to certain foods (olives, say, or goat cheese). Now, there are some that I will never accept, any more than I will ever enjoy seafood; "may have" for "might have" is one of these. But I hope to make progress with others, and in the last couple of days I have heard examples of two mistakes innovations that have annoyed me all my life but that I think I can convince myself to get used to (though I have no intention of using them myself). One is the pronunciation of processes with the final syllable -eez, as though it were the plural of a Latin noun processis (on the model of analysis, analyses). Ahistorical? Sure, but so is half of English. It's just good old reanalysis at work, and I have no problem with that in theory, so it's time to practice what I preach. The other is to no end used for the traditional phrase no end 'exceedingly' (see the last section of the Merriam-Webster entry for end). I will allow myself a grim smile when I see someone using it in the very act of complaining about the errors of others (as Jeff Martin here: "Misspellings bug me to no end"), but otherwise I will tell myself "It's only language change at work... it's only language change...."
