CHAKOBSA.

Those of you who have read Frank Herbert's Dune will remember the Fremen language Chakobsa, described by Wikipedia as "a mixture of Roma (or gypsy) language..., one sentence in Serbo-Croat and various Arabic terms." Imagine my surprise when I was reading Lesley Blanch's absorbing if overheated The Sabres of Paradise (1960), about the Russian-Chechen conflicts of the nineteenth century, and hit this on page 21: "They laughed derisively, speaking among themselves in that mysterious tongue, Chakobsa, 'the Hunting Language', which the rulers and Princes used when they wished to converse in secret, and of which no more than a few words have been discovered." I found a further allusion to it in Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus by "Essad Bey" (one of the pseudonyms used by the remarkable Lev Nussimbaum, whom I discussed in this post), first published in 1930 as Zwölf Geheimnisse im Kaukasus (my quote is from page 16 of the first translated edition, Viking 1931, which has been newly republished with a preface by Tom Reiss):

So the princes have a special language of their own, a language that is understood only by the prince and his peers. This is the famous hunting language. It was contrived by the inhabitants of the knights' citadels, the princely palaces, and the robbers' strongholds. The secret of it is strictly guarded, and no outsider has hitherto succeeded in becoming familiar with it though it is current throughout the whole of the mountains and among all the members of the caste. It is said to be the language of an extinct line of knights; but only within the last few decades has it come to be known about at all, so secretive were the princes. All important business is discussed in this language, secrets that no man must hear, and enterprises which affect the fate of the mountain people. Only five words of it are known to science, and they resemble no single word of any other known language. Shapaka—a horse, amafa—blood, ami—water, asaz—a gun, and ashopshka—a coward. The name of the language itself is Chakobsa.

(You will note that Nussimbaum/Essad is even more overheated than Mrs. Blanch, and I have no idea how much of that is to be taken seriously, including the "five words known to science.")

As you can imagine, the Frank Herbert hits swamp the Google results, but I was able to turn up one precious find from Google Books (a damnable "snippet view," but one of those rare ones where you can actually see the bit you need), from page 75 of George Thomas's 1977 The Languages and Literatures of the Non-Russian Peoples of the Soviet Union: "Presumably the Circassian Hunting language, also called Chakobsa or Sikowschir (Reineggs 1796, 248), (Bzhedukh /š^hə-k'^oa-bza/" (the snippet cuts off there). Reineggs is Jacob Reineggs (1744-1793), who went from serving Erekle II of eastern Georgia to being Russian Resident in Tiflis (Tbilisi) and wrote an Allgemeine historisch-topographische Beschreibung des Kaukasus that was published posthumously in 1796. Bzhedukh is a dialect of Adyghe. "Sikowschir" gets only four Google hits, all from nineteenth-century German sources, three of them books by Friedrich von Adelung and one an article by one of the great monosyllabic linguists of that century, A. F. Pott. While Adelung simply reproduces the word as found in Reineggs, Pott writes: "Die beiden [geheime Sprachen] gewöhnlichsten heissen Schakobsché und nicht, wie Reineggs schreibt, Sikowschir, und Farschipsé. Die erste derselben scheint eine ganz besondere zu sein, weil ihre Worte mit der gewöhnlichen Tscherkessischen Sprache keine Aehnlichkeit haben." ('Both [secret languages] are most commonly called Schakobsché and not, as Reineggs writes, Sikowschir, and Farschipsé. The first seems to be quite exceptional, since its words have no resemblance to the common Circassian language.')

I'm guessing Herbert got it from Branch, since he was working on Dune in the early '60s, when her book was published (and, I gather, popular); I wonder if anyone has noticed before that it wasn't original with him? At any rate, the Circassian secret language should be rechristened something like Shekabza or Shekobza (my attempts to provide a readable English equivalent of the Bzhedukh form cited by Thomas), since the Reineggs/Nussimbaum/Branch version has been firmly appropriated by the Fremen.

BUMPY.

A recent Ask MetaFilter question asks "Do you call your grandfather Bumpy?"

I've known a couple people in my time who called their grandfathers by the title Bumpy [lastname]... I assumed that it was Southern (or maybe Texan) and that it was uncommon, but not completely unheard of. A short office conversation now has me wondering if it's just some weird thing that a couple of the people I know have in common.

1. Do/did you call your grandfather Bumpy?
2. If so, where did you grow up?

As a grandfather myself (though one who goes by the boringly standard "Grandpa"), I am curious about this. So: are you familiar with this usage? If so, where are you from (or where is the user from)?

PROCRASTINATION THROUGH THE AGES.

Lexicographer Ben Zimmer (now of Visual Thesaurus) has a new Slate article on procrastination:

The promise of "another day" is the key to the word's origin. It derives from the Latin verb procrastinare, combining the prefix pro- "forward" with crastinus "of tomorrow"—hence, moving something forward from one day until the next. Even in ancient Roman times, procrastination was disparaged: The great statesman Cicero, in one of his Philippics attacking his rival Mark Antony, declaimed that "in the conduct of almost every affair slowness and procrastination are hateful" (in rebus gerendis tarditas et procrastinatio odiosa est).

(Shouldn't that be "tarditas et procrastinatio odiosae sunt"?) He discusses the (to me repugnant) concept "never put off till tomorrow what you can do today" and its analogues in various languages ("'Morgen, Morgen, nur nicht heute,' sagen alle faulen Leute"), pointing out that though the concept is ubiquitous, the word is not. And he mentions this wonderful feature of Egyptian:

Adherents to this view point to the evenhanded approach of the ancient Egyptian language, which had two verbs corresponding to procrastinate. One verb referred to the useful avoidance of unnecessary or impulsive efforts, and the other to the harmful shirking of tasks needed for subsistence, such as tilling the soil at just the right time during the Nile's annual flood cycle.

Anybody know the actual word for "the useful avoidance of unnecessary or impulsive efforts"? Because that is the kind of procrastination I practice. Actually, though, I don't so much procrastinate as perendinate, a wonderful word I learned from Ben's article meaning "to put something off until the day after tomorrow."

SURLY, SIRLY.

A remarkable etymology has been brought to my attention by the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org: "the word surly is no more than an alteration of sirly, which meant lordly, haughty, imperious, acting like a sir in fact." A couple of citations for the original form:
1579 SPENSER Sheph. Cal. July 203 Sike syrlye shepheards han we none, They keepen all the path.
1600 HOLLAND Livy XXXV. xxxviii. 911 Syrly lords (say they) were the Macedonians, and rigorous.

Here's Pope with the old sense of the new form:
1726 POPE Odyss. XXIII. 50 Stern as the surly lion o’er his prey.

And the first cite for the newer, less lordly sense nicely exemplifies the transition, from a lion to a dog:
1670 RAY Prov. 208 As surly as a butchers dog.

CONTEXT.

The Dalkey Archive Press's CONTEXT magazine "was started to create a context for reading modern and contemporary literature and addressing cultural issues," according to an interview with the founder:

It is founded upon the rather perverse idea—perverse in terms of how books are treated in our culture—that books do not grow old. That is, they are forever being read by someone for the first time, or even the second or third time. But our culture tends to treat literature as though it is "timely" and therefore books are usually written about only when first published, or later when—at least some of them—get written about in scholarly ways, or what passes for scholarship. It's also the case these days that individual writers do not get written about by critics. For instance, twenty-five years ago a serious writer who had, let's say, three or four novels out, would already have a body of criticism written about the work, several articles and a book. That doesn't happen any longer, partially as a result of what has gone on in academia. So it is even harder now than it was twenty-five years ago to find criticism about contemporary writers. CONTEXT is also concerned with a certain kind of literature and with establishing the historical context and tradition for this literature. When you read reviews in such places as the New York Times, there is a sense that this is the first novel that the reviewer has ever read, and inevitably the basis for liking the book and recommending it to readers is whether it has a good plot, likable characters, and tells us something that will be useful in our everyday lives. There is no sense that this particular novel has its place among—and should be evaluated against—a whole history of other novels.

The first article I clicked on was Dmitry Golynko-Volfson's Letter from Russia, which gave me an informed discussion of recent novels by Pelevin, Sorokin, Limonov, and some writers I had never heard of, Alexander Goldstein, Mikhail Shishkin, the team of Linor Goralik and Stanislav Lvovskii, Sergei Nosov, the team of Aleksandar Garros and Alexei Evdokimov, and Zakhar Prilepin. I look forward to ransacking the rest of the archives.

WACKADOODLE AND THE OED.

A couple of items of linguistic interest in today's NYT Magazine:

1) William Safire's column investigates the odd but pleasing word wackadoodle, an insult (comparable to kook(y) or nutjob) which he traces back to a 1995 use in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I plan to use it whenever it seems appropriate. He also, impressively, refuses to take the bait offered by a reader who deplores the phrasing "I approve this message" (rather than "approve of"); he writes:

The O.E.D. makes clear that in both the sense of the 1380 “to pronounce to be good” and the 1413 “to confirm authoritatively,” the verb stood alone; no of followed. In the 17th century, the construction approve on appeared, followed by approve of. For reassurance, I turn to Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, who concludes that "for the two most relevant meanings of approve, the verb without preposition is both the earliest form and the one that continues through to the present."

2) Virginia Heffernan passes along the sad news that the OED will not publish a paper version of the new revision. I can understand the decision, but still—what happens when the internet collapses, hey? What price your fancy websites then?

A TOAD ON A STONE.

This passage from Isaac Babel's story "My First Fee" (Мой первый гонорар) nicely captures the dilemma of a young man who wants to write but knows good writing too well to be satisfied with his own efforts:

Nothing was left for me but to search for love. Naturally, I found it. Whether luckily or not, the woman I chose turned out to be a prostitute. Her name was Vera. Every evening I stole along behind her on Golovinsky Avenue [in Tiflis, now Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi], unable to bring myself to start speaking. I didn't have money for her, and as for words—those tireless vulgar and burrowing words of love—I didn't have them either. Since my youth all the powers of my being had been given over to the composition of tales, plays, and thousands of stories. They lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. Possessed by a devilish pride, I didn't want to write them down prematurely. To write worse than Lev Tolstoy seemed to me a pointless pursuit. My stories were destined to outlive oblivion. Fearless thought, exhausting passion, are worth the labor spent on them only when they are arrayed in fine clothes. How to sew such clothes?

A man lassoed by an idea, silenced by its serpentine gaze, finds it hard to foam with the insignificant, burrowing words of love. Such a man is ashamed to weep from sorrow. He lacks the wit to laugh from happiness. A dreamer, I had not mastered the senseless art of happiness. For that reason I had to give Vera ten rubles out of my scanty earnings.

(The story was written in the 1920s but not published until 1963; the translation is mine. The original Russian follows.)

Мне ничего не оставалось кроме как искать любви. Конечно, я нашел ее. На беду или на счастье, женщина, выбранная мною, оказалась проституткой. Ее звали Вера. Каждый вечер я крался за нею по Головинскому проспекту, не решаясь заговорить. Денег для нее у меня не было, да и слов - неутомимых этих пошлых и роющих слов любви - тоже не было. Смолоду все силы моего существа были отданы на сочинение повестей, пьес, тысячи историй. Они лежали у меня на сердце, как жаба на камне. Одержимый бесовской гордостью, - я не хотел писать их до времени. Мне казалось пустым занятием - сочинять хуже, чем это делал Лев Толстой. Мои истории предназначались для того, чтобы пережить забвение. Бесстрашная мысль, изнурительная страсть стоят труда, потраченного на них, только тогда, когда они облачены в прекрасные одежды. Как сшить эти одежды?..

Человеку, взятому на аркан мыслью, присмиревшему под змеиным ее взглядом, трудно изойти пеной незначащих и роющих слов любви. Человек этот стыдится плакать от горя. У него недостает ума, чтобы смеяться от счастья. Мечтатель - я не овладел бессмысленным искусством счастья. Мне пришлось поэтому отдать Вере десять рублей из скудных моих заработков.

KARSHUNI? GERSHUNI?

First off: bulbulovo is back! Those of you who (like me) had started to think of the blogroll link as a sentimental reminder of the good old days can go back to clicking it regularly. And the latest post is a doozy. I didn't even know there was a practice of writing Arabic in Syriac script, let alone that the name for it could be written "Karshuni, carshuni, carchouni, carschouni, karschuni, karšūnī, karshūnī, karschūnī, garshuni, garschuni, garšūnī, gerschuni, gershuni, geršūnī or even akaršūnī and akarschūnī." The intrepid bulbul does his best to disentangle the word's history and usage, and I commend his discussion to all fans of obscure and useless knowledge.

WAMPANOAG REVIVAL.

A few years ago I did a post about the pronunciation of the tribal name Wampanoag that wound up (thanks to reader Martin) discussing revival efforts as well; now Martin sends me a link to a very interesting Technology Review article by Jeffrey Mifflin on the revival, covering the ground from John Eliot's 1663 Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament [Entire Holy his-Bible God both Old Testament and also New Testament], the first Bible published in Ameri­ca, to three-year-old Mae Alice, "the first native speaker of Wôpanâak for seven generations." It's well worth the read, and I hope there are many more such revivals.

PSEUDO-WORD FEAST.

I'm trying, I really am. When I was younger I was an intolerable snoot (to use DFW's silly term), picking apart texts and holding up errors (real or factitious) with repellent glee. Years of linguistics courses, followed by more years of absorbing their descriptive approach, not to mention the tolerance that comes with middle age, have left me readier to roll with the punches, accepting the fact that the language changes faster than I can change with it, amused by my own irritation with usages I happen not to like. Even within the history of this blog, I've grown less eager to seize on linguistic misdeeds found in my endless reading; life is short and one can't expect reporters and editors, increasingly pressed for time, to get everything right. I've even stopped expecting The New Yorker to live up to its former hard-earned reputation for accuracy. But some things are too much to be borne.

In this week's issue, one of the "Talk of the Town" segments, Word Feast by Lauren Collins, is a chatty squib about the practice (imposed by a new general manager) of poetry readings before the "family meals" at the Union Square Café (which was one of my favorite restaurants back when I lived in NYC and could afford to eat at such places). My pleasure at the thought of people sharing poetry is, unfortunately, more than outweighed by my resentment at bosses who force their employees into jolly group activities. But that's neither here nor there; the bone I wish to pick is with the very last sentence, describing the aftermath of the reading:

“Did we order forks, by the way?” someone asked, which could be considered iambic quadrameter.

This is so egregiously stupid a sentence, in two completely different but equally easily avoidable ways, that I am compelled to bring it here for public keelhauling.

In the first place, there is no such word as "quadrameter." I can, alas, believe the twentysomething Ms. Collins was never exposed to even the most basic analysis of poetics in her doubtless expensive education, but could she not have opened a dictionary? And more to the point, did no one at the magazine (once famed, let me repeat, for its eagle-eyed editors and fanatical fact-checkers) read that sentence and say "Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right"? The word is tetrameter, which comes from Greek tetra- 'four-' (combining form of tettara 'four') and metron 'measure'; it has been in standard English use for four hundred years. The fact that "quadrameter" is a bastard, half Latin and half Greek, like television, would be annoying if it were a real word, but it's not—there's not even a nonce usage recorded in the OED (which I certainly hope will ignore this citation).

Secondly, no it could not "be considered iambic quadrameter," or even iambic tetrameter. This would be iambic tetrameter: "The forks! The forks! We must have forks!" The quoted sentence has no meter at all; if you inserted an extra syllable—“Did we order the forks, by the way?”—it would make a nice anapestic trimeter, and if you read it with a slight pause where the inserted word would be you could fit it into such a context ("How delightful a banquet we'll have!/ Did we order forks, by the way?”), but it is neither iambic nor tetrameter, and no amount of strained emphasis will make it so. The last paragraph of that story is so wrong, so bad, that it should shame the once-proud magazine that ran it.

THE EFFECT OF ALTITUDE ON LANGUAGE.

Claire of Anggarrgoon has a post on the Papuan language Diuwe, about which the Ethnologue entry says only "below 100 meters." The code for the language being DIY, Claire thought a fuller description of the language would make a good "DIY effort":

Therefore let me start the ball rolling by claiming that DIY is the only language which supports the hypothesis that altitude affects air stream mechanisms. Its consonant inventory contains 3 stops, four fricatives, 5 laterals, six approximants and seven vowels.

Mark Dingemanse of The Ideophone (who alerted me to this project) picks up the ball and runs with it:

Hidbap is Diuwe’s closest neighbour both geographically and phylogenetically. It is a language spoken above 100m but below 200m in the same area as Diuwe, that is, 12 miles southwest of Sumo, east of the Catalina River. Like Diuwe, it has exactly 100 speakers. The languages are quite closely related, though there is no mutual intelligibility due to the presence of a large bundle of isoglosses at the 100m isoline. This bundle of isoglosses is largely due to the fact that speakers of either language avoid crossing into each other’s territories at all cost...

There is much more, ending with a call for other language bloggers to "enlarge our sample of altitude-affected inventories to get a better view of the phenomenon." Alas, I'm up to my ears in actual work at the moment, but I hope others will rush in where Foley¹ fears to tread!

¹Foley, W. A. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

TROJANOW OR TROYANOV?

An interesting discussion of transliteration at the complete review, in the context of a new translation of Der Weltensammler, called The Collector of Worlds, by—well...:

Ilija Trojanow was born in Bulgaria, but his family left the country when he was very young and he has lived all over the world. He writes in German, and has always published his books under the name 'Ilija Trojanow'.

Of course, Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic letters, and were one to transliterate his name from those into English one would do so differently than into German: the German w is the English v-sound, and a y is the obvious choice where the Germans use j. And, apparently seeking to get the pronunciation right, Faber is publishing The Collector of Worlds as by: Ilya Troyanov. Which does give English-speaking readers a better idea of how to pronounce his name.

The problem with this is that Ilya Troyanov is better-known as—indeed, very well known as: Ilija Trojanow. Even in the English-speaking world.

Two of his books have even been published in English translation—Mumbai To Mecca and Along the Ganges (get your copy at Amazon.com)—and they were published under the name: Ilija Trojanow.

When he appeared at the PEN World Voices festival last year it was as: Ilija Trojanow. (See now The Messiness of Now, an adapted version of his conversation at the festival now up at the PEN site, which is where we learned about the forthcoming translation.)

Perhaps most obviously to the point, in this Internet age, consider the Google results for the searches of his name:

* "Ilya Troyanov": "30 results"
* "Ilija Trojanow": "about 46,300"

You think maybe anyone who goes looking for information about this new Faber-author "Ilya Troyanov" on the Internet might wind up missing something?

My first reaction was "of course it should be Ilya Troyanov in English!" but as I read on I realized that, though it would have made sense for his first English publisher to have retransliterated the name, by now it's pretty silly, and if his preferred transliteration makes it difficult for English-speakers to say his name correctly, that's just the way Troy crumbles. (I added the alternate transliteration to his Wikipedia page; we'll see if it stays. Oh, and by now "Ilya Troyanov" gets over 900 hits.)

ENTIRELY FICTIVE.

Conrad's latest post at VUnEx is his usual exhilarating excursion through byways of history that one might have thought dusty until he poured champagne over them; he begins with a delightful passage from Borrow's Lavengro ("'He—he—he! you must know that in Lasan akhades wine is janin.' 'In Armenian, kini,' said I; 'in Welsh, gwin; Latin, vinum. But do you think that Janus and Janin are one?'") and continues, via Abravanel, to Annius of Viterbo's Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium.

Now Annius' big idea was to get lots of fragments from ancient historians—Berosus of Chaldaea, Myrsilos of Methymna, Fabius Pictor, and so on—draw them all up, and weave them into a holistic history of the ancient world... The same basic idea had been done before by writers like Josephus and Eusebius; the only problem with Annius was that all of his fragments had been entirely fabricated, and by him.

Now that's what I call breathtaking chutzpah, and his Wikipedia entry points out that not only his citations were sham: "His expertise in Semitic philology, once celebrated even by otherwise sober ecclesiastical historians, was entirely fictive."

THE SHADED LANES.

OK, I know everybody's sick of Nabokov by now, and I'm trying to post about other things, but I ran across a quote I like so much I have to share it. I'll tack on a couple other Nab-related items at the end for those who still have an appetite for Nabokoviana. This is from one of the lectures he gave at Wellesley in 1946, and it perfectly expresses how I view life and learning:

The more things we know the better equipped we are to understand any one thing and it is a burning pity that our lives are not long enough and not sufficiently free of annoying obstacles, to study all things with the same care and depth as the one we now devote to some favorite subject or period. And yet there is a semblance of consolation within this dismal state of affairs: in the same way as the whole universe may be completely reciprocated in the structure of an atom, . . . an intelligent and assiduous student [may] find a small replica of all knowledge in a subject he has chosen for his special research. . . . and if, upon choosing your subject, you try diligently to find out about it, if you allow yourself to be lured into the shaded lanes that lead from the main road you have chosen to the lovely and little known nooks of special knowledge, if you lovingly finger the links of the many chains that connect your subject to the past and the future and if by luck you hit upon some scrap of knowledge referring to your subject that has not yet become common knowledge, then will you know the true felicity of the great adventure of learning....

(Quoted in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd.)

In other Nabokov news, Dmitri Nabokov, VV's son, after years of dithering and agonizing, has decided to defy his father's dying wish and publish the incomplete manuscript of his last novel, The Original of Laura. I approve of the decision (if you want things burned, burn them yourselves, persnickety creators—once you're dead they belong to the living) but I don't expect to be bowled over by the book.

And here's the Barcelona Review Nabokov Quiz from 1999. It's difficult!

FOR WANT OF A SENTENCE.

An interesting jeu d'esprit at Waggish:

pick a work of literature or philosophy (or poetry, if you can make it work) and a sentence from that work that, if the sentence had been excluded from the work, would have made the greatest difference in the work's interpretation/reception/history in the following years.

As david feil says in the comments:

It seems that there are several different types of sentences that can be turned up by this question. There are sentences which change the way you read the text, whether it is an explicit instruction (like your Wittgenstein) or a cryptic clue. There are sentences that are so eruptive that they anchor the rest of the text (Conrad’s “The horror, the horror” or Faulkner’s “I don’t hate the South, I don’t hate it” [from Absalom, Absalom—LH]). There are sentences where the text reaches its most crystallized coherence and turns into some sort of poetic easiness. There are sentences which for arbitrary reasons have been given a lot of critical attention (“My mother is a fish.” [from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying—LH]) but despite their immediate impression don’t really define the text as a whole at all. And then there are the sentences which an individual latches on to as their personal lens of the text, but might have nothing to do with the general reaction...

I think we can eliminate the last category as irrelevant to the spirit of the game (and with my irritating editorial nitpickiness I must point out that "I don’t hate the South" is as apocryphal as "Play it again, Sam"; after Shreve asks "Why do you hate the South?" Quentin responds "I dont hate it," going on to think "I dont hate it ... I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"—right up there with "yes I said yes I will yes" in the Memorable Endings sweepstakes). In terms of the original formulation of the question, what comes to my mind is "'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'" (Through the Looking Glass, Chap. 6) Interesting thing to consider, no?

TYPESETTING ARABIC.

A very interesting article by Eildert Mulder about the difficulty of setting Arabic script in type:

The technical problem is this: Arabic letters are generally not written separately but joined to each other in groups or entire words, like a script typeface in English. And though the Arabic alphabet has only 28 letters, most letters have four forms, depending on whether they occur at the beginning of the word, in the middle of the word, at the end of the word, or stand alone. Furthermore, each combination of letters is unique, creating a typographic challenge greater than Chinese. Because all letters connect dynamically with the preceding one, and most also with the following one, the number of unique combinations is almost astronomical.

The esthetic problem comes from the dizzying mutability of written Arabic. For example, there are actually three ways the letter ha can be written in the middle of a word, and the calligrapher’s choice is influenced not only by the letter immediately preceding the ha, but also by the letters earlier in the word, and even by letters that follow it—yet, in whatever form, it is still in essence the ha in the beginner’s textbook. A sequence of letters can run along a baseline the way Roman letters do—though Arabic runs from right to left, of course—or they may start above the baseline and descend in a diagonal if the connections from one letter to the next make that an esthetically pleasing choice.

The result is that the individual letters in a well-written piece of text are in constant motion, like dancers in a polonaise: In the course of the dance, they bow to each other, embrace each other, push each other away, hug each other’s necks and fall at each other’s feet—and there are some real acrobats among them. Thus, well-written Arabic texts feel alive to their readers, whereas mechanically typeset ones feel like graveyards: At their best they are only still photographs of the calligrapher’s living, moving polonaise.

Thomas Milo, Mirjam Somers, and Peter Somers have solved this problem:

Using the calligraphy of Mustafa Izzet Effendi and other great calligraphers, the Milo–Somers team took the concept of script analysis further than either Müteferrika or Mühendisyan, making the basic unit they examined not the letter but the penstroke. That made it possible to derive the dancing, shifting letters, the tens of thousands of combinations, and the variable words all from a few hundred individual penstrokes and a clear and limited set of rules—just the sort of fundamental, tabular information that computers like to use. And with modern computers, it became possible finally to resolve the conflict that has blighted the relationship between Arabic script and book-printing technology for most of five centuries.

Fascinating stuff, with some gorgeous illustrations. (Via MetaFilter.)