A kind reader in Slovakia took advantage of the Amazon link in the margin to send me a copy of Language Myths
My wife was remarking on our cat Pushkin's excessive fondness for dairy products when I realized I didn't know the etymology of the word dairy. Not being one to accept such a state of affairs, I dashed off to consult the OED, and discovered that just as a nunnery is a place where nuns live, a dairy (originally deierie) is (or was) a place where deys work. And what is a dey, you ask? Why, it's "A woman having charge of a dairy and things pertaining to it; in early use, also, with the more general sense, female servant, maid-servant." The etymology is as follows:
[OE. dćȝe, corresp. to ON. deigja, maid, female servant, house-keeper (whence Sw. deja dairy-maid):—OTeut. *daigjôn, from ablaut-stem of the vb. (in Gothic) deigan, daig, dig-un, digan-, to knead; whence Goth. daigs, OE. dáȝ, dáh, dough.So dough is 'that which is kneaded,' a dey was originally the woman who kneads it (whence 'female servant' and then specifically 'woman who works in a dairy'), and a lady was a loaf-kneader. Isn't that interesting?
The primitive meaning ‘kneader’, ‘maker of bread’, appears in OE. in the first quotation; in ON. and in early ME. we find the wider sense of ‘female servant’, ‘woman employed in a house or farm’. Cf. also ON. bú-deigja (bú, house, household) and mod. Norw. bu-deia, sćter-deia, agtar-deia. The same word, or a cognate derivative of the same root, is understood to form the second element in OE. hlćfdíȝe, hlćfdiȝe now LADY. See also DAIRY.]
A few citations for dey (which is apparently still used in the Caithness region of Scotland):
c1386 CHAUCER Nun's Pr. T. 26 She was as it were a maner deye.
16.. in Maidment Sc. Pasquils (1868) II. 262 An old dey or dairy maid at Douglas Castle.
1721 RAMSAY To Gay xvii, Dance with kiltit dees, O'er mossy plains.
c1820 Lizie Lindsay in Child Ballads VIII. (1892) 524/1 My father he is an old shepherd, My mither she is an old dey.
I always admired books like the Ultimate Visual Dictionary
I happened on this odd word (from Latin redarguo 'refute') because it's the guide word at the top left of p. 1042 of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate (11th edition), which defines it as 'confute, disprove,' calling it archaic; the OED has more to say: "1. To blame, reprove (a person or persons, an action, etc.). Also const. of, for. Obs. 2. To confute (a person) by argument. (In later use only Sc.; cf. next sense.) 3. To refute or disprove (an argument, statement, etc.). (Since c1700 only Sc., chiefly Law.) 4. absol. or intr. To reprove or refute; to employ argument for the purpose of refuting." (A few citations: 1877 BLACKIEWise Men 327 All these Love's vouchers stand, beyond the craft Of sophist to redargue. 1885 Law Rep. 10 App. Cases 383 note, This fact afforded a degree of real evidence which no parole testimony could redargue. 1641 J. JACKSON True Evang. T. I. 55 Men love truth when it shines, but not when it redargues). Next time you present someone with a triumphant conclusion, you can top it off by saying (in a thick Scottish burr, if you like) "Redargue that!"
As I wrote in a previous post, I have a stack of books I've been wanting to talk about for months; having been derailed by moving, work, and various other trivia, I'm finally getting back to them, and the one I most want to talk about is Michael Erard's Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean
He starts off by talking about one of the most famous blunderers, Reverend Spooner, pointing out that "he didn't make as many verbal blunders as are attributed to him" and of those he did make "very few were 'true' spoonerisms." He goes on to a much more important topic, Freud and the "Freudian slip." He provides a detailed dissection of one of Freud's most famous examples, the case of the young man who tried to quote Vergil's line "Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor" ('May someone rise, an avenger, from my bones') but said "ex nostris" and omitted the word aliquis—for Freud, an extremely significant slip that stemmed from the man's fear that his lover was pregnant. Erard then cites an Italian critic of Freud, the philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro, who points out that omitting a less important word like aliquis 'someone' is a perfectly normal speech error, that an error in a foreign language can hardly be analyzed as if it were in one's native tongue, and that if you take the Freudian attitude you could provide "insightful" interpretations no matter which word was left out. This warmed my anti-Freudian heart. He then brings up Rudolf Meringer, another philologist, who was "one of the first scientists to show that speech errors are worth collecting and classifying" and the first to use slips "to get a handle on language"; he made a habit of copying slips made by fellow professors at dinner gatherings, eventually collecting 8,800 of them and classifying them as "anticipations," "perseverations," and so on. Modern linguists, including Rulon Wells and R.J. Simonini, Jr., started studying slips in the 1950s.
In Chapter 5 he gives "A Brief History of 'Um'," explaining that he started by assuming that the condemnation of "filler words" went all the way back to the ancients but found that it didn't really begin until the 19th century (Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote "Don't strew the pathway with those dreadful urs" in 1846) and didn't become popular until the 20th; as he says in this interview, "one of the important aspects of the radio performance was to remove the 'uhs' and the 'ums'—I think because it didn't sound right somehow. But there was also the fact that the radio broadcasts were commercial. They were selling things, selling advertising on the radio, and the 'uhs' or the 'ums' would take up valuable time that you could use to sell pet food and mattresses and whatever other sorts of sponsorships."
I could go on indefinitely, but I'll conclude with his admirable repudiation of the use of nonstandard speech to bash those you don't like: "Liberals shouldn’t talk about speaking this way—it contradicts how they work to include everybody and make sure that everyone has equal opportunity.” Amen. And if you're looking for a present for someone who loves language, I can recommend this one with complete confidence.
A lot of American science fiction fans tend to think that Hugo Gernsback invented sf when he started Amazing Stories in 1926, although of course Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are back there somewhere in the dim prehistory of the field. Actually, science-fictional ideas were very much in the air a century ago (in Russia, "mainstream" writers like Alexander Kuprin, Valerii Bryusov, and Alexei Tolstoi were writing about computerized cities, ecological catastrophe, and trips to outer space, and Kuprin even wrote a parody—in 1913!—of pulp sf, complete with mad scientist and super-weapons), and I was amused to come across a reflection of this in Proust's The Captive. From pp. 259-60 of my edition
A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything that we saw in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is...And later on the same page, musing about music:
And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been—if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened—the means of communication between souls. It is like a possibility that has come to nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language.A nice break from gossip and genealogy!
I'm finally starting to read Zamyatin's famous novel Мы (We), which I bought almost forty years ago as a beginning Russian student and long-time science fiction fan (I'd already read it in English). This prescient book, from which Huxley and Orwell swiped shamelessly for their own dystopias, was written in 1920 but not allowed to appear in the USSR; after it was published in English in 1924 and excerpts were published in the emigré journal Volya Rossii in 1927, the author got into a great deal of trouble, and the book didn't appear in its entirety in Russian until its 1952 publication in America (it was not published in the USSR until 1988).
Before plunging in, I wanted to read the chapter on Zamyatin in Yuri Annenkov's brilliant and moving memoirs, Dnevnik moikh vstrech ['Diary of my meetings'], and I was pleased to see that Annenkov, when his good friend Zamyatin showed him a section of the work in progress, asked him about the very thing that puzzled me when I looked through it. He quotes a bit near the start that begins: "Мерными рядами, по четыре, восторженно отбивая такт, шли нумера..." ('In measured rows, four by four, triumphantly beating time, walked the numbers [numera]...'), writes that he disliked the word numer used for 'number' rather than the usual nomer—it sounded vulgar and un-Russian to him—and asked: Почему - нумер, а не номер? ('Why numer and not nomer?'). Zamyatin says it's not a Russian word, adducing Latin numerus, Italian numero, French numéro, English number, and German Nummer, and asks "Where's the O?" He then opens a dictionary and starts going through the A's, saying "Let's see where the Russian roots are": "абажур, аббат, аберрация, абзац, абонемент, аборт, абракадабра, абрикос, абсолютизм, абсурд, авангард, аванпост, авансцена, авантюра, авария, август, августейший... Стоп! Я наткнулся: авось! Дальше: аврора, автобиография, автограф, автократия, автомат, автомобиль, автопортрет, автор, авторитет, агитатор, агент, агония, адепт, адвокат, адрес, академия, акварель, аккомпанемент, акробат, аксиома, акт, актер, актриса... Стоп! наткнулся на акулу!.. Дальше: аккуратность, акустика, акушерка, акцент, акция, алгебра, алебастр, алкоголь, аллегория, аллея... Стоп: алмаз... Дальше: алфавит, алхимия..."
All these words are obviously of non-Russian origin except the few where he says "Stop!" and names an exception: авось [avos'] 'perhaps,' акула [akula] 'shark,' and алмаз [almaz] 'uncut diamond.' The funny thing is that the last two are also borrowed, akula from Old Norse hákall and almaz from Turkic. I would have thought at least the latter would have worn its foreign origin clearly on its sleeve; it occurs to me, however, that Annenkov, reconstructing the conversation many years later, probably remembered the general idea but not the exact words Zamyatin stopped at.
Towards the end of the piece, after mentioning Zamyatin's remark that his books were his children, Annenkov quotes Viktor Shklovsky (whom I mentioned here and here), from a 1959 article "On the use of private libraries":
Надо накапливать книги, знакомясь с человеческим опытом, - пускай они лежат вокруг твоей мысли, становясь твоими - кольцо за кольцом, так, как растет дерево, пускай они подымаются со дна, как коралловые острова.Words to live by.Если от книг становится тесно и некуда поставить кровать, то лучше заменить кровать раскладушкой.
[You have to store up books, becoming acquainted with human experience; let them lie around your thoughts, becoming yours—ring upon ring, as a tree grows, let them rise up from the depths like coral islands.
If it gets crowded with all the books and there's nowhere to put your bed, it's better to exchange it for a folding bed.]
Thanksgiving (which we are celebrating today in the U.S.) has always struck me as a strange word. In the United States it pretty much refers only to the holiday, though I suppose Catholics have masses of thanksgiving, and since the holiday is celebrated only in the U.S. and Canada (where it is the second Monday of October) the name can't really be translated. If you look it up in a bilingual dictionary it will give something that translates back to "day of giving thanks," but that doesn't really work, because the etymological sense of thanksgiving very much takes a back seat to what is for practical senses its meaning: "day when you stuff yourself with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pumpkin pie and (if you're so inclined) watch football until your eyeballs bleed." Sure, newspapers run pieces on What We Are Grateful For, and I'm sure there are people who truly do give thanks for the good things in their life, but it is very far from being (as a foreigner with nothing but dictionary descriptions might think) a pious day when we all sit around counting our blessings.
Also, this story by Craig Wilson discusses Robyn Gioia, a Florida woman who claims that the "REAL First Thanksgiving" was in St. Augustine and the holiday should commemorate "a Spanish explorer who landed here on Sept. 8, 1565, and celebrated a feast of thanksgiving with Timucua Indians" (who "dined on bean soup"). Now, what could this mean? As Robert Makin, a local tour guide, says, "I also don't think they called it Thanksgiving. You can't even call it Thanksgiving if it's not even English. Thanksgiving is an English word." Surely there were lots of occasions when early settlers sat down with the locals for an amicable dinner; the holiday commemorates a particular such occasion at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621, and I don't see what sense it makes to try to antedate it.
In any event, happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!
Update. I can now report dinner was superb (we had the turkey butterflied, which cuts way down on the roasting time and gets everything equally cooked), and if anyone wants wine recommendations, I've done a lot of experimentation over the years and am very happy with rosé and zin. We had a bottle of each (a 2006 Belleruche Côtes du Rhône from M. Chapoutier, and a 2005 Bogle Old Vine Zinfandel) and finished up with pumpkin pie, cherry pie, and good strong coffee.
Also, Mark Liberman has a good discussion of the word thanksgiving over at the Log (followup here), and I hereby offer my congratulations on his being elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (see Arnold Zwicky's post, in which he correctly says that "it's confusing that the word fellow gets used for two different kinds of academic awards").
Artur Janc's lingro is a very nifty piece of software that provides clickable word definitions for any webpage. The About page says:
lingro was conceived in August 2005, when Artur decided to practice his Spanish by reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. As a competent but non-expert speaker, he found that looking up new vocabulary took much more time than the reading itself. Frustrated with the how slow existing online dictionaries were, he wrote a program to help him translate and learn words in their original context.You just enter the URL of the website you want to read in the box, click, and presto, you can get the meaning of any word that's in the built-in dictionary. So far it translates between English, Spanish,
Correspondent Christophe Strobbe alerts me to this post by Neal Whitman of Literal-Minded, about constructions like "others were attempted to be killed" with "its passive marking on both the matrix verb (was attempted) and the embedded infinitive (to be killed)—something that makes less sense the more you try to parse it like any other passive, but which sounds pretty natural if you just go with it." He quotes a bunch of examples he's found online ("I am attempted to be hacked," "payment must be received before the item is begun to be made," "If any terms or conditions are failed to be followed," and so on) and says "I’ve gotten so used to reading double passives by now that the above examples all sound pretty good to me." In a follow-up post he quotes the American Heritage Book of English Usage:
You may sometimes find it desirable to conjoin a passive verb form with a passive infinitive, as in The building is scheduled to be demolished next week and The piece was originally intended to be played on the harpsichord. These sentences are perfectly acceptable. But it's easy for things to go wrong in these double passive constructions…. [D]ouble passives often sound ungrammatical, as this example shows: The fall in the value of the Yen was attempted to be stopped by the Central Bank. How can you tell an acceptable double passive from an unacceptable one? If you can change the first verb into an active one, making the original subject its object, while keeping the passive infinitive, the original sentence is acceptable. Thus you can say The city has scheduled the building to be demolished next week and The composer originally intended the piece to be played on the harpsichord. But you cannot make similar changes in the other sentence. You cannot say The Central Bank attempted the fall in the value of the Yen to be stopped.He has a draft paper (pdf) on the subject; I haven't had time to read it, but the conclusion begins: "Though scarcely analyzed in the linguistics literature, the English double passive double passive is well attested, has existed since at least the late 1700s, and is the most succinct option for allowing the patient of an embedded infinitive to be used as the main subject in a sentence." This is interesting stuff, and I'm surprised Language Log hasn't discussed it (unless I've missed it).
Christophe adds: "I found examples in French, but not (yet) in German, and only one in my native language, Dutch. I wonder if you are familiar with this construction. I'm sure you and your readers could find examples in other languages where it exists." Any takers?
Here's a splendid misappropriation of an English phrase that's made its way around the world, mostly unbeknownst to the speakers of English itself: Mark Liberman at Language Log reports on the international term making off, meaning "The recording of the director and actors describing the making of a film." There is discussion at Mark's post of the mechanism of of becoming off, which is interesting, but what delights me is the variety of languages to which the term has spread. Mark lists Spanish ("un tutorial podría ser un making off"), French ("Il s'agirait d'une video du making-off du film Titanic"), Portuguese ("Participar do 'making off' dessas fotos maravilhosas"), Italian ("Cosě mi č venuta l'idea del making off, che nella prima stesura rappresentava quasi il sessanta per cento del film"), German ("Nachdem es ja jetzt hip ist über alles und jeden ein Making off zu machen"), and Dutch ("Vandaag is op het net het making-off filmpje opgedoken waarbij je de 'gangster' aan het werk kunt zien"), and Slavomír Čéplö (of the wonderful blog bulbulovo, sadly in hiatus) adds Slovak ("Prosim ta ked by si mal niekedy cas mohol by si uploadnut nieco z nasledujucich making off´s"—"note the English plural, the Slovak plural would be 'making off-ov'"), Czech ("V upoutávce na making off zvolili dost úsměvné věty"), Polish ("Strona składa się z 4 dużych części: portfolio agencji, nagrody, szkolenia i making-off, czyli kulisów produkcji"), Hungarian ("Föleg ha egy making off-ot megnézünk a GT-röl"), Finnish ("Making off-pätkät on tarpeellisia varsinkin muille videoita tekeville"), Maltese ("ma nafx imma waqt li kont qed nara il-making off u rajt lil kristina..."), and of all things Breton ("Aze e vo kavet ganeoc'h pep tra diwar benn pennoberenn Diwan, interview ar c'hoarierien, ur making off, an arvestoů c'hwitet gant hag all hag all"). This is truly remarkable, and I'd love to see somebody research the timeline: when it got started in which language, and what lines of transmission it followed.
And of course speakers of all those languages assume it's a perfectly good English word!
Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log has a fascinating post on "the speech patterns of northeastern Pennsylvania," taking off from a YouTube video called "Heynabonics," heyna or haina being apparently a tag question characteristic of the region:
Putting haina on the end of a statement makes the statement a question. It doesn't matter who you're talking to, or when the thing happened. "You're going dancing Friday night, haina?" means "Are you going dancing Friday night?" "He did that last night, haina?" means "Did he do that last night?"There are interesting parallels with (and possible influences from) Pennsylvania Dutch and Hindi, not to mention British innit. Well worth your attention.
No-sword reports on a phenomenon that is completely unsurprising (given the human capacity for delusion) but about which I knew nothing: "spurious syllabaries invented, promoted, and possibly even believed in by people who just could not accept the idea that Japan needed China's help to learn how to write." The "obvious problem": "they are clearly based on the modern Japanese phonetic system rather than its eight-vowelled ancestor as would be expected—nay, required—of any syllabary in use before the Heian period." He links to some of the sillier examples ("The Ahiru moji are a sadly transparent copy of Hangul, right down to the unnecessary detail of copying the use of the /N/ circle to mean 'no initial consonant'"). Read it and laugh.
I spent today at Mount Holyoke College, at the Books to Blogs & Back program: a set of "interactive activities and exhibits relating to the history of book creation and publication," a talk by Jason Epstein about "how new digital technologies make the book publishing industry obsolete, but not the book itself" (he's involved with a company that sells on-demand book vending machines), and a panel discussion on “The Past and Future of the Book” with Terry Belanger talking about how books as physical objects will survive as prestige objects (like horses) even after their utilitarian functions have been taken over, Sven Birkerts prognosticating about how the internet is going to turn us into a "hive mind," and (by far the best to my mind) Lisa Gitelman taking a sceptical look at predictions of literary doom (including "how in 200 years moral panic about reading novels has shifted to moral panic about not reading novels"). It was all very stimulating, and I picked up a free (if heavily marked-up) copy of Se questo č un uomo by Primo Levi (the Italian original of Survival in Auschwitz, which I already had), and when I got home I found waiting for me the copy of Time of troubles, the diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e: Moscow, July 8, 1917 to July 23, 1922
Oh, and today's NY Times has a feature by Roger Mummert, called "In the Valley of the Literate," on the Pioneer Valley (where I now live): "There are many explanations for why the valley is so rich in bookstores and author readings, but two are paramount: many book lovers live in the valley, and so do an extraordinary number of writers." I had lunch today (with Songdog and his wife) right next door to the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley whose photograph graces the start of the article.
A NY Times story by Joseph Berger (print version) is the first thing in a while that's given me a bit of hope about the American educational system:
Seven-year-old Cooper Van Der Meer is learning Spanish as a second language.Now if they'd just start teaching the basics of linguistics in elementary school (language changes and that's OK, different people talk differently and that's OK, grammar is part of how you speak and not something an authority imposes on you...) I'd be a happy man. (Thanks for the link, Bonnie!)That’s right. This American native is lucky enough to be in a school system that considers the acquisition of languages so important in today’s polyglot, globally entwined America that students start learning a foreign language in kindergarten...
Martha Abbott, director of education at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, said that while there is no reliable data on the trend, her organization keeps learning of more school systems that think paying for elementary school language teachers is money well invested.
Since September 2006, all students in grades one through five in Loudon County, Va., have been given 30 to 60 minutes of Spanish instruction each week. Last year, officials in Fairfax County, Va. — which, with 165,439 students, is the nation’s 13th-largest school system — decided to expand the study of foreign languages to all 137 elementary schools over a seven-year period. Twenty-five Fairfax schools provide 30-minute lessons twice a week in Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese or French starting in the first grade. Ten schools have ambitious “immersion” programs where math, science and health are taught in a foreign language.
Paula Patrick, the Fairfax system’s foreign language coordinator, said Americans have for too long had a “mind-set that everyone else in the world could learn English.” Her district is receiving appeals from businesses that need global-ready travelers and from a health care industry that needs translators.
The growth in language instruction is also taking place in college. A survey by the Modern Language Association released yesterday found a 13 percent increase in language-course enrollments between 2002 and 2006, with a 127 percent increase in the number of students taking Arabic.
Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log reports on the absurd censorship of profanity at the august and prim NY Times. When it gets to the point that you're calling movies "****" and bands "********," you really need to rethink your policies.
This AskMetaFilter question begins:
A few months ago, my wife posted on her a blog an article that appeared in the September issue of Vogue. It's about Ashley Javier, an exclusive New York hair stylist, whose penthouse shop is in a "rough part of Manhattan":A fair amount of pointless guessing followed; finally, someone contacted Mr. Javier and posted the result:When he arrived on Twenty-eighth Street, “This place was harrogatha! Harrogatha!”
Neither one of us knows the word, and my wife included in her blog entry a request for a definition. No one has come forward, and I'm beginning to go crazy.
When Ashley moved to NYC 15 years ago, he befriended Paul Rutherford of Frankie Goes to Hollywood fame.So there you have it. You can simply admire the pluck and resourcefulness of the AskMeFi crew (and raise an eyebrow at the fecklessness of the Vogue reporter, who didn't bother to explain the word), or you can incorporate this silly but memorable vocable into your own usage and try to get it into the next edition of your favorite dictionary.So harrogatha (pronounced huh-RAH-gutha) is a term that he picked up from Paul and it means that something is so horrible, so horrendous, so bad that it's practically infectious.
Ashley's not sure where Paul picked it up, or if he made it up.
My wife showed me a story in the paper about the new Lamborghini Reventón, pointing to where it said the v in the name was "pronounced like b." She asked what this meant, and I said I'd investigate. It turns out the car "is named after a fighting bull according to Lamborghini tradition" and its "namesake, owned by the Don Rodriguez family, is best known for killing famed bullfighter Felix Guzman in 1943" (Wikipedia), which means it's a Spanish name. Now it becomes clear what happened. The letters b and v are pronounced identically in Spanish, as a bilabial stop (/b/) at the start of a word and as a bilabial fricative (like /v/ but using both lips rather than the lower lip and upper teeth) between vowels, so it's clear and accurate to say the v in, say, Veracruz is "pronounced like b." Unfortunately, in Reventón the v is between vowels, so to say it's "pronounced like b" would be technically accurate (if you mean "pronounced as b would be pronounced in the same environment") but wildly misleading. The fact is that the closest thing to an accurate pronunciation of the Spanish word, unless you're a Spanish speaker, is re-ven-TOHN. I'm not sure whether Lamborghini is promoting the "like b" thing because they genuinely misunderstood, or because it was a clever marketing ploy; at any rate, confusion is widespread, and you can see the result here: "It sparked a debate with Jeremy Clarkson claiming the ‘v’ in Reventon is pronounced as a ‘b’ – making it Re-bent-on. After speaking to Lamborghini yesterday, we can confirm Jezza was right."
The funniest thing about the name, though, is that in Spanish reventón means 'burst,' or—in an automotive context—'blowout, flat tire.'
Almost exactly two years ago, I posted The Translation Wars, about the history of translations from Russian and in particular the latest darling of the publishing world, the team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (or Volokhonskaya, as her name would normally be rendered). There I mentioned their forthcoming translation of War and Peace; it has now come forth, and the NY Times Reading Room blog has just finished a group reading of it, in the midst of which they paused for a discussion of The Art of Translation. I found it fascinating, and I think anyone who enjoyed the discussion in my previous post and its thread will feel the same. Sam Tanenhaus, the moderator, raves a bit about P&V and then says "I’m curious to know what others think, and to know what passages have impressed them — for ill as well as good. Does anyone in the group dislike this new translation — or find others superior?" I don't think he was prepared for what he got.
The first responder says "Garnett keeps the flow of the sentence and the work going more smoothly so I am not tripping over this or that detail... With this current translation I feel an awkward stumbling that I sense doesn’t have to be." The second says he loves the novel: "As far as comparisons between translations, I can tell you that my well-worn copy is a paperback version of the Signet Classics translation by Ann Dunnigan, and without laying the passages side by side, there’s nothing really in the Pevear/Vokhonsky translation that seems to me an improvement over the Dunnigan translation." The third had the same reaction: "Frankly, I did not see enough of an improvement to justify buying the new book. I was all set to buy it after reading so much about how it would now be the definitive translation, but after the comparison test I decided to reread the Maude." The fourth: "Both are good, but on the whole I find the PV a little clunky, and the Briggs more fun to read." The fifth concurs: "I think the new translation is fine but I don’t find it all that different from earlier translations I’ve read, in particular by the Maudes and by Ann Dunnigan."
All of this made me very happy—first, that so many people are going to the trouble of comparing translations, and second, that they're refusing to jump on the P&V bandwagon, even when unsubtly prodded to do so by the moderator. Consensus so far (from non-Russian-speakers): meh, it's OK but no big improvement, I'll stick with my previous favorite. This is an admirable slap in the face to the marketer's THE NEW THING IS THE GREATEST EVER! YOU MUST HAVE IT!!
But then Pevear himself comes along and provides a long defense of his own translation (listen up, you peons, I'll explain to you why mine really is as superior as the pull-quotes say). This struck me as unfair; the moderator's already got his thumb on the scales, why should Pevear get to bully people too? But one respondent says "Shockingly, Richard Pevear believes that Richard Pevear was right in each of his choices," and another agrees that P&V are "stilted, unnatural and stiff" and says he does not believe that Pevear has dealt with that accusation. Then Michael Katz, Professor of Russian Studies at Middlebury, says he doesn't agree with Pevear about the importance of Tolstoy's use of "transparent," Timothy D. Sergay says he is one of the "Russian-English translators and literary scholars with proficiency in both languages... who object in principle to the general method the team employs and the results it produces," and Dmitry Buzadzhi and Sara Gombert weigh in with a detailed criticism of P&V for making "that which is ordinary and unmarked in the original stand out in translation." Pevear returns with a huffy and defensive response ("the rumors of my ignorance of Russian are somewhat exaggerated"), whereupon Sergay rather too politely backs down. It's all great fun, but I regret to report that Mr. Tanenhaus couldn't tolerate it; in his outraged response, he says "O.K, gang. No more Mr. Nice Guy Moderator. Today, the gloves come off, which is to say: In re this translation, many of you are — how to put this? — off your rockers. The translators don’t need me to defend them — and, as it happens, Richard Pevear has posted his own response. But here’s the opinion (from the November 22 issue of The New York Review of Books) of Orlando Figes, the eminent historian of Russia..." There follows a quote from Figes's adulatory review and a long rehash of the P&V talking points (Tolstoy isn't "smooth," yada yada). Whassamatta, Sam, can't take a little dissent? If the almighty Times puts its imprimatur on a translation, the rest of us should bow down and worship? If you don't read Russian (and I think you don't), you don't really have any business pronouncing on the superiority of P&V; you're simply taking Pevear's word for it and trying to enforce conformity.
The International Literary Quarterly has just put its first issue online:
We strive to publish the best in contemporary literature while shunning all ideological affiliations. Indeed, the driving force behind The International Literary Quarterly is that it be a broad church in the world of letters, a forum for outstanding poetry and prose, whether in its original version or in translation, and for criticism that is trenchant and thought-provoking.It looks like a very worthy publication, and I greet it warmly. (Found, as so many good things are, at wood s lot.)Issue 1 features recent work by three of Scotland's leading authors (W.N. Herbert, Robert Alan Jamieson and Laura Marney); translations by Suzanne Jill Levine, who has also contributed some of her own work, and Thalia Pandiri; previously unpublished fiction by Lydia Davis, Gabriel Josipovici and Carol Novack; new poetry by George Szirtes; and an essay on the Italian author, Curzio Malaparte, by Daniel Gunn. All of these contributions are published alongside artwork by the review's Art Editor, Calum Colvin, the distinguished Scottish artist.
Grant Barrett wrote to alert me to this NY Times story by Corey Kilgannon, which enraged me to the point of incoherence. I'm not mad at Daniel Cassidy—he's a genial amateur who got a crackpot book published, no better or worse than the zillions of crackpot books that get published every year, and it's not his fault he knows nothing about language and its history, it's the fault of the educational system, for which linguistics and its results do not exist. No, I'm mad at the Times, which accords his nonsense the kind of respect they wouldn't give theories about how space aliens killed Kennedy or how you can produce nuclear energy at home with knitting needles and walnuts. Here, see for yourself:
...Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having “unknown origin.”And I'm mad at the American Book Award (to be distinguished from the much more prestigious National Book Award), which rewarded this tripe. After a couple of days of fighting computer problems and worrying about a work deadline, I'm in no shape to do the kind of thoughtful debunking this should get; fortunately, Grant has done it himself. Go here and read his demolition job, and join me in wishing the Times and other news sources would treat language as seriously as they do, say, football.“Glom” seemed to come from the Irish word “glam,” meaning to grab or to snatch. He found the word “balbhán,” meaning a silent person, and he surmised that it was why his quiet grandfather was called the similarly pronounced Boliver.
He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word “gimmick” seemed to come from “camag,” meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.
Could “scam” have derived from the expression “’S cam é,” meaning a trick or a deception? Similarly, “slum” seemed similar to an expression meaning “It is poverty.” “Dork” resembled “dorc,” which Mr. Cassidy’s dictionary called “a small lumpish person.” As for “twerp,” the Irish word for dwarf is “duirb.”
Mr. Cassidy, 63, began compiling a lexicon of hundreds of Irish-inspired slang words and recently published them in a book called “How the Irish Invented Slang,” which last month won the 2007 American Book Award for nonfiction, and which he is in New York this week promoting.
I heard that word pronounced "nego-see-ation" for the millionth time today (this time by an NPR newsreader) and I finally cracked. Yes, my descriptivist faith tells me if so many people say it it's not "wrong," it's just an alternate pronunciation (in fact, I just checked Merriam-Webster's latest Collegiate and I see it's listed as an alternate), but I've hated it all my life and I just have to post about it and get it off my chest. I used to think it revealed a prissy fear of sounding colloquial by using the /sh/ sound, but now I'm wondering if it's good old dissimilation, the -sh...sh- sequence producing -s...sh-. If so, I guess I'm slightly reconciled.
This has been the Languagehat Venting Hour, or rather Minute. Our regular programming will resume tomorrow. Thank you for your attention.
In the ongoing process of unboxing books, I just ran across one I hadn't looked at in ages: Philip J. Davis's The Thread
"...your presentation is flawed by your insistence on spelling Chebyshev's name as 'Tschebyscheff.' This barbaric, Teutonic, non-standard orthography will gain you no friends. I sincerely hope that when you come to prepare the second edition of your book you will alter this incorrect and irritating spelling. Yours faithfully, John Begg, Professor of Mathematics."The rest of the book is a madly digressive attempt to explain why his impulse was to tell the man "to go fry his fish elsewhere"; this involves a brief history of mathematics in general and Russian mathematics in particular, an explanation of how the Cyrillic alphabet came to be and why the name in question "appears in six different spellings," the Coptic origin of the name Pafnuty, and many other things. If whimsical digression gives you pleasure and you can bear nontechnical discussion of mathematics, you should definitely investigate this little (124-page) book, whose bibliography includes Helen Waddell's The Desert Fathers, O. R. Kuehene's A Study of the Thaïs Legend, I. V. Kuznetsova's Lyudi Russkoi Nauki, Thomas R. Hazard's The Jonny-Cake Papers, René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz's Oracles and Demons of Tibet, and the Erinnerungsblätter der Mathematischen Gesellschaft zu Jena (Jena, 1859-1877), inter alia.
Oh, and a fact he never mentions: the name is pronounced che-bi-SHOF. Ah, Russian!
That's Finnish for Linguistic Association of Finland, and its initials are SKY, and the SKY Journal of Linguistics is "a refereed general linguistic journal published on an annual basis. It contains articles, short essays or so-called 'squibs' and book reviews... The languages of publication are English, French, and German." And it's all online. Just at random, I see Anna Fenyvesi and Gyula Zsigri's "The Role of Perception in Loanword Adaptation: The Fate of Initial Unstressed Syllables in American Finnish and American Hungarian" (pdf) .Lots of linguistic goodness; enjoy!
The Hungarian poet Gyula Illyés (in Hungarian order, Illyés Gyula) was widely considered one of the greatest living Hungarian poets before his death in 1983, and his 1950 poem Egy mondat a zsarnokságról ("A Sentence About Tyranny"), immediately suppressed, was passed around in a Hungarian version of samizdat, as Mátyás Domokos explains:
...the "non-existent" censorship of "existing socialism" made it impossible for the poem to be republished, whether in a newspaper or a review, or in Illyés's own books, including various editions of "collected" poems. Indeed, anyone purveying the poem in any form or through any channel could expect the police to take action against them, especially in the aftermath of the revolution. In the meantime, the poem acquired a historic patina and a place in the public mind on a par with Sándor Petőfi's "National Song", a poem that had played an inflammatory role in the 1848 Hungarian revolution and subsequent war of independence. It was copied in different versions and passed from hand to hand in secret.You can read George Szirtes's translation of the poem here, and listen to the author read it in Hungarian at this YouTube post. (Via wood s lot.)[...]
Two years after the poet's death, on 31 October 1985, in the small village of Ozora, where he had spent part of his childhood, a newly built school was named after him. The school was opened with an address given by György Aczél, a member of the Political Committee of the HSWP, and the Party's cultural overlord. It was in this address that, for the first time, someone representing the official political line claimed in public that the poem was in fact about "the indisputable historical calling of socialism—the fight for the totality of freedom and against all kinds of dictatorship" and it was not up to Illyés, nor the poem, that in 1956 it "had become a weapon in the hands of those triggering and inciting violent emotions and of harbingers of hopelessness."
This strange story, with its morbid and grotesque turns and spanning thirty years, is nothing else than that of a show trial that had been initiated against a poem...
That's the subtitle of an article by Anthony Grafton in the latest New Yorker on the business of putting books and other written material online. Grafton begins with the wonderful writer Alfred Kazin and his encomium to the New York Public Library ("Anything I had heard of and wanted to see, the blessed place owned...") and goes on to Google Books and its mission to "build a comprehensive index of all the books in the world" and the wild-eyed "millenarian prophecies" it has spawned ("Last year, Kevin Kelly... predicted, in a piece in the Times, that 'all the books in the world' would 'become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas'"), continuing with a compendious history of libraries, cross-referencing, and abridgment that includes such tidbits as Jacques Cujas's "rotating barber’s chair and movable bookstand that enabled him to keep many open books in view at the same time." Then he gets back to Google, Microsoft, and other players in the digitization game, and explains why "The supposed universal library... will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money." My main complaint is that the piece isn't longer; at four pages, it's a mere appetizer. Fortunately, the online version of the magazine has a sidebar that "points to some favorite archives and historical resources," and among the links to be found there is one that addresses my subsidiary complaint, that he doesn't complain enough about the wretched failures of Google Books, Robert B. Townsend's AHA blog post Google Books: What’s Not to Like? Townsend lets them have it:
Over the past three months I spent a fair amount of time on the site as part of a research project on the early history of the profession, and from a researcher’s point of view I have to say the results were deeply disconcerting. Yes, the site offers up a number of hard-to-find works from the early 20th century with instant access to the text. And yes, for some books it offers a useful keyword search function for finding a reference that might not be in the index. But my experience suggests the project is falling far short of its central promise of exposing the literature of the world, and is instead piling mistake upon mistake with little evidence of basic quality control.He details all these failings, except for my particular bugbear, which is addressed in the first comment on his post:
You didn’t mention my pet peeve. In my work, I need to basically fact-check some historical info. The snippet view for copyrighted works would be, if not ideal, then sufficient for my objectives. That is, if the snippet actually included the search terms requested with a little surrounding text. However, more often than not some text other than what one asked for is highlighted, but one can’t, of course, scroll up or down in the snippet to see adjacent passages. So one is left wondering: now what? This is now more than just incidental. I’ve reported it to Google and they respond that it’s still beta so be patient.You tell 'em, Jim! That "snippet view," more than any other single thing, makes me dislike Google, and for years I never thought I would have any reason to dislike Google. Shape up, guys—make sure your snippets at least include the searched-for material and provide full view for the out-of-copyright stuff, and we'll love you with that unreserved love you've gotten used to; keep pushing these defective goods and someone else will come along and do it better.— Jim Roan
(Thanks for the links, Paul!)
I'm not a basketball fan (and it's a long way to spring training, alas), but as a public service I present this post from nba.com.
German Racecar is hot, and he's working hard to get his team to the playoffs. Meanwhile Little Emperor lords over the East and his team just clinched a postseason spot.They even give the characters for each nickname. Nicely done. (Via MetaFilter.)Hold on, hold on, what are you talking about? Who is German Racecar? Little Emperor? Well, let us explain: those are NBA players' nicknames in China.
"German Racecar" is Dirk Nowitzki, his ability to roll on court like a racecar, and he is, of course, from Germany. Meanwhile, China's Little Emperor is our "King James." For instance, do you want to know why Tim Duncan is called Stone Buddha? Scroll down.
Ben Zimmer has another splendid post at OUPBlog, this one on the sad results of relying uncritically on spellchecking software. Here's a set of examples:
Foreign words and phrases are easy prey for the Cupertino effect, as when a California lawyer submitted a brief in which the Latin phrase sua sponte ('of one’s own accord') had unfortunately been changed to sea sponge, or when Reuters referred to Pakistan’s Muttahida Quami Movement as the Muttonhead Quail Movement. Unusual proper names are also potential pitfalls. The New York Times once changed the first name of football player DeMeco Ryans to Demerol, while the Rocky Mountain News rendered Leucadia National Corp. as La-De-Da. And the New Scientist recently reported on a spellchecker fiasco in a Contemporary Sociology review article: contributors’ last names were changed from Gareis to Agrees, Beavais to Beavers, Gerstel to Gretel, and Sarkisian to Sardinian.The title of my post comes from the end of his:
It’s best to heed the warning given by the Denver Post after it was embarrassed by an errant spellchecker:One sympathetic journalism expert said yesterday that spellcheck can be an editor’s enemy, "as Voldemort is to Harry Potter." Or as our spellchecker would have it, "as Voltmeter is to Harry Potter."