Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has an intriguing post questioning whether the Omotic languages of eastern Africa are (as they are said to be) part of the Afro-Asiatic family, linking the skeptical paper "Is Omotic Afroasiatic? A Critical Discussion" by Rolf Theil (pdf, HTML cache). I haven't got time or energy to actually read Theil's paper at the moment, so I'll just accept Lameen's judgment that it's a "pretty good... argument against the hypothesis" (the discussion in his comment thread supports that judgment as well). I like Theil's final passage:
My conclusion is that Omotic should be treated as an independent language family. No convincing alternative has ever been presented.The Hayward quote is bizarre. What could it possibly mean to say "we do not need a whole family of 'Basques' on our hands"? Are isolates somehow a threat to our well-being? Should we shove them into closets where they don't belong just so they won't stare at us from the abyssal depths of their mysterious eyes?Hayward (1995: 11) writes that «[i]t is, of course, a relief not to have Omotic as an isolate; we do not need a whole family of 'Basques' on our hands!» An alternative point of view is possible. Africa is the cradle of mankind. Why are there no language isolates on a continent where humans have lived since language was invented?
In my ongoing immersion in Russian history, I'm up to the Civil War, and one of the books I've been looking forward to is Ivan Bunin's Cursed Days
I was mildly irritated at first by the sheer plethora of them, the dutiful explication of things anyone could look up for themselves, sometimes on the map provided in the book: "Smolensk is an administrative and cultural center, 350 miles south of Saint Petersburg..." But I told myself "better to err on the side of excess," and it was good to have detailed information on each newspaper Bunin mentions and be given a précis of the historical events he alludes to. An early warning sign of serious trouble came on page 36, when the footnote talked about a city called "Oredyosh"—it's actually Oredezh (with the stress on the first syllable). But I didn't actually put an appalled exclamation mark in the margin until page 59, when Bunin says "The Romans used to brand the faces of their prisoners with the words: 'Cave furem'" and the footnote said "Beware the Madman." Fur (accusative furem) is the Latin word for 'thief'; I can only suppose that the annotator got it confused with furor 'madness,' but really, you'd think the incongruity of the translation would have prompted a further look into the dictionary or a quick consultation with someone from the Classics Department. On page 60 Bunin mentions "Karakhan," whom I looked up in the list of "Prominent individuals mentioned in the text" (many of them the opposite of prominent, but I'm not complaining) and found Karakhan, Lev Mikhailovich (1889-1937) with the helpful parenthesis "(pseudonym of Rozenfeld, Lev Borisovich)"—except that that belongs to Kamenev, Lev Borisovich (1883-1936), a few lines above! Furthermore, if you look up Karakhan in the index it says "See Rozenfeld, Lev"! On page 61 Bunin says "Derman has received news from Rostov: the Kornilov movement is weak there," and the footnote says "Rostov, also known as Rostov the Great, is one of the oldest cities in Russia and is located roughly two hundred miles northeast of Moscow." All well and good, except that the Rostov the author is talking about is Rostov-na-Donu (or Rostov-on-Don), about 600 miles south of Moscow, something that should be obvious to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the geography of the Civil War: what the hell would Kornilov have been doing in the Yaroslavl Oblast? If there are mistakes like that in the things I know about, how can I trust the notes about things I don't?
By comparison a minor annoyance, but the one that made me head for the computer to blog this whole mess, is the consistent spelling of Clemenceau as "Clemençeau"—why on earth would there be a cedilla on that c, coming as it does before an e? (If you're going to misspell Clemenceau, the proper way is to put an accent aigu on the first e, which better reflects the pronunciation.) It bothers me more than I can say when books like this, which deserve to be sent out into the world with the best apparatus scholarship can provide, are treated so shabbily.
Language Log's Ben Zimmer has a new column at OUPblog called "From A To Zimmer"; the first installment discusses the chances of getting invented words in dictionaries, about which he has useful things to say. (One candidate: hangry, "an extremely useful adjective to describe a person suffering from hunger-induced crankiness.") A hearty Languagehat welcome to this newest addition to the linguablogosphere! (Via Mark Liberman at Language Log.)
I recently discovered starosti.ru, a site that reprints excerpts from century-old Russian newspapers (and I mean exactly century-old—they've just put up material from June 15/28, 1907). I was planning to post about it anyway, but today I happened on one of their many subsections, called Без'Ятие (bezyatie, "yatlessness"), about efforts to reform Russian orthography, and in particular to expel the letter yat. I had no idea there was such serious discussion of it as early as 1904 (the actual reform didn't occur until 1917), and it's fun to see the journalistic discussion of it. I particularly enjoyed this, from the Apr. 14/27, 1904 issue of Rus':
Diary of a ColumnistIt all makes me even more eager to read Orfografiya.Today I received the following letter:
"In Petersburg a club has been formed called "Azbuka" ['Alphabet'], with the aim of eliminating the letter yat from Russian spelling by the simple method of not writing it any more. Anyone joining the club is thereby committed to writing without the letter yat. Those who wish to join the club should send their full name to the following address: St. Petersburg, Znamenskaya 10, apartment 3, Pavel Bryunelli."
Fully sympathizing with the goals of the club, I immediately enrolled and thus am obliged to write from now on without the yat, and I invite all my readers to do the same. The sooner this completely superfluous and unneeded letter is removed, the better it will be for both schools and life: in school there will be fewer chances to waste years unnecessarily, printers will eliminate one compartment from their type cases, typesetters and especially proofreaders will feel a tremendous sense of relief in correcting proofs. I am not exaggerating in the least if I say that every newspaper that decides to expel the letter yat from use will come out half an hour, if not an entire hour, earlier...So godspeed! long live "yatlessness"! may social/public/voluntary [общественная] initiative go forward even in this small matter.
Back in January I mentioned the name Iwo Jima in connection with its first element (which means 'sulfur'); now it's in the news because the island has been renamed Iwoto (more accurately, Iōtō), which is what its inhabitants called it before the war:
"I have felt something was wrong because the name of my hometown was called by a different name after the end of the war. I'm really happy," said 74-year-old Yoshiharu Okamoto, who heads an association of former Iwoto residents.The interesting, and very Japanese, thing is that the written form stays exactly the same, 硫黄島; the last character, meaning 'island,' can be read either tō (the Sino-Japanese reading) or shima/jima (the native Japanese reading). Thanks for the Japan Times link go to frequent commenter (and superb blogger) MMcM.
A 1917 article from the the Washington Post reproduced by etymolog (the link goes to his promising new blog) in this Wordorigins thread sheds light on the new slang created or popularized by British soldiers during WWI and how it was perceived:
War Brings New LingoThere's considerably more at the Wordorigins thread; it's a great look into the linguistic environment of 90 years ago.British Soldiers Enjoy Slang as Hospital Pastime.—Talk In Strange Metaphor—Visit to Operating Room Known as “Going to the Pictures”—Recruits From All Parts of World Add to New Language of Army Life in Europe.
London, July 21.— An entirely new crop of slang has come into force in the British army during the past year. They have taken the place of “blighty” and the rest of the picturesque synonyms that were uppermost a year or so ago. A hospital orderly writes about them as follows:
“There is a brand of cheap cigarettes, popular in the army, known by the name of ‘Singles to Woking.’ The allusion enwrapped in this mild witticism is typical of the oblique mischievousness which characterizes the best of Tommy’s slang. Tommy has a passion for what one might call the pseudo-grumble. He is a grouser who doesn’t mean his grousing to be taken seriously.
Jokes of “Danger Last.”
“Having served for two terms as an orderly in a war hospital, I may claim to speak with some assurance of that lovable, absurd, cheery malcontent — the British soldier. I have heard him crack jokes about a timber shortage, for instance. Can you guess why? Because he had found out that officially he was on what is known as the Danger List (and let me say that only a hero could crack jokes when in such a state as to be on the Danger List), and was voicing the charming theory that he might be ‘bilked of a coffin.’ That is our fearless and macabre Mr. Atkins all over. Another of his war hospital pleasantries is to announce that he is ‘going to the pictures.’ This is the regular phrase for the visit to the operating theater. And isn’t it rather fine?
“But I wish Tommy would rid himself of his habit of using rhyming slang. It is a curse, this vast list of synonyms which, I can only surmise, originated somewhere far back in the thieves’ latin of the tramp. Both the old army and the new are in the thraldom of the inane lingo. ‘Chevvy chase’ means ‘face,’ ‘mince pie’ means ‘eye,’ ‘false alarm’ means ‘arm,’ ‘almond rocks’ means ‘socks,’ ‘daisy root’ means ‘boot.’ I could (for my sins) continue the dismal catalogue down a column.
There is apparently a Senegalese-American hip-hop singer and producer named Akon (IPA pronunciation: /ˈeɪ.kɑn/) who says his full name is Aliaune Damala Bouga Time Puru Nacka Lu Lu Lu Badara Akon Thiam. I haven't kept up with the pop music scene for, oh, a couple of decades now, so I learned of his existence from this stereogum thread (sent to me by Liosliath—thanks, Liosliath!), which links to a heated Wikipedia discussion on whether the name is real. People who actually know Wolof are saying it's bullshit, and in particular that the "Damala Bouga Time" part means "I wanna f*ck you" in Wolof. (The counterargument that "The 'truth' doesn't matter, it's sourced and should stay" showcases the crazed nature of Wikipedian fundamentalism.) My Wolof references make it clear that dama la bëgg (to use the accepted orthography) means 'I like you' (bëgg being 'to love, like, want'), so it's plausible that dama la bëgg timee (if the spelling used by a stereogum commenter is correct) means what it's said to mean; the fact that my dictionary doesn't have an entry for timee makes sense if that's as vulgar a verb as it's cracked up to be. Anybody know?
I'm reading Hayden N. Pelliccia's review of two newish translations of Virgil (by Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo) in the Apr. 12 New York Review of Books. I haven't gotten to the part where he talks about the translations yet (in true NYRB fashion, that comes as an afterthought on the last page), but I thought I'd share an interesting excursus on a particular allusion. He's discussing the famous scene in Book VI of the Aeneid in which Aeneas, having descended to the underworld (in imitation of Homer's Odysseus), is confronted with the shade of Dido, the woman he left behind in Carthage. Aeneas apologizes for having driven her to suicide; she refuses to talk to him and stalks back to her husband Sychaeus, with whom she has been reunited in death (as Dryden puts it, "Then sought Sichaeus thro' the shady grove,/ Who answer'd all her cares, and equal'd all her love"). In the course of his anguished self-justification, he says "invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi"—'against my will, queen, I left your shores.' But as Pelliccia says, "The words... are taken almost word for word from a poem of Catullus'..."
The problem is that this other Catullan poem is, not to put too fine an edge on it, a joke—an exercise in Hellenistic facetiousness. The poem is spoken by a lock of hair, cut from the head of a queen and dedicated by her in a temple, in thanks for the safe return from war of her husband the king. The talking hair says, "I left your head, my Queen, against my will" (in Latin, invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi).He then has a footnote tracing the possible allusions back even farther:For many readers the implications of this allusion are extremely upsetting, even painful. The Marx Brothers seem suddenly to have clambered onto the set of a tragic opera. What could Virgil have been thinking? Perhaps he was not thinking at all, these readers suggest, and the line is "a wholly unconscious reminiscence." But the idea that Virgil was capable of being "unconscious" of anything in Catullus is insupportable; he knew Catullus' poetry better than the back of his own hand. So that explanation fails. Others see in the allusion a deliberately subversive irony. But the joke seems too undignified and crude to be taken seriously as such.
The matter is more complex than the bare linking of the two passages might lead one to believe. Catullus' poem about the lock of hair is a translation from Callimachus (third century BCE), the unofficial head of the Alexandrian school of poetry of which both Catullus and Virgil were latter-day members. Callimachus' original survives only in the briefest fragments: our knowledge of it derives primarily from Catullus' translation. But the situation so humorously depicted was a real one: the Egyptian king Ptolemy had just married his cousin Berenice, and immediately went off to war in the East. The poem tells of the bride's tearful lamentations, and of her vow to offer a lock of her hair (i.e., of the poem's speaker) at a temple in the event of her husband's victorious return. He did return victorious, and she dedicated the lock. Soon thereafter, however, the lock was found to have disappeared from the temple. But all's well that ends well: the royal astronomer Conon promptly noticed a new constellation—the now-deified lock of Queen Berenice's hair, which speaks to us in the poem from its new perch in the sky.
It is plausible to conjecture that upon his return from a campaign to his bride, Ptolemy was reported to have said, or to have quoted from a lost epic source, something like "I left your shores, my Queen, against my will," and that the line borrowed by Virgil from Catullus' translation was written by Callimachus as a playful parody of this nonironical utterance. The theme of the groom torn from his bridal chamber to answer the call of war was a popular one with Homer. The memorable phrase "I left (you) against my will" occurs in its Greek form (ouk ethelon kallipon) in a comparable context (Theseus and Ariadne) in the fourth-century-CE epic of Quintus of Smyrna (4.389, cf. 10.286, a passage possibly modeled on Virgil), and is the subject of parody already in Archilochus (mid-seventh century BCE and about as early as we can get back with datable Greek poets), in a poem (no. 5 in the edition of M.L. West) in which he says antiheroically, of his escape from death in battle: "I left my shield against my will. But I saved myself. So why should that shield bother me? The hell with it—I'll soon get a better one."Archilochus 5 is one of my favorite Greek poems; you can see it here, and my favorite translation (which I found in a college textbook and memorized) runs:
Some lucky Thracian has my shield,Pelliccia goes on to discuss the implications of the passage for recent Roman history ("Is Aeneas a good guy or a bad guy? Is he Caesar? Antony? or Augustus, who stayed on course with his Roman duty and brought about Cleopatra-Dido's suicide? Or is he a little of all of them?"); I discovered by googling that there's been a whole lot of scholarly discussion of all this, and interested readers can start with these JSTOR links.
For, being somewhat flurried,
I dropped it in a wayside bush
As from the field I hurried.
Thank God, I made it clean away—
To blazes with the shield!
I'll get another just as good
When next I take the field.
Mark Liberman has a Language Log post about the implications of the fact that not only do very few of the U.S. Foreign Service officers in Baghdad have any proficiency in Arabic, but what proficiency they have is in the literary (standard) language, known in Arabic as fusha, which is spoken on a daily basis by almost no one in the Arab world. The following anecdote represents the exception that proves the rule:
Parkinson relates the story a friend who was a passionate supporter of fusha and who decided to stick to it exclusively in his family in order to give his children the full advantage of having it as a native language. Getting on a busy Cairo bus with this friend and his three-year-old daughter, the two of them, father and daughter, were separated and the yelling that was necessary to reestablish the contact took place in fusha making the entire bus burst out in laughter.The quote is from Mohamed Maamouri's 1998 paper "Language Education and Human Development: Arabic Diglossia and its Impact on the Quality of Education in the Arab Region" (pdf, html cache), which has much more information if you're interested in the topic.
I had always thought that the concept of a "Moldavian language" (as opposed to Romanian) was introduced by the Communists as part of their drive to support, or if need be create, a single "national language" for each of the constituent republics of the USSR (insisting, for example, on separate languages for each of the Turkic-speaking republics and ensuring their orthographies were as distinct as possible). My 1986 edition of Kenneth Katzner's The Languages of the World
The origin of the phrase the whole nine yards (meaning 'the whole thing') has been endlessly disputed (you can get a summary of the leading theories at Wordorigins.org.) For a long time the earliest citation was from a 1967 book about Air Force pilots serving in Vietnam; now Sam Clements has turned up a use in an April 25, 1964 article in the Tucson Daily Citizen about slang in the US space program: "'Give ‘em the whole nine yards' means an item-by-item report on any project." See Benjamin Zimmer's Language Log post for more context and links. You never know what you'll turn up reading old newspapers!
A correspondent sent me a link to a language blog I'd somehow missed, The Chocolate Interrobang ("where we savor discussions about language & grammar & syntax, and sometimes reminisce about diagramming sentences..."). There's a fair amount of tedious pop-grammatical blather (like a post ranting about "very unique"), but the latest post, by Jeff W (it's a group blog, with half a dozen authors), is a nice discussion of translation. He starts with the Fourth Casio Cup Translation Contest:
Organized by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, the goal of the contest is to translate a given English source text into Chinese. The text this time is "Reservoir Frogs (Or Places Called Mama’s)," a 1996 New Yorker piece by Salman Rushdie, on what Rushdie calls "the fine art of meaningless naming."This leads him to translation of Harry Potter books:
In Book One, Chapter 5, Harry asks Hagrid the eternal question: "What's the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite?" Hagrid, not feeling up to geological exegesis (as Sir Salman might say), replies: "Stalagmite's got an "m" in it. An' don' ask me questions just now, I think I'm gonna be sick."Great stuff. (Thanks for the link, Bathrobe!)In Chinese, stalactite is zhōng-rǔ-shí ("hanging-bell milk rock") and stalagmite is shí-sǔn (''rock bamboo-shoot''). No "M" in sight. What do you do?
If you're the Mainland Chinese translator, well, there's no problem: Hagrid says: "There's an "M" in the middle of zhōng-rǔ-shí." Well, true enough as a translation but that answer must leave Chinese readers scratching their heads.
If you're the Taiwanese Chinese translator, Hagrid says "zhōng-rǔ-shí is made up of three characters" (the word shí-sǔn , after all, has two), effectively getting at the irritated non-answer of Hagrid's reply.
Another example: one character, Fleur Delacour, is referred to by the contemptuous nickname, "Phlegm." So how do you come up with a nickname that sounds like "Fleur" but with the disgusting properties of "phlegm"?
This time the Taiwanese Chinese translator comes up with a true masterpiece: Fleur in the Taiwanese version is named Huār meaning 'flower'; the contemptuous nickname for her is Wār meaning "frog" which might be considered a suitably slimy substitute for "phlegm" and, as a bonus, mocks the French accent of the character (who drops her "h's").
No, not the kind you're thinking of, but the much rarer kind with four identical letters (or, if one cheats a bit, a repetition of a two-letter combination, like chch) in a row. Mark Liberman at Language Log quotes Benjamin Monreal quoting George Starbuck's poem, "Verses to exhaust my stock of four-letter words":
From the ocean floors, where the necrovores
Of the zoöoögenous mud
Fight for their share, to the Andes where
Bullllamas thunder and thud,And even thence to the heavens, whence
Archchurchmen appear to receive
The shortwave stations of rival nations
Of angels: "Believe! Believe!"They battle, they battle—poor put-upon cattle,
Each waging, reluctantly,
That punitive war on the disagreeor
Which falls to the disagreeee.
Ian Brown has a long piece in Saturday's Globe and Mail that discusses the importance or otherwise of a well-stocked vocabulary. He starts off with a striking anecdote:
In Chicago, in a downtown courtroom, lawyer Edward Greenspan won't let Conrad Black take the stand.He continues with a professor who says "One has to tell students in journalism school to express themselves simply, because they have been taught in high school to use big words in an effort to impress their professors" and another who says kids who don't have a good vocabulary are at "considerable risk of continued low achievement." Then comes a section about how the Educational Testing Service has been de-emphasizing vocabulary on the SATs, contrasted with the new National Vocabulary Contest to honor kids who know lots of words.The problem is Mr. Black's fondness for whacking big words: tricoteuses (knitters of yarn, used to describe reporters and gossips, augmented by the adjective "braying"), planturous (fleshy), poltroon (a coward, a.k.a. former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa), spavined (lame), dubiety (doubt: Mr. Black rarely uses a simple word where a splashy lemma will do), gasconading (blustering) and velleities (distant hopes), to list just a few of his verbal smatterings. Mr. Greenspan fears the Lord's lingualism will turn off the jury.
All this is fine, and written in an engaging style ("The Hit Parade of the top 50 words on the SAT... includes easy passes such as exculpate (to free from blame or guilt) but also yataghan, a guardless sword used in Muslim countries. It does not include yegg (a travelling burglar or safecracker) or yapp (a form of bookbinding), words your correspondent found while he was looking up yataghan"); alas, Mr. Brown then succumbs to the universal journalistic disease of setting up straw men to create an artificial battle of the sort beloved by hacks the world over, and when the subject is vocabulary, you just know one of the straw men is going to be those nasty linguists:
Where the argument over the importance of big words is now set to rage anew, however, is in universities across North America, in the Next Great Battle between the linguists and the logophiles.I wonder how many linguists he had to canvass to find one who was willing to go on record discouraging people from using unusual words? But hey, once you find him, he becomes a representative sample! And then, of course, you can go on to mock linguists for using big words themselves: "The most recent issue of the International Journal of Lexicography, the go-to tome for learned language leaders, features an article with the title 'Linguistic Lightbulb Moments: Zeugma in Idioms.'"The linguists, who have the upper hand at the moment, are very much of a type. They tend to be acolytes of American scholar William Labov, who developed the concept of code-switching. Standard vocabulary doesn't need to be taught, the Labovites claim, because there's no such thing as a standard vocabulary...
Some of the most militant linguists are Canadian. Clive Beck, a professor of education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, relishes the collapse of the standard Western vocabulary. "I think it's partly a democratization, of getting teachers to have a closer relationship with their students, and being able to talk on the same level. I love correctness in speech and in writing. But I think to some extent I have to go with the change."
Betwixt, for instance, "is just an old-fashioned word. So you shouldn't use it. Nefarious, people don't understand it, so don't use it. I think it does put a distance between you and especially young people if you use an old-fashioned word. True, some people like to be old-fashioned. But I think the world is changing so rapidly that we should change with it. So if you don't explain what it means, you waste people's time."
And the pleasure, the actual fun of knowing and using and privately sharing a word like, say, sciagraphy?
"My advice to people is to get pleasure out of explaining things clearly. You have to give up things you love. But then you can have a really great connection with people."
He takes a break for an amusing four-paragraph riff on the fun of using zeugma, then continues: "But not for the contemporary anti-vocabulary linguist, who values a word only in terms of its usefulness to a target audience," and digs up a lexicographer (not the same thing as a linguist, but never mind), Katherine Barber (editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary), who explains the necessity for weeding words out of dictionaries while you add new ones and ends up making the absurd claim "We lexicographers just feel there are too damn many words in the language." (I add the necessary disclaimer that Brown may have distorted, or even invented, the quote; reporters are notorious for playing fast and loose with the things the people they interview say—see Language Log.)
Then he quotes a couple of "logophiles" (read "cranks"): Thomas Delworth, an ambassador in Canada's foreign service, objects to the use of fuck and fucking (what, those aren't words?) and "blames the cheesy easiness of e-mail" (and, of course, "the linguists") for "the barren state of our word cupboards." And Robert Brustein, playwright, critic, teacher, and professional deplorer, finds "a deterioration in the capacity of students to use language... Imprecise writing... a laziness too. A kind of disconnect... the capacity to articulate what's in your mind has declined..." Yes, kids today! They just don't use language with the precision and grace of my generation! And the music they listen to, if you can call it music, and the clothes, and they have no respect for their elders and betters! If I ever start maundering like that, just shoot me. Can't these people tell they're just repeating the same cliches elders-and-betters have been proclaiming for millennia?
Ah, well. It's a fun read, and I like his conclusion:
Because this is the solid thing about words, long or short: They wait for anyone who wants them, and cost nothing. You can use rare words for an ultra-efficient purpose, and you can juggle them for pleasure. But take the pleasure out of their use, and people stop using them.(Thanks for the link, Derryl!)"I don't think there is any goal in having a vocabulary," Thomas Delworth says from his perch toward the end of his rich spoken and written life. "I think it is its own reward. I can't give you a cost-effectiveness breakdown. You simply have a somewhat larger grasp of this vast empire you might command."
The alternative is that we use fewer and fewer of them, until the world is small enough that one word alone will suffice: Duh. (Interjection. Used to express actual or feigned ignorance or stupidity.)
Today's NY Times has an obituary (by Margalit Fox) of a man whose name was vaguely familiar to me; after I read the first sentence I wanted to know more: "Israel Shenker, a scholar trapped in a newsman’s body who was known to readers of The New York Times for his vast erudition and sly, subversive wit, died on June 9 at Kibbutz Shoval in southern Israel." It continues:
From 1968 to 1979, Mr. Shenker was a reporter on the metropolitan staff of The Times. But from the start, his portfolio ranged far beyond the city. Among the notable figures he interviewed over the years were Jorge Luis Borges, Noam Chomsky, M. C. Escher, John Kenneth Galbraith, Marcel Marceau (who spoke), Groucho Marx, Vladimir Nabokov, S. J. Perelman, Picasso and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Mr. Shenker was known in particular for his coverage of letters, lexicography and languages, especially Yiddish, to which he retained an ardent lifelong attachment. In later years, in ostensible retirement, he wrote freelance articles for The Times on European travel.Great quotes from a life well lived, and now I want to read his In the footsteps of Johnson and BoswellReading Mr. Shenker’s articles was like panning for gold: just beneath their calm, reporterly surface were glimmering nuggets that produced small, sweet shocks whenever they came to light. “Labor Day, the holiday for the nation’s gainfully exhausted, beckons just ahead,” he wrote in 1972.
From 1976: “Insurance policies may be balm for the afflicted, but they are murder on the English language.”
And this, from a 1969 interview with the two writers behind the Ellery Queen novels: “In their guile they had hit on a wondrous formula: the same name for author and hero, so that readers and moviegoers who forgot one might still remember the other.”...
After Mr. Shenker retired from The Times, he and his wife moved to the deep Scottish countryside. To his relief, their idyll was interrupted periodically by the arrival of masses of pastrami, shipped from New York. Mrs. Shenker, who was Scottish, did not partake. Her husband, writing in The Times in 1984, inimitably explained why:
“My wife, moved by the sight of lambs at the window, has renounced eating meat, her abstinence reinforced by the spectacle of pastrami on the hoof — lovely Highland cattle, unpickled, unspiced, unsmoked.”
.
The word of the day is scacchic (pronounced SKAK-ik), discovered by Bill Poser at Language Log in the adverbial form scacchically. As he says, "it took only a moment to realize what it meant," but that's if you recognize the root from its source language. When I read his post I thought it might be a nonce creation, but no, the OED tells me it has a pedigree dating back to 1860 (D. Willard Fiske, "Stern old fellows were these scacchic sages!"). If it's unfamiliar to you, you might want to ponder it for a bit before clicking on the Log link and finding out what it means.
Fiske was an interesting guy:
When very young he disclosed an uncommon aptitude for the acquisition of languages, and a precocious interest in both literature and politics. He pursued his school education at Cazenovia seminary and at Hamilton College, but left that institution in his sophomore year to go abroad and study the Scandinavian languages. At Copenhagen he enjoyed the friendship of Professor Rafn, the distinguished Danish archaeologist. With little aid except some occasional correspondence with the New York "Tribune," he sustained himself during 1849-52, passing two years in the University of Upsala, giving lessons in English and lecturing on American literature, and speaking Swedish so well that he commonly passed with the students for a Swede. In 1852 he returned to New York and took a place in the Astor library, where he remained as assistant until 1859, still pursuing his studies in languages, and in making a collection of Icelandic books, which soon became the most considerable in this country. So enthusiastically had he directed his attention to that enlightened Island that it was said that few natives were more familiar with its geography, history, politics, and literature than he.This decorous account does not mention the fact that his wife's death set off an unseemly episode known as the Great Will Case, in which Fiske and Cornell battled over his wife's estate, Fiske eventually winning; you can read a brief description here and a full account in Chapter XIII of Morris Bishop's A History of Cornell (1962).In 1859-60 he was general secretary of the American geographical society. In 1861-2 he was again abroad, and attached to the American legation at Vienna under Minister John Lothrop Motley. Returning, he was editor of the daily "Journal" of Syracuse, New York, in 1864-6, and through 1867 had charge of the Hartford, Connecticut, "Courant," from which he was called in 1868, after another extensive tour abroad, which embraced Egypt and Palestine, to the professorship of the north European languages, and the place of chief librarian, at Cornell University. To his unremitting labors for years in the classroom, as librarian, and as director of the University press, no inconsiderable degree of the success of the institution is due. During this time he took a deep interest in the reform of the civil service, and was a most influential writer and lecturer in its behalf. In 1879 he was again abroad for five months, and visited Iceland. He had been a principal promoter in this country of the contribution of a library on the celebration of the National millennium, and upon his arrival he was the guest of the nation and accorded honors seldom if ever given before by one nation to a private citizen of another. His health failing from his severe application to College duties, he went abroad again in 1880. In that year, in Berlin, he married Miss Jennie McGraw, of Ithaca, New York, who died in September 1881. In 1881 he resigned his offices at Cornell and took up his permanent residence in Florence, Italy. Although his chief work has been that of a scholar and bibliopole, he has been a voluminous contributor to various Swedish, Icelandic, and German journals, and to the American press.
My wife and I are contemplating yet another move (after relocating from NYC to Peekskill and from Peekskill to Pittsfield, all within the last few years), this time an hour east to what's called the Pioneer Valley along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts. There are various personal reasons for the move that I won't burden you with, but one reason I'm looking forward to it (setting aside the agony of the actual move) is cultural. There is not a single bookstore in Pittsfield; the Valley, with five colleges within a few minutes' drive of each other, is lousy with them. This article by Andrew Varnon from the Valley Advocate should give you some idea of the riches to be found, and these are just the ones along one stretch of Route 10. The pictures alone have me salivating, as does this quote:
Angell said the Valley was a pretty good place to be a book hound. “There’s probably more bookstores per capita in the Valley than anywhere else in the country,” he said.(Thanks for the link, Leslie!)
I've been wanting to write about a book Columbia University Press sent me a while back, but every time I pick it up I get immersed in it and forget about blogging it. I was familiar with Seth Lerer's name because of his book Error and the Academic Self
It's not that he's right about everything—he makes the common error of thinking Shakespeare invented all those words that first occur in print in his works, and his strange terminology in this sentence irritated me: "Thus, the modern Celtic languages have survived on the edges of Britain: Gaelic in Ireland, Welsh in Wales, Cornish in Cornwall, Erse in Scotland, and Manx on the Isle of Man. Some of these Celtic languages are flourishing (Welsh and Gaelic); some are dead (Manx, Cornish, Erse)." In the first place, "Gaelic" is usually used to refer to Scots Gaelic, the Irish variety being called Irish. In the second place, what the hell does he mean by "Erse"? The OED says "Applied by Sc. Lowlanders to the Gaelic dialect of the Highlands (which is in fact of Irish origin), to the people speaking that dialect, to their customs, etc. Hence in 18th c. Erse was used in literary Eng. as the ordinary designation of the Gaelic of Scotland, and occasionally extended to the Irish Gaelic; at present some writers apply it to the Irish alone. Now nearly Obs." Mind you, the "now" there is the late 19th century; it's been thoroughly obsolete for a long time now—I don't think I've ever seen it used in a contemporary book to refer to a language. And Scots Gaelic is not dead.
But never mind the nitpicking: this is a wonderful book. It's not hard to find well-informed books about the history of the English language, and it's not hard to find good critical accounts of English literature, but to have the two intertwined in one book is remarkable. Lerer goes through the various periods of Old, Middle, and Modern English, explaining the changes the language undergoes and analyzing the literature of the time accordingly, and the results are consistently enlightening. He starts off his first chapter, "Caedmon Learns to Sing: Old English and the Origins of Poetry," by quoting the less familiar Northumbrian version of Caedmon's Hymn: "Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes Uard,/ Metudaes maecti end his modgidanc..." After explaining how English developed out of Germanic and saying Caedmon "took the traditional Germanic habits of word formation, the grammar, and the sound of his own Old English and used them as the basis for translating Christian concepts into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular," he points out that beginning in the eighth century the north of England was devastated by Viking raids and "by the last decades of the ninth century, power was moving to the south," which explains why the version we know from Bede is in the West Saxon dialect: "Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard,/ Meotodes meahte ond his modgeþanc..." The forms in that version look more recognizable to us because modern English descends from the southern dialects of Old English. Lerer goes on to discuss the Anglo-Saxon Riddles:
The riddles take vernacular literacy as their theme, as they illustrate how a knowledge of the word leads to a knowledge of the world, and in turn, how the world itself remains a book legible to the learned. One of these riddles, for example, is about a book. Told in the first person, it begins by recounting how a thief ripped off flesh and left skin, treated the skin in water, dried it in the sun, and then scraped it with a metal blade. Fingers folded it, the joy of the bird (that is, the feather) was dipped in the woodstain from a horn (that is, the ink in an inkwell), and left tracks on the body. Wooden boards enclose it, laced with gold wire. "Frige hwæt ic hatte," ask what I am called, it concludes. It is a book, but no mere volume. It is made up, sequentially, of all other parts of creation. The natural world and human artifice come together here to reveal the book as a kind of cosmos, and in turn, to demonstrate that the book contains all knowledge.Then he quotes a riddle on the bookworm and says:
The Riddle begins with a deceptively simple statement [Moððe word fræt, 'A moth ate words'], and a comment that this action seems a "wrætlicu wyrd," a remarkable event. Wrætlic here describes neither a wrought object nor a curiosity of creation but rather a strange juxtaposition of the work of nature and of human hands. The word wyrd can mean something as neutral as "event" or "occurrence," but it also means fate, fortune, or destiny (it is the origin of our word "weird"...). This, then, is both a strange event and a remarkable fate: strange, that the writings of man should have as their destiny the bowels of an insect. Reading is ingestion—an image central to the monastic tradition of learning, where ruminatio connoted the act of chewing over and digesting words as they were read...I love that kind of exegesis, and it's his method throughout, whether discussing calques in Beowulf, lexical change after the Norman Conquest ("when the king's rule disappears and England loses itself in an anarchy of local barons... we are once again granted a lesson in the language of administrative pain: Hi læiden gældes on the tunes ævre umwile and clepeden it 'tenserie.' [They imposed taxes on the towns repeatedly and called it 'protection money.']"), dialects in Middle English ("When I arrived at Oxford in the fall of 1976... I was baffled at the structure of instruction and, in particular, at the attention paid to early English dialects... I learned that... forms of speech determined region, class, level of education, and gender with a precision almost unheard of anywhere else"), or the many other developments he writes about. And, as my wife pointed out when I read her the Shakespeare chapter, he writes amazingly well for a scholar.
I'll probably be blogging more material from this book as I work through it, but I didn't want to wait any longer to give a preliminary report. And I'm very much looking forward to the book on error!
1) Strč prst skrz krk (thanks, Songdog!). ("Strč prst skrz krk is a Czech and Slovak tongue-twister meaning 'stick finger through throat'.")
2) bad grammar makes me [sic] (thanks, dame!).
A while back I posted about what was said to be the world's last handwritten newspaper (in Chennai/Madras). I am happy to report that this does not seem to be the case; this post at Iqag Notes says:
This is just flat-out wrong. The vast majority of “printed” Urdu works are hand written. That includes books, newspapers, magazines, posters, and so on. It’s true that there is at the moment an incredibly fast pace of change towards computerization amongst the major newspapers, and a slower pace for books, but this has been only over the last five years. In fact, one of the only things which are almost always computer composed are wedding invitations, because it’s cost effective for these small batches, and because the consumer bears the higher labor costs of DTP vs. caligraphy. If that sound backwards, think about this: hand copying of manuscripts at the Salar Jung library is cheaper per page than photocopies from those archives which will let you copy (which SJ won’t.)There's much more, including a history of Urdu typesetting. Thanks to Bill Poser of Language Log for linking to it.
Claire of anggarrgoon has gotten a grant to work on Pama-Nyungan prehistory and historical reconstruction; progress reports will be posted on her new website Pama-Nyungan reconstruction ("Exploration of Australian Linguistic Prehistory"). From the abstract:
Australia’s linguistic prehistory is important for several reasons. It has been claimed that methods developed for Europe and the Americas do not work in Australia. If true, such a finding would be highly important, since these methods are based on properties of language change which until now have been assumed to be universal. However, preliminary work indicates that Australian languages show the same characteristics that we find elsewhere. Small speech community size, widespread multilingualism, and other factors have obscured relationships between these languages. These languages are an excellent laboratory for modeling what language change might have been like before the spread of agricultural communities. If we are ever going to be able to model accurately what prehistoric global language spread might have looked like, we need to understand how it operated in Australia.Congratulations, and I look forward to the results!
Before World War II dispersed emigre Russian life to the four winds, its cultural center was Paris, and by far its most important "thick journal" (mixing, in the Russian tradition, political and literary content) was Современные записки [Sovremennye zapiski, 'Contemporary Notes'), published (by a group of Socialist Revolutionaries far more interested in politics than literature) from 1920 to 1940. It started out publishing only writers who had made their name in Russia (Andrei Bely, Mark Aldanov, and the like), but in 1929-30 it took the plunge and serialized a new novel by one of the generation who had started writing in emigration, Zashchita Luzhina by one V. Sirin. As it happened, Sirin was the pen name of one of the greatest writers of the past century, Vladimir Nabokov, and the novel (known in English as The Defense) bowled over the entire Russian community abroad. Nina Berberova, who had been unimpressed by Sirin earlier, wrote in her memoirs "A tremendous, mature, sophisticated modern writer was before me; a great Russian writer, like a phoenix, was born from the fire and ashes of revolution and exile. Our existence from now on acquired a meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved." Ivan Bunin, who had ruled the literary roost, said "This kid has snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included." Sovremennye zapiski went on to publish everything Sirin/Nabokov wrote for the next decade (except, in an appalling instance of censorship, the fourth chapter of his greatest Russian novel, Dar [The Gift]), and a few years ago, when I was feverishly reading his Russian novels, I spent a lot of time at the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library, gingerly turning the pages of those beautiful heavy cream-colored issues of the journal, wishing I could own at least a few copies myself.
Well, it's not the same thing, and as yet it's not very much at all, but I've just discovered that a Russian site has a plan to put online the entire run of Sovremennye zapiski. Right now only the first issue is available, but it's enough to whet my appetite; I wish they'd at least list the contents of all the issues even if it will take a while to scan them and get them online.
Meanwhile, I'm mollified by the discovery that the entire run of Синтаксис (Sintaksis, 1978-2001), my favorite of the so-called "third-wave" emigre journals, is online already! If you read Russian (and don't already know about it), you have a treat in store. It was produced and edited by Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and published many of the most important writers of the '70s and '80s: Sergei Dovlatov, Sasha Sokolov, Venedikt Erofeev... I bought as many copies as I could when the Donnell Branch deaccessioned much of its foreign-language material, but it's wonderful to have it all accessible online.
I'm not a religious man myself, but I'm impressed with the work that has been done by Christians eager to translate the Bible into as many languages as possible; the site World Scriptures has a section that lists such translations, and not only is the number impressive (more than 2000) but you can see portions of the translation (usually the beginning of the book of John) for many of them (those marked with an icon of a scroll in the A-Z list). Sure, they have plain old Arabic ("Part of the Bible was published for the first time in 1516"), but also Algerian, Chad (Romanized!), Egyptian, Judaeo-Tunisian, Lebanese, North African, Palestinian, Sudan, Southern Sudan, and Tunisian. (And I'm afraid I got a juvenile chuckle out of the fact that there's a language called Anal.) Thanks for the link, Paul!
In an effort to find out what exactly is going on in the famous scene in Le Côté de Guermantes
"Straightforward" is not a word that can readily be applied to language, which, like a confidence man, is often most devious when it seems most plain. Consider, just to bring these abstract matters down to the level of concreteness, exhibit A, from a biography of Foucault, in fact, and written, as it happens, by a journalist from Le Nouvel Obs. The book begins:Le décor est presque saugrenu. C’est un théâtre, situé au rond-point des Champs-Elysées.I was asked to evaluate the work of another translator. The text began:The setting was almost preposterous: a theater at the traffic circle on the Champs-Elysées.What’s wrong with this? Nothing and everything. The translator has made a decision to use the English past for the French historical present, which is fine, though in biography sometimes the English present works better. He has combined the two choppy French sentences into one English sentence, which is excellent. The sense is almost right. But what are we to make of "the circle on the Champs-Elysées?" Rond-point certainly means "traffic circle": the dictionary says so. But hasn’t the translator ever been to Paris? The avenue boasts two famous "traffic circles," if you can call them that, one at Etoile, the other at Concorde. As it happens, the writer isn’t thinking of either of these. He means the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées, the smaller, less famous circle where, under the glassy-eyed gaze of Le Drugstore, the great avenue joins the avenues Montaigne and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Perhaps the French publisher’s copy editor is at fault, because Rond-Point should have been capitalized in the French. A pedantic point? Maybe, except for one thing: the real intention of the sentence depends on it. For what is preposterous about the location is that the theater in question is the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the first reinforced concrete building in Paris and the site of the famous premier of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The gathering being held there, as described in the remainder of the paragraph, is a memorial colloqium in honor of the dead philosopher, a man more usually associated with such Left-Bank venues as the Collège de France than with this Right-Bank icon of modernism. The occasion being a memorial, the atmosphere was presumably decorously lugubrious, whereas the first performance of Le Sacre triggered a raucous riot. But how much of this can be got into a translation? Not too much. One doesn’t want to overinterpret or weigh heavily on a point the author would prefer to make lightly. Consider:The setting was almost preposterous: the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées at the Rond-Point.
This modified translation supplies some, but not all, of the information implicit but unstated in the French. The translator needn’t flaunt her knowledge; the naming of the theater is enough to compensate for the English reader’s presumable unfamiliarity with Paris geography. What of the writer’s other assumptions: the Left-Right Bank distinction, the début of The Rite of Spring? These are signs, to those who perceive them, of the position from which the writer speaks. Some readers, whether French or English, will fail to perceive these signs, will know no more of Stravinsky in 1913 than the prince d’Agrigente at the Guermantes’ dinner party in Proust knows of Flaubert. But that is the point, really. These opening phrases establish a degree of intimacy between the writer and the knowing reader—the reader who, like the cocky duc de Guermantes, considers himself anything but what he declares himself to be: a pedzouille, a country bumpkin; and the translator, however much he may deplore the writer’s "insider" tone, the meretricious glitter of false sophistication, had better not interfere, for the manner in which an author strikes that distance from his reader is a fundamental trait of style. Some authors, used to the podium, can only lecture; others can only whisper in the reader’s ear. Here, I think, the manner is one of winks and nudges. I conjure up the image of two habitués of the Latin Quarter drinking espresso in the Café du Panthéon or Le Soufflot. "You’ll never guess where they’re holding the Foucault colloquium," one says. "Where?" the other asks. "C’est presque saugrenu. Le Théâtre des Champs-Elysées." "Mais c’est quoi alors?" "Ben, tu sais bien, cette espèce de blockhaus en béton près du Rond-Point." "Ah, celui du Sacre de Stravinsky?" "Ça y est, mon vieux, tu te rends compte?"The problem is, though, that the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées is not at the Rond-Point on the Champs-Elysées; it's not even particlularly close, being several blocks south at 15, avenue Montaigne, near the Pont de l'Alma—in fact, you could probably throw a rock into the Seine from the entrance if you had a good arm. This means that his analysis of the sentence has to be wrong; a glance at my map of Paris suggests that the biographer means the Théâtre du Rond-Point, which has been open since 1981 (Foucault died in 1984), but at any rate it can't have been "celui du Sacre de Stravinsky" unless the biographer, like Goldhammer, mistook its location. But never mind; as he himself says, "misreading is more common than one might think," and what's important is the effort to ferret out the subtleties that lie beneath the bare words of the text. I just hope he didn't repeat the mistake in a published article.
The error that really annoyed me came a little later on, when he writes:
Errors can be signs. When we hear someone say, in English, "Thank you for inviting my wife and I," instead of "my wife and me," we suspect that, having grown up in a home where it might have been common to say, "Me and the missus thank you for the invite," the speaker has, by way of overcompensation toward the "cultivated" norm, substituted the nominative where the objective case is required—a case of misguided or jumped-up politeness.This "hypercorrection" theory is incorrect, and the fact that Goldhammer feels so comfortable repeating it is one more demonstration of how little awareness there is of the findings of linguistics.
It's too late to get this into my curses-and-insults book, but I have to share it with you all: looking for something else in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang
cheeks! excl. [mid-late 19C] a coarse and insulting excl.
Just before it was:
cheeks n. [late 18C-late 19C] an imaginary person, usu. used in a rude reply to an irritating question. [note synon. 19C naut. jargon Cheeks the Marine. In both cases the phr. refers to the buttocks and equates with ASK MY ARSE!]
And just after it was:
cheeks near cunnyborough phr. [mid18C-early 19C] a coarse rejoinder to what the speaker (invariably a woman) categorizes as a stupid question (cf. ASK MY ARSE!). [CHEEKS + CUNNY]
Naturally, I checked the OED; none of these delightful usages were there, but definition 1.c. read "Used like beard, teeth, etc. in defiance, cursing. maugre thy (his, etc.) chekes" (Langland, from 1377: "We wil haue owre wille, maugre þi chekes").
And now that I have your attention: for Pete's sake, somebody get Helen DeWitt an agent! I want to read her next novel, dammit.
A paper published recently in Science, "Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy" by Whitney M. Weikum et al, "shows that 4- and 6-month-old infants can discriminate languages (English from French) just from viewing silently presented articulations. By the age of 8 months, only bilingual (French-English) infants succeed at this task." A CBC News story elaborates:
The study is the first to show young babies are prepared to tell languages apart using only visual information, Weikum said.Fascinating stuff; many thanks to Jordan for the CBC link!The researchers tested infants at four, six and eight months of age from English-only homes and six and eight-month-olds from bilingual English and French homes.
Each group was shown silent video clips of bilingual speakers, who recited sentences first in one language and then switched to the other.
"We expected that if the baby noticed the change in the language, they would start watching the screen again," Weikum told CBC News.
The babies did just that. At four and six months, babies paid closer attention and watched the video for longer when the speakers switched languages, which suggests the infants were able to discern the change from visual information alone.
While six-month-olds from monolingual and bilingual environments could tell languages apart visually, by eight months of age, only babies from bilingual homes who were familiar with both languages continued to be able to do so, the researchers found.
The results suggest that by eight months, only babies learning more than one language maintain their ability to use visual language information. If not, their sensitivity for other languages declines, Weikum said.
"It's as if they're prepared to learn any or more than one of the world's languages," said study co-author Janet Werker, a psychology professor at UBC. "They stop using that information that they don't need, and they continue to sharpen and use the information that they do."
In Pepys' Diary a few days ago commenter Pedro quoted Man of War by Ollard as follows:
Meanwhile [in late May 1664] on the West Coast of Africa…When I asked him about the "Dye of Foutou," he said "This is around the time that Holmes is at Cape Coast Castle, and he seems to have been given this name by a John Cabissa the remarkable leader of the tribe at Kormantin" and in a subsequent comment "It looks like this may be the King of Fetu," which gave me the hint I needed to find that Fetu (more properly known as Ef(f)utu or Afutu) was indeed a small kingdom on the Gold Coast in the 17th century; you can read about their history, legends, and matrilineal system here. But I've been unable to find any reference to anything resembling a "dye" either online or in my African history books. Any ideas?At Anashan Holmes celebrates the King’s birthday with a dinner party on board the Jersey for the Danish Commanding Officer and the Dye of Foutou “with diverse others whom I caressed and very well presented to secure their friendship to the English.”
David Montgomery of the Washington Post has a good story on the contradictory impulses of politicians who want to pander to one group by demanding English be made America's Official Language but also pander to another by making speeches and advertising in Spanish:
Newt Gingrich goes into one of his deep-think riffs on assimilation for immigrants, but he probably shouldn't have implied that anything but English is "the language of living in a ghetto."I hate the idea of an Official Language, and I love to see politicians writhe and squirm. This story comes via Ben Zimmer at Language Log, where you will find further discussion and a prediction: "expect our leading politicians to use more and more Spanish in the coming campaign season."So he does penance on YouTube, apologizing and explaining in -- what else? -- grammatically correct Spanish, albeit with a terminally Anglo accent. Turns out he's a closet Spanish geek, getting tutored three times a week, while he considers a run for president...
The fact is, the politics of language is one thing, and the language of politics is another. Language is both a tool and a value.
The politics of language requires a politician to honor that sacred and hard-to-define concept, the "American identity." The language of politics is about getting votes -- and pragmatically accepting that every day, including Election Day, the American identity speaks in many tongues.
Reconciling the two means operating like those ubiquitous recorded phone prompts: "Press 1 to continue in English. Oprima el 2 para continuar en español."
Coming out strongly and courageously in favor of English is a way of flashing a high-sign to a certain segment of the electorate. It's a linguistic nod-and-a-wink to those who fear America's soul is imperiled by the rise of a population speaking, thinking, dreaming in another language. Can you be a real American and speak Spanish? Bilingual Canada is held up as a warning.
"We cannot be a bilingual nation like Canada," Romney told the Union Leader in New Hampshire, where few Latinos live, so few were likely to get that message.
Yet down in Florida, Romney was one of the first in the race to air a Spanish-language radio ad, and he is one of the few GOP candidates to have an "En Español" Web option. Click on it, and see one of Romney's sons give a video testimonial in excellent Spanish, acquired during a missionary stint in Chile: "Hola, soy Craig Romney, y les quiero hablar un poco sobre mi papá, Mitt Romney . . . "
I've just been reading an article that takes issue with various examples of English usage, and I'm curious about the extent to which English speakers agree with the author. Do any of the following sound wrong to you, and if so, why?
1) "One of the main facts that have induced philologists to declare against Asia as the cradle of the race…"
2) "Seventy-five percent of loons were found to have mercury in their livers or their feathers."
3) "We played some good games, and our senses of humor clicked."
Also, in his latest column William Safire refers to "the famous expression a sop to Cerberus, metaphorically meaning 'an insignificant price to pay for averting much discomfort.' I confess I was not familiar with the expression; are you?
Justin Rye, whose post on xenolinguistics I wrote about here, also has one on spelling reform:
For some years now I've been amusing myself by planning exactly what I would try in the way of "spelling reform" if I woke up one morning and found that the Revolutionary Stalinist-Linguist Party had mounted a coup and appointed me as World Dictator. Details of my proposal for a Revolting Orthography (modestly entitled Romanised English) are unlikely ever to become available; for now I want to get it clearly established exactly how mad this scheme is. The problems with our current system are sufficiently well-known that I feel no need to rehearse them all here; and people have been protesting about the situation for centuries. So just what is wrong with the idea of switching to something better? Anti-reformists come in thirteen basic flavours, with arguments summarisable as follows.As I said in the MetaFilter post where I first saw it, "it's the best thing I've ever seen on the subject, comprehensive, knowledgeable, and funny." That was a couple of years ago; I'm not sure why I didn't blog it then, but thanks to a comment by David Marjanović in this thread, I'm doing so now. Enjoy!
I usually miss the National Spelling Bee, but last night I managed to watch a good chunk of it (NY Times story, excited liveblogging at ReadySteadyGo); it's fun to watch kids sweat over something as meaningless and yet (if you're so inclined) riveting as the correct spelling of English words. I was rooting for Isabel Jacobson, but she went out on cyanophycean (a kind of algae); the eventual winner was Evan O'Dorney, who correctly spelled serrefine ("a small forceps for clamping a blood vessel")—a pretty easy word to guess even if you didn't already know it, compared to some of the doozies others had gotten: triticale, cachalot, fauchard all in Round 8, along with the word with far and away the best definition I heard all night, schuhplattler "a Bavarian courtship dance in which before the couple dances together the woman calmly does steps resembling those of a waltz while the man dances about her swinging his arms and slapping his thighs and the soles of his feet."