I can't believe I haven't linked this yet, but I guess I ran across it before I started the blog. Anyway, Jeff Miller's A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia is your one-stop shop for, well, word oddities and trivia. Want to know which seven-letter words can be played on a musical instrument? The world's longest acronym? Some common words which change from one to three syllables upon the addition of just one letter? Sixteen spellings for Hanukkah? Those and many more are on page 1, and there are 19 pages (three of them containing "long words"). The level of obsessiveness can be judged by this bracketed note on page 11:
[Note: To be precisely correct, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest vocabulary entry in any English-language dictionary. Stuart Kidd points out that a longer word actually appears in the OED2, although only as part of a quoted citation for a different word. It is a 75-letter chemical name with numerous hyphens, and it is described on page 13 of this web site. Several other citations in the OED2 include multiple words that are "run together" with or without hyphens, forming "words" of more than 45 letters.]And these are long pages. Abandon all hope of getting anything productive done in the near future, ye who enter there!
(I was reminded of the site by an Ask MetaFilter question.)
The Daily Growler reminds us that today is the anniversary of the birth of Ezra Pound, one of my favorite poets ever since I came across "Ancient Music" ("Winter is icummen in," quoted in the Growler's post) in college. You can read perhaps the best of his short poems, "The Spring," here; today I'll quote "The Gypsy," which for some reason has stuck in my head for almost 40 years:
THE GYPSY"Est-ce que vous avez vu des autres—des camarades—avec des singes ou des ours?"
A Stray Gipsy—A.D. 1912That was the top of the walk, when he said:
"Have you seen any others, any of our lot,
"With apes or bears?"
— A brown upstanding fellow
Not like the half-castes,
up on the wet road near Clermont.
The wind came, and the rain,
And mist clotted about the trees in the valley,
And I'd the long ways behind me,
gray Aries and Biaucaire,
And he said, "Have you seen any of our lot?"
I'd seen a lot of his lot ...
ever since Rhodez,
Coming down from the fair
of St. John,
With caravans, but never an ape or a bear.
Andrei Bely was famous as a poet as well as a novelist, but while I love his novel Petersburg and am reading his earlier The Silver Dove (set aside to read Orfografiya, which I finally finished Saturday night), I've read very little of his poetry. His supreme achievement as a poet is generally considered to be his long poem of 1921, Pervoe svidanie, available in a very nice bilingual edition with copious notes called The First Encounter
And now for something completely different. The Style section of Sunday's NY Times had an article by Stephanie Rosenbloom on the word vajayjay:
It began on Feb. 12, 2006, when viewers of the ABC series "Grey’s Anatomy" heard the character Miranda Bailey, a pregnant doctor who had gone into labor, admonish a male intern, "Stop looking at my vajayjay."I had been vaguely aware of the word, and was glad to get the backstory on how it achieved its current prominence. I suspect, however, that it will not catch on beyond the United States; something about it screams "cutesy Americanism."The line sprang from an executive producer’s need to mollify standards and practices executives who wanted the script to include fewer mentions of the word vagina.
The scene, however, had the unintended effect of catapulting vajayjay (also written va-jay-jay) into mainstream speech...
What this really demonstrates, say some linguists, is that there was a vacuum in popular discourse, a need for a word for female genitalia that is not clinical, crude, coy, misogynistic or descriptive of a vagina from a man’s point of view.
"There was a need for a pet name," said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chairman of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, "a name that women can use in a familiar way among themselves."
Trying to get some books unpacked (yes, we've been here almost three months and some of the books are still in boxes), I pulled out my ancient Sophocles for the use of schools, Vol. II: Explanatory notes, by Lewis Campbell, and looking at the inscription "Alice Leslie Walker 1905, Vassar 1906" I thought (being easily distractible) I might as well google her and see if there was any information. I soon found out she'd gotten her BA in '06 and her MA in '08, then a PhD from the University of California in 1917, and had done archeological work in Greece, particularly at Corinth. Then I hit the mother lode: "Alice Leslie Walker (1885-1954)," by John C. Lavezzi (pdf, Google cache). Turns out the woman known to her friends as "Mopsie" had quite a life, with lots of activity, lots of frustration, and not much (of a public nature) to show for it—a fatal combination of excessive perfectionism (a common scholarly trait all too well known to me from my time in grad school) and academic politics (she was part of the losing faction at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens) meant that she was never able to get most of her Corinth work published. A bout of malaria with typhoid-like symptoms in 1920 left her very overweight and nearly deaf, which made her the butt of unkind jokes; nevertheless, she married Georgios A. Kosmopoulos in 1924 and they seem to have had a happy marriage, moving to Santa Barbara, California (for many years my family home) sometime around WWII—Lavezzi says "it may be (evidence is deficient) that she never was able to return to her beloved Greece." I got my copy of her Sophocles text in July 2000, at Bart's Books in Ojai (well worth a visit if you're in Southern California), and I hereby pay tribute to her memory. (She had a nice bookplate, too, with a view of a mountainous landscape and the legend LEVABO OCVLOS 'I will lift up mine eyes [unto the hills]," from Psalm 121.)
I just discovered that canola was coined as late as 1978 the 1970s and is derived from Canadian oil, low acid. If I'd had to guess, I'd have picked an Italian origin; I certainly wouldn't have pegged it for a recent semi-acronym. That's what I call a successful bit of word-creation. (It used to be rapeseed, but for some reason that name was felt to be a detriment from a marketing standpoint.)
I was debating whether to get rid of a little book of "Chinese Sayings" (i.e., four-character expressions) when I looked in the back and saw with a pang of nostalgia the label of Caves Book Co., where I bought so many cheap (mostly pirated) books thirty years ago. On a whim I googled ["Caves Book" taipei], and the first hit was this, a long page that has the exact label I was looking at (the green one, about a quarter of the way down). It turns out Greg Kindall's Seven Roads has a Gallery of Book Trade Labels that I could happily lose myself in for days. I suspect anyone who loves books as physical objects has a soft spot for what Greg calls "these small and sometimes beautiful labels pasted more or less discreetly into the endpapers." Aside from the alphabetical index, you can navigate the collection geographically here; I'm sorry to see that his scanty Argentine collection doesn't include the librería Pygmalion in Buenos Aires where I spent so many happy hours in the mid-'60s (alas, never running into Borges, who frequented the place during the same period)—maybe I'll scan one and send it in.
The Seven Roads site also has a sporadically updated blog and various arcana like a Complete Serial List of Everyman's Library Titles and De Ludis et Hortis: A translation into Latin of R. L. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses; I highly recommend it to your attention.
I don't like The Office (I got enough office nastiness in actual offices, thanks), but it's certainly well written, and Ed Cormany of Descriptively Adequate has a superb analysis of a scene in which a bunch of people argue about the proper use of whomever. You don't have to know the characters to enjoy it, and a YouTube video of the scene is right there so you can watch it before reading the discussion. As Ed says, "since the writers weren't actually taking sides on the issue, but instead doing their best to represent its contentiousness, they were able to successfully portray several points of view and the way that such debates inevitably degrade into snarkiness."
I got to Ed's post via Ben Zimmer at Language Log; in the Update to that post you will find two diametrically opposed views from Log readers about the moribundity of the word: "whom is disappearing, but I hear whomever all the time" versus "'Whom' may be on its last legs, but it's still out there, used by at least a significant minority of speakers, and everyone is aware of its existence. 'Whomever' ... has been completely eradicated from most dialects of standard English (even in the formal register)." It would be interesting to see the results of a study of where and how it's used.
A Haaretz story by Benny Ziffer:
The audience at "Sephardic Jews and Ladino," a conference held Wednesday at Jerusalem's Mishkenot Sha'ananim, was no less interesting than the academics and distinguished figures on the dais...That's a pretty negative take on it, but if all of Ladino literature takes "up less than a wall and a half of shelf space," I guess it's hard to be too positive. (Thanks, Kobi!)Researchers and their fans and the few remaining speakers of a language that for centuries served the Jews of Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle East have not given up. They continue to fight to preserve Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish, which apparently has achieved "museum" status. The National Authority for Ladino Language and Culture, which is headed by former President Yitzhak Navon, Wednesday gloried in what was billed as the first public conference on Ladino literature.
The question is whether there is anything on which to confer. About a year ago I was invited to Yad Ben Zvi in Jerusalem. Dr. Yaron Ben-Naeh, an expert in Jewish history during the Ottoman Empire, ushered me into the holy of holies of the institution's library the rare books wing. Books in Ladino take up less than a wall and a half of shelf space. Apparently that is nearly all there is, according to Ladino literature researcher Dov Hacohen of Bar Ilan University and Yad Ben Zvi. It's not much in comparison to the endless treasures of Yiddish, Ladino's rival since the creation of the state.
Still, participants insisted on speaking of "Ladino literature," even when the material was in fact advertising, aimed at getting readers to contribute to some yeshiva. Hacohen, who spoke on Ladino publications in Jerusalem since 1500, was a crowd-pleaser with his presentation of these rare documents. In one, consisting of Ladino mixed with Arabic, the Jewish target audience is warned against sitting in kahwe houses or enjoying the merriments of the Gentiles. But is it literature?
Literature was a luxury for Ladino speakers. The novels and poetry written in the language are on such a primitive, basic level as to evoke pity.
A nice Washington Post story by Monica Bhide about teaching her son another language:
As a very young child, my son Jai had an unaccountable aversion to learning any language other than English. Yet, I was determined to teach him Hindi, my mother tongue, to ensure he did not miss out on a culture and heritage for lack of simple knowledge of its language.It's a touching account that helps me understand how stories and languages get passed on. Maybe my mother would have learned her parents' native Norwegian if instead of offering a penny for each word learned they'd sat around the kitchen telling stories and preparing food. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)I would point to his clothes, toys and books and encourage him to respond with their Hindi names. Eventually, he spoke a few words — he could point to a chair and call it kursi and say the numbers from 1 to 10 in Hindi. But he did not know simple phrases such as "How are you?" or "My name is Jai." He could not have a conversation in Hindi.
That all changed during a trip to India when Jai was 4. I was sitting with my mother on the floor, shelling peas. As we were laughing and talking, Jai wandered over, picked up a pea pod with great curiosity and asked what it was. It is mattar, my mother told him. Peas? he wondered. Inside this? He loved the fact that he could open the pod and find a treasure. He opened one, then another and another. He sat still, which in itself was an achievement. He began to listen to us, to ask questions.
Some mothers like to color with their young children, some read books, some watch television. I could never have imagined our time together would be used to shell peas.
Once we were back in the States, I searched supermarkets and farmers' markets for peas in pods. I rinsed them, patted them dry and waited for 3 o'clock so I could pick up Jai from school and we could shell peas. When pea pods were hard to find, I cheated, more than once passing off edamame as peas. Rarely were we able to eat the peas for dinner; by the time Jai's tiny fingers got them out of the pods, they were too squished or had gone straight into his mouth. I didn't care as long as we sat and shelled and talked...
Some Russian-related items:
1) I'm nearing the end of Bykov's Orfografiya (discussed here, here, and here), and in a section where a bunch of people were getting drunk and quoting poetry, I was delighted to find that after a bunch of Blok the narrator says "Then some young people read poetry Yat' didn't know at all"—and it turns out (upon googling) to be by Yunna Morits, a fine poet I've only recently discovered! She was born in 1937 and became well known in the '60s, but anachronism is rampant in this operatic novel set in early 1918. (The poem quoted in the novel is "Читая греческий кувшин," which is available in this thread; this page has a selection of poems in English and Russian.)
2) Via Там есть немало хорошего, но особенно выделяется отличная сетевая версия Библиотеки литературы Древней Руси. Там просто очень много замечательного - далеко не только стандартные тексты, такие, как "Слово о полку Игореве" или "Повесть временных лет" - хотя они тоже конечно есть. Например, там есть очень интересное Хождение Игумена Даниила - о паломничестве в Палестину в начале 12-го века. Или текст множества новгородских берестяных грамот - тоже захватывает. И еще и еще. Притом все тексты есть в оригинале, в переводе на современный русский язык, или в паралелльном показе и того и другого.
3) I neglected to mention on Saturday that I'd gone to the Troubadour Books sale I wrote about here; I got a bunch of books, among them Stalin's last crime: the plot against the Jewish doctors, 1948-1953 by Jonathan Brent, Tsvetaeva by Viktoria Schweitzer, Proust: The later years by George D. Painter, Vekhi: sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii by Nikolai Berdiaev et al., Russia under the old regime by Richard Pipes, Autobiography: My childhood, In the world, My universities by Maxim Gorky, Snow by Orhan Pamuk, and Nabokov's Dar as well as its English translation The Gift, but the ones I want to single out for mention are Metkoe moskovskoe slovo ['The accurate/pointed/apt Moscow word'] by Evgenii Platonovich Ivanov and Russkaia literatura XX veka: dooktyabr'skii period ['Russian literature of the 20th century: prerevolutionary period'] by N. A. Trifonov.
The first is a collection of articles written almost a century ago by Ivanov, who was born in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1884 but fell in love with Moscow and its inhabitants, and spent his time hobnobbing with tradesmen and others, noting their peculiarities of their speech: chapters are titled "Booksellers," "Antiquarians," "Cries of street vendors," "Trickery," "Curious street signs," "Cabbies," "Tailors," "Innkeepers," and so on. The editors say many of the words are in no other dictionary, even Dahl. And many of the entries consist of noted-down scraps of dialog, giving a vivid feel for Moscow street life in the prerevolutionary period.
The Trifonov anthology is a double time capsule, the texts collected from the first years of the 20th century but seen through the lens of a later era, 1971 to be precise (the very year I visited the late USSR); I was amazed to see that already Nikolai Gumilev (shot in 1921) and Osip Mandelstam (died in the Gulag in 1938) were being reprinted and studied in schools, alongside the recently rehabilitated Akhmatova and the exiles Andrei Bely, Ivan Bunin, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and Zinaida Gippius. Of course all of them had to be sanitized by a preliminary 100-page section of Revolutionary Proletarian Literature (led off by the mandatory Lenin article), but still, it sheds new light on what I had thought of as the frozen Brezhnev regime. This was, after all, just a few years after the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the removal of Dubček.
The title of this entry is something of a nod in the direction of the Prague journal of that name, a 1996 copy of which was given me by a young woman who translated for it and in whose company I greatly improved my Russian. Thanks, Katya, wherever you are!
I've just read Adam Gopnik's typically charming and insightful essay "The Corrections: Of abridgments, commentaries, and art" in the latest (Oct. 22) New Yorker, and I heartily recommend it to you if you have the physical magazine—alas, it is not online. But there is a sentence that is probably yet another sign that I am irrevocably behind the times when it comes to ever-changing English grammar. Here it is:
The tale of how the guy who played Superman on a cheap, forgotten TV series shot himself lacks the grip of tragedy, even pop tragedy, which demands, after all, that the hero once counted.(He is discussing Hollywoodland, "the intelligent, brilliantly acted... yet unbelievably dull story of how the fifties television Superman, George Reeves, killed himself or was killed in a very minor Hollywood scandal.") Now, in my dialect, the verb demand requires the pathetic remnant of what was once the English subjunctive: I demand that you go, He demanded that she be executed, or in this case which demands that the hero once have counted. Does Gopnik's version sound perfectly acceptable and mine stodgy and archaic, or do you share my sense of what demand demands? (If the latter, do you too get regular solicitations from AARP?)
Jeremy Osner of READIN is trying to translate Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" (see here, here, here, and here) and says "I'm trying to put together a new translation of "Hymns to the Night", an updated version of MacDonald's translation, which is more than a hundred years old now and sounds a little stilted to me. I set up an engine for a collaborative translation effort (since I am myself neither a fluent speaker of German nor a student of Romantic literature) here — if you or any of your readers want to make suggestions I would love to hear them." So if that sounds like fun, head on over and help out.
Something completely different: this blog is devoted to the French equivalent of "asshole," the sale con; this post invites comments on how to say it in Québec (the suggested equivalent is chien sale).
Jed Hartman used to write "a fortnightly column on words and wordplay" called Words and Stuff (archives). It hasn't been updated in over four years, but there's lots of interesting material there, for instance a column using only monosyllables ("This week's screed is writ in words of just one beat") and one on names for winds. (Via MetaFilter.)
Jed also has an "online journal," what the kids today are calling a blog, called Lorem Ipsum, that is still being updated. We all know about "lorem ipsum," right?
According to flynn999 in this Wordorigins thread:
If you’re just saying someone is ginger-haired or ginger, factually, without any intended insult both g’s are pronounced soft (jin-jer). If you are being insulting it can be pronounced with a hard g and no soft g sound in the middle (ging-er, like singer), but by no means always or even the majority of the time, and its quite new. (I’ve taken to calling my tortoiseshell and white cat Ging Ging (like Sing Sing)). Its almost always more of a joke, though obviously some people can use it to be seriously nasty or bitchyThe learned Dr. Techie says "it sounds rather improbable," and aldiboronti (a Brit) says "I’ve never heard a hard ‘g’ pronunciation in my life for any sense of the word." As always, I turn to my readership for enlightenment: are any of you familiar with this alleged ginger-rhymes-with-singer pronunciation?
Actually, the Day itself was the 16th, but I've just found out about it, and an excellent perk—free access to Oxford Language Dictionaries Online—is available through this weekend (15-21 October 2007). So if you want to rummage around in the lexicons of French, German, Italian, and Spanish, now's your opportunity.
And while I was at OUPblog, I found Ben Zimmer's post Are We Giving Free Rei(g)n to New Spellings?, in which he explains why and how dictionaries add "incorrect" spellings like "vocal chords" and "free reign." It may surprise you (if you are, like me, American) to learn that "the vocal chords variant has long been accepted in the United Kingdom (along with other anatomical uses like spinal chord)" and that the chords spelling is actually attested two years earlier than the "correct" one. As Ben says, "One generation’s 'common error' ... can be the next generation’s accepted variant, and this is where we rely on the Oxford English Corpus to give us a snapshot of how usage is shifting." It's a good read. Oh, and he has a post on Dictionary Day too, with lots of historical tidbits.
Like having fun with words? Like feeding people (even if on a tiny scale)? Head right over to Free Rice and start playing. They give you a word with four possible definitions; pick the right one and they donate ten grains of rice to a hungry person through an aid agency. (Don't say "why don't they just give the rice," because the rice is funded through ad revenue which they get by hits, and each time you move to the next page of choices they get another hit and can buy more rice. No game, no views, no ad revenue, no rice.) As you get words right, you move up to higher levels; the highest is Level 50, and I've managed to stay there for fairly long periods... but then they stump me with a word like nisus (yes, I should have studied harder in Latin class) and I drop back down. I found it at MetaFilter, and as a commenter said there, "I'm sure the people who put this together had fun.. one of the (incorrect) choices for the meaning of 'cockloft' was 'womb'." I responded "Yeah, I think that's why this is so much fun: the people who created it really care about words and have a sneaky sense of humor. Most 'word game' sites use stupid words and/or definitions and pall quickly." Give it a try, but don't blame me if it eats up your morning.
I've had a stack of books I want to write about sitting here for weeks—all right, months—glaring at me, peeking from behind my computer and making me feel guilty. Well, I've got excuses, what with the moving and the editing and what have you, but it's time to move on and start whittling away the stack. With no further ado, let me introduce Substantific Marrow, by frequent LH commenter John Emerson, proprietor of the consistently interesting site Idiocentrism.
If you like Idiocentrism (go on over and check it out), you'll like this book. It puts on display the extraordinarily wide range of John's interests, from literature ("Madame Bovary as Train Wreck," "Third-world Joyce," "Square Ibsen," Aucassin et Nicolette) to philosophy (Wittgenstein, Descartes, Parmenides, et al) to Americana ("The Muskogee / Waukesha / Bismarck Triangle," "W. C. Fields and the American Family") to probably his most enduring passion, the complex network of links between Northern Europe, the Silk Road, and the Far East, involving such things as the putative connection between Turkish qayiq and Inuit qayaq (see this LH post) and the wanderings of Edward Ætheling (who died, probably murdered, before he could take over the throne of England and avert the Norman Conquest).
Don't be fooled by self-deprecating remarks like "At one time I hoped to work these concepts into a coherent argument, but increasingly it seems that my works will consist mostly of the interesting scraps of citations which I have succeeded in accumulating in the course of my wasted life" (from "Parmenides in Szechuan"). He does find wonderful quotes ("So protracted was [Darwin's] barnacle study that his children assumed it was the normal occupation of every father: When one of Darwin's young sons visits a neighbor's home, he asks his friend there, 'Where does your father work on his barnacles?'"), but his arguments, conjoining tidbits of history you never knew about or never thought of relating to each other and suggesting contacts and influences standard history knows not of, take side roads that tend to be far more enlivening than the well-trodden highway that bored us in high school. If you're going to read about Aristotle, would you rather it be in the context of analytics and the five elements or the sex life of molluscs? I thought so.
His credo is "To me studies of concrete particulars (history, geography, philology) are infinitely more interesting than their theoretical explanations, and the fully-theorized studies (marginalist economics, analytic philosophy, 'literary studies') are abominations," and I happily subscribe to it. If you prefer shiny and unusual facts and suggestions to the dull coin of Standard Theories, this is the book for you. And he's promised more, including one on Inner Eurasian history that I'm very eager to read.
In case you're wondering about the title, it's from Rabelais:
Following the dog's example, you will have to be wise in sniffing, smelling, and estimating these fine and meaty books; swiftness in the chase and boldness in the attack are what is called for; after which, by careful reading and frequent meditation, you should break the bone and suck the substantific marrow.
[The following is another nugget from the stash of decade-old papers where I found the Mandelstam translation I posted yesterday; I originally sent it as an e-mail in late 1995 to my old friend Holt. The context is the argument among linguists over the phonemic system of Kabardian; some people thought it had only one vowel, others that it didn't have any at all (see discussion here). Yes, the humor is silly and obvious, but it still gives me a chuckle, so I'm posting it.]
Obviously you are not au courant with developments in the Western North Caucasus, which is understandable, since what attention is left over from the Middle East, the Balkans, and Newt Gingrich has gone in recent years to the Southeastern South Caucasus, the Northwestern South Caucasus, the Central South Caucasus, and of course of late the Eastern North Caucasus. Frankly, the Western North Caucasus has not been much in the news the last couple of hundred years. But I digress.
The fact is that for some time now the Sacred Vowel has not been brought out of the temple and shown unto the people, as was strictly required by He Who Loosened the Tongue of Mankind and Taught Them to Curdle Goat's Milk (in Kabardian, Pshchtskrekhlkhdmkhrt). Instead, an allegedly faithful replica has been exhibited, while the authorities in Nalchik have claimed that the original is being kept in a temperature-controlled vault to avoid further wear and tear on a vowel that is, after all, many millennia old and not easily replaced.
However, the story does not end there—this is the Caucasus, after all. For years the rumor has been circulating in Kabardino-Balkaria (and before that in the Kabardino-Balkarian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and it was not unknown to the Karachaev-Cherkessk Autonomous Region) that the vowel was not in a vault at all (a supposition strengthened by the fact that the nearest temperature-controlled vault not run by Armenians was in Moscow), but was in the personal possession of Samuil Samuilovich Kshkhbzhmeshchkmov, long-time party chairman of the KBASSRCP and now unquestioned boss of Kabardino-Balkaria, granted what amounts to de facto autonomy by Moscow in return for surreptitious support of the South Ossetians (not to mention quite open participation in the Russian contingent aiding the Abkhaz separatist movement; the Kabardians have so far managed to avoid taking sides in the Chechen conflict, citing a proverb to the effect that "The Terek and the Cherek [rivers] are like the goat and the camel" and plying suspicious Russian ethnographic experts with arak until they quit asking for elucidation). Kshkhbzhmeshchkmov, known familiarly to his people as "Smlsk," is said to bring out the vowel at wild parties, performing antics that leave even his faithful retainers muttering ancient apotropaic formulae. Although the Kabardians are a fairly stolid lot and unlikely to rebel even with such provocation, it should be remembered that the vowel is sacred to the Circassians as well, a fierce people that, even though much reduced in the 19th century by defections to Turkey, is still capable of causing havoc if roused.
It is possible, however, that the potential crisis may soon fade into the realm of the might-have-been. Conservative as they are, the peoples of the Western North Caucasus have not remained unaffected by the onslaught of modernity, and it is beginning to be said among the younger generation that there never was a Sacred Vowel at all, and that the annual exhibition is an embarrassing relic of bygone days that interferes with the transition to capitalism and prosperity. Saparmurad Niyazov has promised the Turkmens "a Mercedes in every yurt," and the Kabardians feel they deserve no less. It will be ironic if, by the turn of the millennium, cheap replicas of the Sacred Vowel are being hawked to tourists in Zalukokoazhe and Baksan while the precious original is moldering in a cellar, nosed by the occasional stoat and forgotten by mankind.
In the woods are orioles: the length of vowels
in tonic verses is the only measure.
But only once each year does nature lavish out
lagniappe duration, as in Homer's metrics.
Like a caesura yawns this day; since morning
there have been peace and arduous longueurs,
oxen in pastures, and a golden languor
out of a reed extracts a whole note's riches.
—Osip Mandelstam, summer 1914
I finally got screwjacks (or, if you prefer, jackscrews) put up in the cellar to support the ridiculous weight of the bookshelves I've arranged back to back to separate my office from the vestibule area of the house and give it the feel (so pleasant to this habitué of university libraries) of a private carrel, so I'm getting around to going through boxes that have been sitting around for a couple of months now, and one of them contained (among other papers from a decade ago) my translation of one of my favorite early Mandelstam poems, which I thought had gotten lost in one of our moves, and since it still pleases me, I decided to share it with you. (The original Russian is below.)
I notice that many online versions carry the title Равноденствие [Ravnodenstvie] 'equinox' (literally 'equal-day-hood'). The version in my battered little Sobranie sochinenii is untitled, and I'm leaving it that way because "Equinox" makes no sense for a summer poem (and it's obviously a summer poem—for one thing, orioles don't show up until well after the vernal equinox [Russian link]). I'm curious how the title got attached to the poem; if anybody knows, please share. The note in Stone
Есть иволги в лесах, и гласных долгота
В тонических стихах единственная мера.
Но только раз в году бывает разлита
В природе длительность, как в метрике Гомера.
Как бы цезурою зияет этот день:
Уже с утра покой и трудные длинноты,
Волы на пастбище, и золотая лень
Из тростника извлечь богатство целой ноты.
<Лето 1914>
Sally Thomason at Language Log has an excellent post taking issue with a confused article by W. Tecumseh Fitch on the history of linguistics, which claimed (in Sally's summary) that "historical linguistics failed because its main practitioners had nutty ideas, so that it had to be replaced by the truly scientific linguistics of Noam Chomsky and his followers." This got my hackles up for any number of reasons, and Sally does a superb job of demolishing it; anyone interested in intellectual history should read her post. This paragraph reawakened in me the impact—not just intellectual but emotional (it was almost like falling in love)—of learning about all this as I was in the process of deciding linguistics was what I wanted to do, several decades ago:
In 1879, still a student, Saussure published his famous Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Thesis on the primitive system of vowels in the Indo-European languages). This is the initial proposal of the theory that later came to be known as Laryngeal Theory. The significance of Saussure's proposal (formulated when he was all of about 20 years old!) is hardly confined to Indo-European (IE) linguistics. It was in fact the first major structural analysis of a language in Western linguistics — the language, in this case, being Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of the many IE languages. Saussure took the extraordinarily messy and numerous patterns of IE vowel alternations, the so-called ablaut alternations, and reconstructed a much neater and simpler system for PIE by hypothesizing the existence of three consonants that had not survived into any of the then-known IE languages, ancient or modern. He could not have done this if he had not started with a profoundly structural notion of the language system; and the structural notion itself, though it was developed in a dramatic way by Saussure, was prefigured by the Neogrammarian breakthrough, the regularity hypothesis of sound change — which also makes sense only if language is viewed as inherently systematic.This stuff should be as well (if vaguely) known to the public at large as Einstein's theory of relativity (not to mention Freud's pseudoscientific ideas); language is, after all, closer to us than the stars, and of more immediate importance in our lives than the speed of light.
Her followup, on Fitch's misunderstanding of how language change works, is also worth reading. But I find the use of red for cited words annoying, and I imagine color-blind people would find it even more so (and there are probably browsers where it doesn't show up as intended); why not use italics like everybody else?
Joel at Far Outliers quotes a chunk of Tony Judt's new book
Just so you'll have something to take your mind off current political messes, here's Papa's Diary Project: "The 1924 diary of Harry Scheurman, transcribed and annotated by his grandson, Matt Unger." It starts here, on New Year's Eve, 1923 ("I don’t feel like going out with friends celebrating the N. Year"—but he did anyway: "My New Years Eve, was at an end at an East Side joint where prohibition drinks were freely served, I reached home 4am"); Matt is posting an entry a day, and I look forward to catching up as his Papa (from Snyatyn in Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian empire when he was born and now in Ukraine) discusses baseball, dating, and Jewish life on the Lower East Side, accompanied by his grandson's annotations and relevant illustrations. Great stuff. (Via this NY Times article. Thanks, Bonnie!)
Every time I try taking the EU seriously some piece of nonsense like this comes up to derail the effort. A BBC News story says:
The European Union and Bulgaria are at odds over how to spell the word euro.The problem lies with Bulgaria's Cyrillic alphabet, under which the common European currency is spelt "evro" rather than euro.
The row threatens to scupper the signing of an EU accord with Balkan state Montenegro, officials say.
Bulgarian diplomats said they could only sign the document if euro is spelt correctly in the Bulgarian version of the agreement...
"This is part of our national identity. We brought the third alphabet into the European Union and it's a matter of respect for linguistic diversity," the Bulgarian spokeswoman said.What does "taken into account" mean if not "let them use their own goddam alphabet"? What the hell is wrong with bureaucrats? "Sorry, the Greeks get to write 'evro' in their alphabet but you don't get to in yours, because, well, they're Greeks and you're Bulgarians." (Thanks for the link, Ben!)Bulgaria is the only EU member to widely use the Cyrillic alphabet but it is used in Balkan countries that are lining up to join the EU.
According to the Brussels-based EU Observer website, other countries where the euro is pronounced differently, including Slovenia, have tried to obtain a different spelling of the common currency. However, they have all failed except for Greece.
Unlike Slovenia which uses the Latin alphabet, Greece had put forward its different alphabet as an argument - something the Bulgarians are trying to do as well, the EU Observer said.
The European Central Bank insists that the name of the common currency must be the same in all the official languages of the EU although the existence of different alphabets should be taken into account.
The site words of a man's mouth records a great find:
In December of 2005 this autograph book was found at a used knicknack store in Hong Kong's central district and purchased for 380 Hong Kong dollars. The identity of the book's original owner is a mystery. The stories the book reveals are hidden in plain sight. Aside from a few quotations in English, the bulk of the entries are in Chinese. Tiny pictures of men dot the pages of the book. The Chinese characters start in earnest on the seventh page... You are invited to browse the pages, comment on the imagery, and if you are able, translate the Chinese characters into English. Perhaps together we can discover (or perhaps imagine) the story behind the owner of this almost lost journal.It turns out to be a "farewell book" in which classmates wrote quotes or their own thoughts for a fellow student; this is dated 1942 (the year 31 in the Nationalist calendar), and the classmates attended Jiao Da (Shanghai Jiao Tong University). Many of the inscriptions have been translated by commenters, and some of the students have been identified ("Cai Zhu-Hong, the person who signed this page, might be responsible for designing a new steam engine at East Shanghai Shipyard in 1958"; "Xu Shao-Gao, Senior Engineer... Graduated in 1942 from Jiao-Tong University, Department of Mechanical Engineering... Has various positions in the government as well as the Chinese Association of Mechanical Engineering"). A great use of the internet, and it's very interesting to see what young people write in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. (It's not clear whether the original owner of the book was Xi Yao or Xi Rao; different translators render it different ways.)
Thanks for the link, Paul!
Via the always interesting Far Outliers, another blog discovery: Slainte, "David Goldsworthy's writings - Indonesia, Irish Music, Language and Linguistics, Mainly Poetry, but not Politics (or Economics)." How can I resist a description like that? His latest post is on Jakarta Chinese Indonesian:
Having learned most of my Indonesian in Central Java it came as a bit of a shock when I started working at my current school in Jakarta and being confronted with the Jakarta Chinese variety of Indonesian. I can't say at this point in time just how much it differs from Central Javanese Indonesian other than it is often spoken at break-neck speed - much faster than one is used to hearing in Java.The first five numbers are ce, nok, sa, si, nggo. An earlier post is on the Indonesian Orthodox Church; as my mother used to say, I never thought the subject would come up.I find the Jakarta Chinese variety of Indonesian a fascinating code and wish I had more time to devote to a serious analysis of it.
One difference is the counting system that one often hears. I think it comes from the Hokkien language...
Matt of No-sword has a typically informative post about two words for 'frog' in Japanese, kaeru and kawazu; he says "The common answer is that kawazu is the 'old word' that got replaced by the 'new word' kaeru, but this is a misconception. It's really just another case of semantic overlap combined with poetic versus everyday register," and proceeds to give a detailed and convincing explanation which you should read if you have any interest in the subject. But I came here to tell you about it because of the kicker:
Kawazu would probably have been forgotten by all but the specialists by now (much like tazu) if it weren't for one thing: the Dark Side of the Moon of traditional Japanese poetry, that one haikai by Bashō that everyone knows...Isn't that interesting? I've read that poem umpteen times without having the slightest inkling of this basic information!古池や かはづ飛び込む 水の音Bonus fact: Bashō was actually consciously playing with the kawazu tradition here by attributing the sound to the water rather than the frog. The frog's implied silence, after centuries of naku kawazu, is a crucial part of the stillness that allows the sound of water to make its impact.Furuike ya/ Kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto
Old pond/ Frog jumps in/ Sound of water
Today, as a reward to myself after two months of steady work, I finally visited Troubadour Books in North Hatfield, which had been recommended to me as one of the best bookstores in the Pioneer Valley. After spending a couple of hours there, I'm willing to state flatly that it's the best bookstore in the area, and one of the best I've been in anywhere. Bob Willig, the owner, got into the business the way all the good ones do: by buying way, way too many books and realizing opening a bookstore was the only way out. (I've thought of it, believe me, but working as assistant manager of a bookstore many years ago pretty much inoculated me against the notion; it's really, really hard to make a go of selling books. And here's a moment of pure serendipity—I went in to turn down the radio so I could concentrate on what I was writing; WFCR was playing "Keepin' Out Of Mischief Now," and as I bent down to turn the knob I heard the line "Books are my best company." Oh, and no, there's no website; Bob calls himself "computer-illiterate" and has an ancient desktop with a dial-up connection that regulars needle him about.) When I went in (dropped off by my loving and endlessly tolerant wife) I asked Bob where the Russian history books were and if he had any books in Russian; he leaped into action, taking me around the main room (maneuvring past the piles of books in most of the aisles) and saying "Most of the post-medieval stuff is here, below Germany, but the early history is mostly back here, and I've got lots of stuff on Orthodoxy in the religion section... I don't have much in Russian, but what there is is on the top shelf here." (I'm compressing drastically, since he likes nothing better than talking about books.) Then a young woman came in and asked about Pound's Cantos; being a Pound fan and a kibitzer, I trailed along to the Modernist nook (Joyce-Pound-Eliot), where Bob was distressed to be unable to find any copies. "That's terrible, I usually have a bunch of them. I'm really sorry." Meanwhile, with my eagle eye I noticed one and sang out like a whale-spotter in a crows-nest: "Upper shelf, on the right!" Everyone was happy, and I got into an extended conversation about Pound, anti-Semitism, Zukofsky, and the sad propensity of otherwise smart and perceptive writers to fall for things like Mussolini saying "I liked your book" (or, in Mark Twain's case, all those ridiculous business ventures).
But what about the books, you say? Well, yes, I found a few books:
A reader's guide to Remembrance of things past, by Terence Kilmartin
Medieval Russian Epics, Chronicles and Tales, by Serge A. Zenkovsky
The burn, by Vasilii Pavlovich Aksenov
The naked year, by Boris Pilniak
In the grip of strange thoughts: Russian poetry in a new era, ed. J. [James] Kates
Smolensk under Soviet rule, by Merle Fainsod
Stalin, a political biography, by Isaac Deutscher
Golos iz khora [A voice from the chorus], by Abram Terts
Mysli vrasplokh = Thought unaware, by Abram Terts
Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, ed. I.V. Gessen
You'll note that in what was billed as a scanty Russian-language section I found three books I had to have right away (Tertz/Sinyavsky is one of my favorites, and the Gessen collection of documents includes a 120-page essay on the Provisional Government by V.D. Nabokov, the novelist's father, who was a member of it); there were others I managed to leave for possible purchase during the sale next week (33% off starting Thursday the 18th!). And despite barely scratching the surface of the history section I found a couple of nice cheap paperback classics (Fainsod and Deutscher). And glancing at the start of the fiction section I saw a translation of the Aksenov novel I recently got in Russian (hey, sometimes a trot is helpful), and then it occurred to me they might have a translation of the obscure Pilnyak novel I'd just been reading about, and sure enough they did.
So if you're anywhere near North Hatfield (north of Northampton, across the river [alas] from Hadley) and have an interest in books other than the latest best sellers, you owe it to yourself to drive up Route 5 to Depot Road—it's right at the intersection. In fact, a fellow Troubadour fan ("world's greatest used bookstore") has actually put up a brief YouTube video showing what it looks like from the road, so you have no excuse. And for god's sake, don't just walk around for a few minutes and then leave without a word. Bob hates that. You don't have to buy anything, but take the time to say "Hey, nice store!" Because it is.
Update. There's a nice write-up by Drew Johnson, with pictures, at Maud Newton.
The other night, in our Long March through Proust (begun last November), my wife and I finally finished Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe)—it certainly ends with a bang!—and I now have a question and a complaint. The complaint is an artistic one, and I have not seen it mentioned anywhere: it seems utterly implausible that the narrator is welcomed into the circle of every single person he meets. The problem is not that he's a self-absorbed cad, since so is pretty much everyone else in those circles, it's that he's a nobody from nowhere. His father is a Permanent Secretary in some Ministry or other, which is respectable but not so imposing as to open all doors; the family is well off but not so rich as to open all doors; he himself is an adolescent with lots of fantasies and a deep knowledge of the repertoire of the Paris ballet companies but no ability to do anything significant for anyone. As far as I can make out, a plausible response on the part of an aristocrat being introduced to him would be a vague smile, a limp handshake, and a quick retreat. Instead, every single person, even the goddam Prince de Guermantes, insists that he come to tea/dinner and meet the very best people in France—their normal companions won't do for this young man, no, it's got to be the cream of the cream. I'd call it a Mary Sue except that the hero is so repellent. ("Say, honey, could you come help me scout out a restaurant where I can seduce the woman I'll be taking out to dinner instead of you?") But you can't help me with that; I'm just griping to get it out of my system.
The question is this: what the devil are all those etymologies doing in the latter part of Cities of the Plain? On p. 917 of my edition
"I shall be all the more delighted to meet her," I answered him, "because she has promised me a book by the former curé of Combray about the place-names of this region, and I shall be able to remind her of her promise. I'm interested in that priest, and also in etymologies."That is followed by four pages of detailed etymological discussion, beginning:
“Don’t put any faith in the ones he gives,” replied Brichot, “there is a copy of the book at la Raspelière, which I have glanced through, but without finding anything of any value; it is a mass of error. Let me give you an example. The word bricq is found in a number of place-names in this neighbourhood. The worthy cleric had the distinctly odd idea that it comes from briga, a height, a fortified place. He finds it already in the Celtic tribes, Latobriges, Nemetobriges, and so forth, and traces it down to such names as Briand, Brion, and so forth. To confine ourselves to the region in which we have the pleasure of your company at this moment, Bricquebose means the wood on the height, Bricqueville the habitation on the height, Bricquebec, where we shall be stopping presently before coming to Maineville, the height by the stream. Now there is not a word of truth in all this, for the simple reason that bricq is the old Norse word which means simply a bridge. Just as fleur, which Mme de Cambremer’s protégé takes infinite pains to connect, in one place with the Scandinavian words floi, flo, in another with the Irish word ae or aer, is, beyond any doubt, the fjord of the Danes, and means harbour. So too, the excellent priest thinks that the station of Saint-Mars-le-Vetu, which adjoins la Raspelière, means Saint-Martin-le-Vieux (vetus). It is unquestionable that the word vieux has played a great part in the toponymy of this region. Vieux comes as a rule from vadum, and means a passage, as at the place called les Vieux. It is what the English call ford (Oxford, Hereford). But, in this particular instance, Vêtu is derived not from vetus, but from vastatus, a place that is devastated and bare...(The French is below the cut.) Now, I love etymologies as much as anyone and more than most, but I tend to like my etymologies in reference works, where I can be reasonably sure they're plausible. The musings of a fictional character about fictional place names are of much less interest. I grasp that there are artistic points being made about the preservation of history in names, about the importance of perspective (X says this, but Y says that; I used to believe this, but now I believe that, and it changes the way I think about things), all well and good, but four pages? My wife, who loves Proust and has sat without complaint through hundred-page descriptions of trivial chitchat at posh dinner parties, begged me to skip over the next such section (for the etymologies do not end there, oh no, every time Brichot turns up he feels the need to bring a little more lexical enlightenment)—I had to point out to her that the etymologies helped her get to sleep quickly and probably produced a good sound sleep. But seriously, what's the point of these passages? After the bricq and the fleur, the fjord and the vetus, what possible gain is there in going on about vasta and holm and carque and dozens of other odd bits of nomenclature? Inquiring minds want to know.
Ne vous fiez pas trop à celles qu'il indique, me répondit Brichot; l'ouvrage, qui est à la Raspelière et que je me suis amusé à feuilleter, ne me dit rien qui vaille; il fourmille d'erreurs. Je vais vous en donner un exemple. Le mot Bricq entre dans la formation d'une quantité de noms de lieux de nos environs. Le brave ecclésiastique a eu l'idée passablement biscornue qu'il vient de Briga, hauteur, lieu fortifié. Il le voit déjà dans les peuplades celtiques, Latobriges, Nemetobriges, etc., et le suit jusque dans les noms comme Briand, Brion, etc... Pour en revenir au pays que nous avons le plaisir de traverser en ce moment avec vous, Bricquebosc signifierait le bois de la hauteur, Bricqueville l'habitation de la hauteur, Bricquebec, où nous nous arrêterons dans un instant avant d'arriver à Maineville, la hauteur près du ruisseau. Or ce n'est pas du tout cela, pour la raison que bricq est le vieux mot norois qui signifie tout simplement: un pont. De même que fleur, que le protégé de Mme de Cambremer se donne une peine infinie pour rattacher tantôt aux mots scandinaves floi, flo, tantôt au mot irlandais ae et aer, est au contraire, à n'en point douter, le fiord des Danois et signifie: port. De même l'excellent prêtre croit que la station de Saint-Martin-le-Vêtu, qui avoisine la Raspelière, signifie Saint-Martin-le-Vieux (vetus). Il est certain que le mot de vieux a joué un grand rôle dans la toponymie de cette région. Vieux vient généralement de vadum et signifie un gué, comme au lieu dit: les Vieux. C'est ce que les Anglais appelaient «ford» (Oxford, Hereford). Mais, dans le cas particulier, vieux vient non pas de vetus, mais de vastatus, lieu dévasté et nu...
I love being able to check referral logs and Technorati, because they introduce me to things I might not otherwise find. The latest is Unhappy Medium, the blog of a woman who had been anonymous but is now using her name, Elizabeth Little, because "I no longer have a real job, which means that I no longer fear for my gainful employment. In fact, as a full-time freelancer, I have come to accept the fact that I will never again have truly gainful employment." (These words describe my situation as well.) She has a book coming out in November, Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, which sounds like a lot of fun:
Biting the Wax Tadpole is my take on comparative linguistics, a fresh, irreverent look at the languages of the world. ...[I]f you're the sort of person who has always believed yourself to be incapable of learning a new language - or even if you've just been bored to tears by all the soul-killing grammar classes you've suffered though - then you're the reason I wrote this book. It's designed to be as accessible and enjoyable as possible, without resorting to the sort of pandering condescension that you find in so many guides to style. Instead of warning against grammatical errors, I revel in them. The way I see it, there's far more pleasure to be had in fucking up than in grim perfection.You tell 'em! And she got the book contract because the publisher saw this essay, "Ablative, Allative, Adessive, Obsessive," in the NY Times (which I had missed when it came out because I tend to skip the Travel section); it's a very enjoyable read:I also wrote the book because if there's anything in this world that I truly love, it's language... Although I'm well aware that you probably don't want to spend your free time rifling through Yoruba grammars, that's not enough to keep me from standing outside your window with the equivalent of Peter Gabriel on a boombox, doing my best to convince you that language is far more exciting and entertaining than your teachers ever made it out to be.
I don’t exactly have the usual collection of literary classics and popular nonfiction. Instead, I have language books. A lot of language books. Several shelves of them, in fact, and they’re not exactly useful titles like French in 30 Seconds or Spanish on the Go. My books are more along the lines of Beginning Dutch, An Introduction to Sanskrit, Practical Mongolian...It can cause problems on dates ("It was only recently that I was in the company of a rather attractive young man and had the bright idea to pull a hefty comparative grammar out of my bag to illustrate the exciting complexities of Finno-Ugric locatives"), but on the whole, it's a pretty good obsession to have. (But then, I would think that, wouldn't I?)The fact of the matter is that foreign-language primers and grammars are my version of a bodice-ripping pirate romance: a guilty pleasure I’d love to hide but can’t quite make go away. I relish conjugation tables and declension charts. I thrill to morphophonemics, glottochronology, perfectiveness.
Mark Woods of the indispensable wood s lot posts a mention of his septennial along with a photo of himself wearing a fine hat and a cheerfully dubious expression that suits the sensibility of his dedicated cullings from the online cornucopia. Saith mw:
As I've said before (and no doubt will say again), "My sense of collegiality with those of similar sensibilities coupled with the voice I find in producing this collage have acted as a great anodyne for megrims, funks and other assorted black dogs of a chemical, tempermental and/or situational variety."Congratulations, keep up the good work, and if those photos are of the countryside around your "small town in Lanark County near Ottawa," you're a lucky man.
Incidentally, for those who don't know, saith (the archaic third person singular of say) is pronounced exactly like the name Seth. It is not "say-eth"; if it were, it would be spelled sayeth, as one form of the archaic second person is spelled sayest.
The always interesting R Devraj of Dick & Garlick ("Notes on Indian English, Hinglish, slang & pop culture") links to a great post at Chez Sinjab about Khaleeji Pidgin, the confusing "Indo-Anglo-Urdu-Arabic mix" spoken in the Gulf (khalij means 'gulf' in Arabic).
I didn't know sida was Urdu. I think only half of the Arabic I know is actually Arabic. And the more Fusa [fusha, Classical Arabic—LH] I learn, the more I realize that I don't really know any Arabic at all. It's ila, not sir; it's rajul, not riyal and don't think for a minute that "inta bachem?" is an acceptable way to ask a woman if she has children.But here it is. This is by no means the Emirati dialect, but in the shops and on the streets of Ras Al Khaimah this is a popular and effective way for people with no common language to communicate. And so somehow I can convey more with a handful of words, and a few good hand signals and guttural gruffs than I could if I had a degree in grammatically sound Arabic.
Of course, there are certain rules to Khaleeji pidgin.
First, certain words must be spoken in certain languages. Greetings, such as sala'am aleykum and sabah al kheir, are always in Arabic. How are you? is usually delievered in Arabic or Hindi. Iuwa, tamam, good, acha and, most importantly, ok are all acceptable ways of saying good. The phrase number one! must always be delivered in English, and with enthusiasm. My friend is perhaps the most popular English phrase, and is to be used liberally. No problem and mafi mushkala are both universally understood, but mafi mukh (no brain) must be spoken in Arabic. Throw in the occasional bas and khalas when ordering food or to show frustration. Then finished it all off with a masala'am for strangers or a yella, bye! for friends.Wonderful stuff!Additionally, many people who've grown up here are fluent in Emirati/Khaleeji, Lebanese, and Egyptian dialects, and maybe a few others. When my Syrian and Emirati friends go for shisha, they switch to Egyptian as a sign of respect. At school they wrote in Standard Modern Fusa, in the mosque they use Classical Fusa. And on the streets and in shops, they speak the Khaleeji pidgin. At home, they speak the dialect of their parents' country. Which is why, perhaps, you can understand Y.'s frustration.
Y. isn't the first to express her shock over this linguistic paradox. In Travels with a Tangerine, Arabic scholar Tim Mackintosh-Smith describes 'Indo-Arabic' in this manner,
"Vocabulary is stripped down to an anorxeric minimum, and the vigorous branches of Arabic verb pruned to a binary fi ( 'in' = 'there is' ) / ma fi ( 'not in' = 'there is not' ) + infinitive. (A neat example of that is of an Indian Muslim who passed a graveyard. His version of the traditional memento mori - 'You [the dead] are those that precede; we are those that follow' - came out as, 'You there is go, I there is come.' ) Omanis seem to be bilingual, I never quite got the hang of it."
Utterly unrelated but also amusing is this article on bizarre English names given to African children ("In Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, another Godknows was a waiter at a popular outdoor café. So was a man named Enough, about whom more will be said later. Across southern Africa, in fact, one can find any number of Lovemores, Tellmores, Trymores and Learnmores, along with lots of people named Justice, Honour, Trust, Gift, Energy, Knowledge and even a Zambian athlete named Jupiter"). Enjoy, but take with a grain of salt because it's by Michael Wines, whose clueless dispatches from Russia were mercilessly mocked by The Exile a decade ago. Thanks to Rethabile (of On Lesotho and Sotho) for the link!
It's not often I scoop the Anglophone world on a news story, but this may be one such occasion—I can't find anything in English on the Cendrars scandal a Francophone reader noticed in Le Figaro (story by Raphaël Stainville, 28 juin 2007) and promptly alerted me to. As I wrote in the early days of LH, Blaise Cendrars (born Frédéric-Louis Sauser) is one of my favorite modernist poets. It so happens that his first publication (or alleged publication) is one of the great mysteries of modernism: he always insisted that as a teenage employee of a Saint Petersburg jeweler in 1907 he had written a long poem called "La Légende de Novgorode" [The legend of Novgorod], a friend had had fourteen copies of a Russian translation printed up (in white on black paper) to surprise him and encourage him to pursue a writing career, and no copies were available (according to the surprisingly detailed French Wikipedia article on the poem, he called it « épuisée » or « hors commerce »). There the matter rested for decades, many scholars deciding the whole thing was an invention of the playful poet.
Then, in 1995, a Bulgarian scholar announced he had found a copy of the Russian edition at a Sofia bookstall. Mon dieu! The world of Cendrars studies was shaken, and people got to work eagerly examining this new find, with its invocation of Rimbaud, reminiscences of the author's stay in Russia (in particular the 1905 revolution and the Russo-Japanese War), and prefigurations of the great Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (discussed in the LH post linked above). The unique copy was bought by a Swiss collector for a price said to exceed $50,000.
Recently a young Russian grad student doing a dissertation on Cendrars, Oxana Khlopina (Оксана Хлопина), decided to investigate the work more closely, and she was disturbed to realize that the Russian of the supposed translation, though printed in pre-1917 orthography, contained errors that would not have been made by anyone who'd grown up with the pre-reform spelling. She then analyzed the typeface and discovered it was Izhitsa, created in 1988 and apparently the only computer font available in the 1990s that could reproduce text in the old orthography. (She also claimed that a mention of "l'hôtel d'Angleterre" was anachronistic, saying the hotel did not have that name before 1925, but that's ridiculous and easily disproved—the 1914 Baedeker lists it under that name on page 88, and a quick googling shows it mentioned in a 1900 book.) Convinced it was a forgery, she put clues together and decided it must be the work of the very scholar who claimed to have found it, though out of respect for him she refused to point the finger at him. (Kiril Kadiiski, the scholar/poet in question, has denied the forgery, but the interview, "Ce n'est pas moi qui ai écrit 'La Légende de Novgorode'," is hidden behind a subscription wall.) You can see images of the original white-on-black publication and of a Bulgarian reprint edition here, and if your German is better than your French you can read about it here. I have no idea where the truth lies, but I do love a good literary scandal. (Thanks for the link, Paul!)
I knew that nonce was (like adder, apron, and orange) an example of metanalysis, for the nonce being reanalyzed from early Middle English for þen ane(s) 'for the one (time).' What I didn't know was that the term nonce word, so familiar to me from linguistics classes (it means a word that occurs only once, or once in a corpus), was (as the OED puts it) "[one of a number of terms coined by James Murray especially for use in the N.E.D.]." Citations:
1884 N.E.D. Fasc. 1, p. x, Words apparently employed only for the nonce, are, when inserted in the Dictionary, marked nonce-wd. 1884 N.E.D. s.v. Agreemony, A nonce-word, probably intended to suggest acrimony. 1927 Englische Studien Nov. 99 If an alternative explanation presents itself, topographical nonce-words ought to be avoided. 1990 B. BRYSON Mother Tongue vi. 91 Germans, suffering a similar problem with zwei and drei, introduced the nonce word zwo, for two, to deal with such misunderstandings.(Note: N.E.D. stands for New English Dictionary, the original name of the OED.) I already discussed self-quoting at the OED; here they get to quote themselves for the first two citations!
I will add that I think Bryson misunderstands the term (as he misunderstands so much about language), and it's regrettable they chose to use that citation.