I've found a nut too tough for me to crack, and naturally I'm tossing it in the direction of the Varied Reader. Frequent commenter (and slayer of prescriptivist dragons) jamessal sent me a quote from Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era
And some years before the young American’s visit, Levy had solved the problem, divining (after six months, the Canto bids us realize) that the second part of noigandres must be a form of gandir (protect, ward off); then enoi is cognate with modern French ennui; and the word comes apart neatly into d’enoi gandres, ward off ennui, and the line reads,So all is clear (although apparently modern editions of Daniel reconstruct the line slightly differently—James J. Wilhelm's The Poetry of Arnaut Daniel has "e l'olors d'enuo[c] ga[i]ndres"), but Kenner has left us with a conundrum of his own: what the hell is "ameises"? There's no "ameise" in the OED or in any other dictionary I have access to, I can't find an Old English word Pound might have extrapolated it from, and no Greek or Latin roots come to mind that might explain it. Kenner must have tried looking it up himself; I can't decide whether he left it as an exercise for the reader or whether he simply couldn't be bothered to investigate that particular detour, but it's driving me nuts (as the pirate with the steering wheel sticking out of his pants told the bartender); if anyone has any plausible theories, let's hear 'em.e jois lo grans, e l’olors d’enoi gandres—“And joy is its seed, and its smell banishes sadness.” He entered this triumphant emendation, complete with Arnaut’s reconstructed line, under gandir in his great Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch, page 25, Vol. IV (G-L), 1904, where it would have eluded Pennsylvania inquirers await for the volume that should treat of N. But one member of Prof. Rennet’s seminar was rewarded with the solution he went to Freiburg for (we are not to suppose that Levy spoke that day only of his six months' bafflement); and Pound’s text and final translation, first published in Instigations, concur with Lavaud's 1910 edition (which he cites) in following Levy's reading:... Bestir my heart to put my song in sheen
T'equal that flower which hath such properties,
It seeds in joy, bears love, and pain ameises.
In my googling, I discovered that Carroll F. Terrell's A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound
Update. Mystery solved! MMcM came up with it; it's an alternate spelling of amese 'To appease, calm, render mild; to moderate, pacify' from OFr. amesir, amaisir, from a reconstructed Med. L. *admitiare, based on Latin mītis 'mild.' I will sleep better tonight.
I know, I know, we're all sick of top-ten lists, and on the face of it a list of the Top Ten Endangered Languages seems... well, odd, but Peter K. Austin is an actual linguist who "has published 11 books on minority and endangered languages, including 12 Australian Aboriginal languages, and holds the Märit Rausing Chair in field linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he is also director of the Endangered Languages Academic Programme," so his piece at the Guardian is knowledgeable and interesting, even if the descriptions of the languages are so short and superficial ("extremely complicated word structure and grammar") that they're not very useful. After all, in this wonderful internet age, we can always google for more. This link comes from Crown, AJP, a frequent LH commenter aka Sir Arthur Crown, V.C.; Arthur, Graf von Hubris; et alia varia, to whom my thanks.
I apologize in advance for the fact that this post will be totally uninteresting to the vast majority of my readers, but those few who are interested in reading Tolstoy in Russian or enjoy obscure historical Russian idioms will like it, and the rest can continue discussing names for Ireland or little words. So: in reading War and Peace (see here and here), several times I've come across a tiny phrase that looks simple but is hard to explain, с поля [s polya]. This looks like it means 'from the field,' and in fact is nowadays so used ("the enemy was driven from the field"), but in these contexts it describes a hat; for instance, as the Battle of Austerlitz is beginning, General Miloradovich is described as "без шинели, в мундире и орденах и со шляпой с огромным султаном, надетой набекрень и с поля": 'without a greatcoat, in uniform and [wearing his] orders and with a hat with a huge plume, worn on one side and s polya.' Now, polyá (with end-stress), literally 'fields,' can also mean 'brim of a hat' (as well as 'margin of a book'), but this has to be singular and stem-stressed (pólya), and even if you assume that once upon a time the singular could refer to the brim of a hat (though even Dahl only has it as plural), what would 'from the brim' mean?
So I wrote to one of my informants (I try to rotate my queries, so none of them get sick of my pestering), who comments here as mab, and she did a little research and came up with this Russian page, which says "The three-cornered hat of [Pestel]'s uniform was worn not straight, as was required by [army] regulations, but s polya — with a corner forward: wearing a uniform hat in that manner was permitted only to officials in the Emperor's retinue and adjutants. At the time of the Patriotic War of 1812 and foreign expeditions, the fashion arose among the dandies of the officer corps to wear their hats s polya, which was an undoubted breach of regulations." So there you have it; I'm still not sure how the phrase works grammatically, but at least we know what it means both denotationally (with a corner in front) and connotationally (dandyism).
The Schøyen Collection is "a means to preserve and protect for posterity a wide range of written expressions of belief, knowledge and understanding from many different cultures throughout the ages"; from the Introduction:
The Schøyen Collection comprises most types of manuscripts from the whole world spanning over 5000 years. It is the largest private manuscript collection formed in the 20th century.The Contents page divides the collection into The Bible (The Hebrew and Aramaic Bible, The Greek New Testament and the Septuagint, The Coptic Bible translation, etc.), History, Literature, and Palaeography (The beginning of writing and the first alphabets, Greek book scripts, etc.); here, for example, is what they call "the earliest alphabetical writing known" (Canaanite West Semitic on bronze, Israel/Palestine, 18th - 17th c. BC). I don't know how seriously to take their descriptions (they seem overenthusiastic about the possible age of the Australian objects), but the items themselves are remarkable and a pleasure to investigate. Thanks, David!The whole collection, MSS 1-5381, comprises 13,642 manuscript items, including 2,242 volumes. 6,850 manuscript items are from the ancient period, 3300 BC - 500 AD; 3,851 are from the medieval period, 500 - 1500; and 2,941 are post-medieval. There are manuscripts from 134 different countries and territories in 120 languages and 184 scripts.
The eudæmonist is studying Armenian, and has a typically irresistible entry about the "little words, of clear and unclear meaning, these adverbs, these prepositions, these postpositions, these nebulous, numinous specks upon the (in)certitude of syntax" that "trip you up in supposed subtleties." This is exemplified by the word "էլի (eli), which one dictionary helpfully glosses as ‘adv. 1) again. 2) more.’"
A more helpful dictionary observed that eli also means ‘again, anew, more, some more, still, now, well’. This is not the half of it. For instance, when someone asks you what you’re eating, you can say: կաբտռֆիլ էլի (kartofil eli) which doesn’t mean just ‘more potatoes’ or ‘potatoes again’, but seems to mean something more like, ‘potatoes of course, as you can see by looking at my plate, numbskull’. գնում ես էլի (gnûm es eli) which isn’t ‘you’re going again’ but is rather ‘you’re going aren’t you’ or ‘so you’re going, huh’. One speaker seemed to use eli in every sentence, much as an English speaker might say ‘like’, ‘well’ or ‘y’know’.It reminds me of Russian уж [uzh], which a dictionary will tell you = уже [uzhé] 'already,' but which is actually stuck in all over the place for all kinds of emphatic and ironic purposes. (Ancient Greek is full of such things, and the eudæmonist apparently takes the same pleasure in browsing Denniston
as I do.) Neither of my (admittedly small) Armenian dictionaries even has an entry for էլի/eli, and I'm guessing the Armenian/English bilingual dictionary situation is pretty dire in general. Checking my Guide to World Language Dictionaries, I find that "The major Armenian dictionary, though it is hard for non-Armenians to use, is the etymological dictionary by Adjarian," of which Dalby says "In citing forms in other languages, Adjarian used Greek, Latin, Arabic, Georgian, Hebrew, Syriac and even cuneiform script, but, mercifully, he added a transliteration of the cuneiform!" There's an Armyansko-russkii slovar' (Yerevan: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk Armyanskoi SSR, 1987; 724 pp.) that's probably pretty good if one could find a copy of it (assuming, of course, one knows Russian). At any rate, I wish the eudæmonist the best of luck in navigating the tricky waters of a foreign language with such shaky lexicographical support!
Ellen Barry has a surprisingly good article in Sunday's NY Times that starts by talking about the difficulties of Georgian—"its ridiculous consonant clusters ('gvprtskvni' ['you peel us'–LH]); its diabolical irregular verbs" (having studied Georgian, I was able to assure my appalled wife that the description was, if anything, understated)—and goes on to describe the rest of the region:
Some 40 indigenous tongues are spoken in the region — more than any other spot in the world aside from Papua New Guinea and parts of the Amazon, where the jungles are so thick that small tribes rarely encounter one another. In the Caucasus, mountains serve the same purpose, offering small ethnicities a natural refuge against more powerful or aggressive ones.Aside from Nichols, an expert on the area, she quotes Bill Poser of the Log, and you can read his take on it here (he has a nice linguistic map of the Caucasus). The one thing that bothered me in Barry's piece was the reference to Georgian as "a language whose closest relative, some linguists say, is Basque": Larry, thou should'st be living at this hour!As a result, there is a dense collection of ethnic groups, the kind of arrangement that was common before the Greek and Roman empires swept through the plains of Europe and Asia, shaping ethnic patchworks into states and nations, said Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley.
The story ends with this horrifying anecdote:
Dr. Dybo has yet to hear from a library in Tskhinvali, which held a magisterial lexicon of the Ossetian language that was compiled over the course of many years. It’s a single manuscript, never transferred to a computer.War: What is it good for?She is not sure, she said, but she thinks it burned up on Aug. 8.
Some kind and anonymous reader has sent me a copy of The Early Slavs : Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe
A comment by marie-lucie in this thread (which has now reached the hundred-comment mark thanks to the usual digressions, in this case involving edibles) is so interesting I thought I'd give it its own post:
At a time when I was required to read 19th-century French novels, I was struck by a number of occasions in which a young man from the provincial bourgeoisie, sent to Paris as a student but preferring to write verse, got involved with a working-class girl who embarrassed him by pronouncing poète as pouâte, that is, just as poêle is pronounced as if it were written pouâle. I suspect that the girls in question were coming from the (then) rural belt around Paris which preserved the older pronunciation of written oi (as in moi or mois) as [we] while Parisians and most educated people had long switched to [wa], and they made the equation rural [ouè] = Parisian [ouâ], and therefore interpreted the vowel sequence in poète as a forgotten instance of rurality to be avoided in more sophisticated company. Similarly my father's grandmother, coming from a village South of Paris, pronounced the word fouet 'whip' as [fwa] (I never heard her talk about poets).This must be a common phenomenon; I'm reminded of the confusion between final [i] and [ǝ] in some American dialects (e.g., Missouri vs. "Missoura"), not to mention the recent post about New Zealand [r]. Anybody know of examples in other languages of people trying to avoid a shibboleth and getting it wrong?
The delightfully named Fuchsia Dunlop, an an East Asian specialist at the BBC World Service who writes about Chinese food (she has a book Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper
As the 2008 Olympic Games approached, the Beijing government embarked on a gargantuan task: to provide approved translations of all the names of dishes English-speaking visitors were likely to encounter on restaurant menus. They were keen, the official Chinese news agency said, to avoid “bizarre English translations” such as “chicken without sexual life” (used to describe a young chicken) and “husband and wife’s lung slice” (a Sichuanese street snack). The agency added, with an unusual burst of humour, that “the images they conjured up were not, one could say, appetising”....Along the way she mentions dishes I love well, like mapo doufu and dan dan mian (both Sichuanese). And what I wouldn't give for two dozen steamed dumplings from the Dongmen Jiaozi Wang in Taipei, on which I used to pig out thirty years ago! But that brings me to a quibble: she defines jiaozi as "boiled dumplings," but they can be prepared several ways; the boiled ones are shui jiao (水餃, "water dumplings"), but the steamed ones I love are zheng jiao (蒸餃). (Thanks, Paul!)Drawing up accurate translations for even a fraction of Chinese dishes would be a daunting endeavour (Sichuan province alone lays claim to 5,000 different dishes). And the language of Chinese cuisine presents particular challenges. Chinese chefs use a vast vocabulary of terms to describe their cooking methods, many of which are untranslatable. Take, for example, liu, which means to pre-cook pieces of food in oil or water and then marry them with a sauce that has been prepared separately: how to describe this succinctly in English? Even a method like stir-frying has many variations, such as basic stir-frying (chao), fast stir-frying over a high flame (bao), and stir-frying in a dry wok (gan bian). When I trained as a chef in Sichuan province, I had to learn a canon of 56 different cooking methods, and that was just the beginning of my apprenticeship in Chinese cuisine. Translating such a richness of culinary technique into menu shorthand is no easy matter.
Moreover, many types of food have no English-language equivalent. Think of “dumpling”, a blanket term used for all kinds of Chinese snacks, from jiao zi (boiled semi-circular dumplings), to shao mai (steamed dumplings shaped like money bags) and bao (steamed dumplings with twirly tops). And how to translate fen, which can mean powder, meal, noodles, or strips of starch jelly? When taking notes in Chinese kitchens, I find myself jotting in Chinese characters simply because there is no other way of recording precisely what I see, smell and taste....
The final result of the Beijing government’s endeavours is a 170-page book entitled Chinese Menu in English Version. Its suggested translations for more than 2,000 dishes represent a solid achievement, and a great leap forward for linguistically challenged Chinese restaurateurs. The two dozen translators have stuck to their guns in holding on to several useful Chinese terms, like jiaozi for boiled dumplings, tangyuan for glutinous riceballs, and shaomai for those money-bag steamed dumplings. They have avoided some notorious foodstuffs (such as dog), but no one could accuse them of sanitising their menu, because they have included challenging dishes such as steamed pig’s brains and sautéed chicken gizzards.
An article by linguist Laurie Bauer discusses the strange fate of the phoneme /r/ in New Zealand:
When North America was settled, many of the early settlers came from the west or still pronounced "r", with the result that standard North American varieties still have an "r" sound in words like "far" and "farm" (such accents are called "r"-ful or, more technically, "rhotic"). By the time Australia and New Zealand were settled, it was a lot clearer that users of the standard form in England did not pronounce an "r" in "far" and "farm", and so, except in Southland, where there was a huge Scottish influence, a non-rhotic variety became the norm here, too....Thanks, Stuart!There are just two words where most of us who do not come from Southland get it wrong. The letter of the alphabet that comes between Q and S is usually called "arrrr" with a burr, and the name of the country "Ireland" is usually said with a burr in the middle. There may be good reasons for these exceptions, but they are nevertheless rather strange exceptions.
For a while it was not considered cool to sound like a Southlander, and many Southlanders lost their burr, then it became cool once more to be associated with the region, and burrs started to reappear as far north as Dunedin and Queenstown. The interesting thing about these new burred "r"s is that they appear almost exclusively after the vowel [ɜː], that is in words such as word, work, fern, nurse, curse, learn, first, bird. They do not appear in words like finger, farm, scarce, beard and ford, where the "r" in the spelling shows that there once was an "r" in the pronunciation (and where there still is one for standard speakers from the US, Canada, Scotland and Ireland)...
Researchers from Victoria University, as well as those in other centres, are finding traces of this new rhoticity in the speech of school children from Kaitaia in the north, through Auckland, to the volcanic plateau. And it seems to be travelling fast, and to be strongest in the speech of young people who are members of Maori or Pacific Island communities.
The development of the pronunciation of "r" provides a fascinating study, and the way in which different sources seem to be converging to provide a unique New Zealand variant as a conservative south meets an innovative north is one of the most fascinating parts of the study.
The June 19 LRB, on page 20, had a box entitled "Two Poems by Jean Sprackland." The first, "The Source," begins:
Want to learn the source,The second is called "In the Afternoon" and begins:
the cool under the surface fire?
Watch the heron:he snatches the silver voice
from the throat of the river
and swallows it live.
The devil likes the chicken coop.You might want to do a quick mental compare-and-contrast before diving below the cut.
He lies on a bed of straw
Watching the snow fall.
The hens fetch him eggs to suck,
But he's not in the mood.Cotton Mather is coming tonight,
Bringing a young witch.
OK, here's the kicker: in the July 3 issue, they published this highly embarrassing item:
ApologyI wonder if anyone not previously familiar with the Simic poem read it and thought "That doesn't sound like Sprackland"?In the LRB of 19 June we published two poems, ‘The Source’ and ‘In the Afternoon’, which we attributed to Jean Sprackland. She is indeed the author of ‘The Source’, but the author of ‘In the Afternoon’ is Charles Simic. We would like to apologise to both of them.
Thanks to Wordorigins.org, I've learned one of those useless bits of information I love: André Citroën, founder of the eponymous auto company, was of Dutch origin, and, as the linked Wikipedia article says, "The Citroen family moved to Paris from Amsterdam in 1873 [five years before André's birth]. Upon arrival, the diaeresis was added to the name, changing Citroen to Citroën (a grandfather had sold lemons, and had changed the consequent name Limoenman 'lemon man' to Citroen 'lemon')." I'm reminded of Saul Bellow's Charlie Citrine and his friend and mentor Von Humboldt Fleisher ("Oh, Humboldt! He was no potato. He was a papaya a citron a passion fruit"), and of some novel I've otherwise forgotten in which a character named Death insisted the name was pronounced De-ATH. No, no, it's not Si-TROON, it's Si-tro-EN! Much more chic that way. [As explained by marie-lucie in the thread, French basically can't deal with consecutive vowels of this type, so the diaeresis was needed to enable the French to pronounce the name, even if not the way it was pronounced by the Dutch.]
I don't think I've seen languages interwoven in quite this way; if you know both French and English, it's a very enjoyable read:
To answer the question I'm always asked [voyons réfléchissons] No I do not feel that there is a space between the two tongues that talk in me [oui peut-être un tout petit espace] On the contrary [plus ou moins si on veut] For me the one and the other seem to overlap [et même coucher ensemble] To want to merge [oui se mettre l'une dans l'autre] To want to come together [jouir ensemble] To want to embrace one another [tendrement] To want to mesh one into the other [n'être qu'une] Or if you prefer [ça m'est égal] They want to spoil and corrupt each other [autant que possible] I do not feel as some other bilingualists have affirmed that one tongue is vertical in me the other horizontal [pas du tout] If anything my tongues seem to be standing or lying always in the same direction [toujours penchées l'une vers l'autre] Sometimes vertically [de haut en bas] Other times horizontally [d'un côté à l'autre] Depending on their moods or their desires [elles sont très passionnées vous savez] Though these two tongues in me occasionally compete with one another in some vague region of my brain [normalement dans la partie supérieure de mon cerveau] More often they play with one another [des jeux très étranges] Especially when I am not looking [quand je dors] I believe that my two tongues love each other [cela ne m'étonnerait pas] And I have on occasion caught them having intercourse behind my back [je les ai vues une fois par hasard] but I cannot tell which is feminine and which is masculine [personnellement on s'en fout] Perhaps they are both androgynous [c'est très possible]It's by Raymond Federman, from his Loose Shoes: A Life Story of Sorts, where I also enjoyed Federman, his meditation on his name ("His wife ... always tells him that Federman does not mean Penman, that it has nothing to do with la plume and his vocation as a writer, that the name simply came from what his ancestors were doing back in the old country. And what were Federman's ancestors doing in the old country? his wife explains, plucking chicken feathers in the steppes of Russian or the Ghettos of Poland"). I don't usually enjoy "experimental" writing, but this I like. (Via wood s lot.)
David Shulman in The New Republic discusses the sad state of awareness of Sanskrit literature: "The astonishing fact is that cultivated readers of [European] tongues may have never heard of Kalidasa, or of the no less important Bhavabhuti, Bharavi, Magha, and Sriharsha."
Happily, help has now arrived. In the last decade, a new library of translations from Sanskrit has begun to appear. It is called the Clay Sanskrit [Library], named after the generous donor who has made it all possible, John P. Clay, who took a degree in Sanskrit from Oxford University many years ago. More than thirty volumes have already appeared in this extraordinary project, with another twenty or more in the pipeline. And so, for the first time in English, we have the beginnings of a representative canon of Sanskrit literary works, for the most part well translated and accessible to a wide public.This is an excellent thing, and I wish these volumes had been around when I was sullenly studying Sanskrit 35 years ago. Thanks, Kári!The Clay volumes are patterned after the justifiably celebrated Loeb Classical Library for Greek and Latin: small, elegant books, beautifully printed, sparsely annotated, and bilingual—the Sanskrit, transliterated into Roman characters in a system devised by the Clay editors, sits on the left page, facing the English translation on the right. This arrangement naturally delights students of Sanskrit, who may dispense, at least temporarily, with their dictionaries and grammar books; but you do not have to know Sanskrit to enjoy reading these volumes. Indeed, their raison d'être is to win for the Sanskrit classics an audience outside India, and certainly beyond the limited scholarly circles that have, for the last two centuries or so, studied these works, produced critical editions and philological commentaries, and sometimes also translated them into Western languages, almost invariably badly.
My pal Paul has sent me a link to an essay by Lucy Kellaway that struck me with its pure essence of language lunacy. It's basically your standard purist rant, and is nicely summed up by its first sentence: "For the last few months I've been on a mission to rid the world of the phrase 'going forward'." You get the picture: I hate this newfangled phrase, I hear it all the time, I can't make it stop but at least I can vent about it. So far, so tiresome. But the thing is, she knows better. She says so. But she rants anyway. As I wrote to Paul:
She knows on some level she's being an idiot — "You could say
this orgy of pedantry was not only tedious, but also pointless.
Language changes" — but she continues "Yet protesting feels so good.
Not only does it allow one to wallow in the superiority of one's
education, but some words are so downright annoying that to complain
brings relief." Rarely have I seen the pathological nature of
language gripery displayed so openly. She quotes Swift, understands
that he was foolish to object so strongly to "mob," but then says "By
contrast there is so much more to object to in 'going forward'." If
that's not tongue-in-cheek, it shows a degree of blindness that makes
one despair for the human race.
I understand being annoyed by other people's usage, and I've shared some of my own annoyances in the past ("may have" for "might have," "disinterested" to mean "uninterested"). What I don't understand is taking such annoyance seriously. How can you know that language changes, that Swift thought "mob" was ruining the language but he was wrong, and yet think that your own pet peeves are somehow different? On a gut level I dislike the new that use of "disinterested," but intellectually I know that people will communicate just as well however they use it, just as they communicated perfectly well after they dropped the inflectional endings of Old English (a far more disruptive change than any of our modern peeves). Language changes, we get used to it, we go on as before. Why is this so hard to assimilate?
After her language rant she goes on to rant about what a heading calls "Misplaced passion"; she means by this "the new business insincerity: a phoney upping of the emotional ante," but it applies equally well to overheated reactions to language change.
Courtesy of LH reader Trevor, here's a ditty by Flann O'Brien (remembered here and elsewhere) which will delight anyone who's ever studied Old Irish; it begins:
My song is concernin’My favorite couplet: "They rose in their nightshift/ To write for the Zeitschrift."
Three sons of great learnin’
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
They worked out that riddle
Old Irish and Middle,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
They studied far higher
Than ould Kuno Meyer
And fanned up the glimmer
Bequeathed by Zimmer,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
These limericks take advantage of especially odd mismatches between spelling and pronunciation, usually involving family names like St. John "SIN-jǝn" and Menzies "MING-eez" (not the only pronunciation, but the one used here). A sample:
There was a young fellow named Cholmondeley,I should note that the one beginning "At the art of love..." cannot be deciphered until you reach the last line. Thanks, Trevor!
Whose bride was so mellow and colmondeley
That the best man, Colquhoun,
An inane young bolqufoun,
Could only stand still and stare dolmondeley.
When we last saw our heroes in the "war" part of War and Peace, they were hightailing it east, away from the victorious French, in the autumn of 1805, hoping to meet up with the reinforcements coming from Russia before Napoleon could trap and destroy them as he had the hapless Austrians. As the Battle of Austerlitz approached, I decided I wanted to know more about the history, so I sent off for 1805: Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Destruction of the Third Coalition
My main complaint is one that would seem trivial to the vast majority of readers: insufficient explanation of place names. As longtime LH readers know, I love alternate geographical names (see, for instance, here and here, and compare this annoyed post), and it doesn't bother me that the author uses the old German names of the places his armies march through (mostly now replaced by Slavic ones), since those were the ones used at the time and in the vast majority of histories. It would be silly to talk about the Battle of Slavkov, and similarly it makes sense to use Pressburg for what's now Bratislava (the capital of Slovakia) and Laibach for Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia).
But the names should be matched with their modern equivalents somewhere, either in an appendix or in the index. In the first place, not everyone is aware of the fact that the names are now changed, and a reader might get frustrated trying to use a modern map to follow the action. And even those, like me, who are on top of the issue can be confused. At the start of Chapter 3, talking about the situation after Kutuzov had managed to join up with his reinforcements and Napoleon had halted his advance at the city of Brünn (now Brno), he says that the Austrian Army of Italy under Archduke Charles and the remnants of Archduke John's Army of Tyrolia, both marching east, "converged at Marburg." Poring over the map, I could see no Marburg, but I knew there was a German city of that name; when I looked it up, however, I discovered it was far in the northwest, in Hesse, and couldn't possibly be the intended location. Fortunately, the Wikipedia entry mentioned a disambiguation page, and that pointed me to Maribor in Slovenia, whose German name is Marburg an der Drau ("on the Drava"). This made perfect geographical sense, and (muttering) I added it to the map. But the reader should not be forced to jump through hoops; the first time the town is mentioned, it should be "Marburg (now Maribor)."
Incidentally, the most famous feature of Brünn (Brno) in the nineteenth century was its old castle, used by the Habsburg emperors as a place to stash political prisoners like pesky Italian nationalists; it's where Emperor Francis put the unfortunate General Mack until he decided Mack's surrender at Ulm was the result of stupidity rather than treason. It was a byword for dread dungeons in Austria, much as the Bastille was in France. It's name? Spielberg (now Špilberk). I wonder if Steven knows?
Ever wonder who writes the subtitles and how it works? Guy La Roche is happy to tell you:
First of all, people process spoken information faster than written information. Subtitles follow the pace of spoken language. The amount of text used in subtitles therefore needs to be reduced so that the reading speed matches the speed of the dialogue. The faster a character speaks, the more the translator needs to reduce his text. Most of the time it is simply impossible to do a word for word translation. You, the people who watch tv and movies, simply cannot read fast enough....Lots of interesting stuff, including a long disquisition on the surprising problems of translating porn ("In this case the story was about some bimbo trying to make it through college.... to my great horror, she mentioned a 15th century Spanish book. And she gave the title in Spanish. ... I was so upset that I made it a point of honour to find that book. And I did. After several hours trawling the internet I found exactly ONE webpage that mentioned the book and its Spanish title. That one subtitle alone, invoice value seventy eurocents, cost me hours of work and precious time"). Thanks for the link go to frequent commenter Kári Tulinius.
Reading Troyat's biography of Tolstoy can be trying, although it's very well written and illuminating, simply because Tolstoy was such a jerk. A common phenomenon, of course, but still, it's a relief when I run across something that makes me feel closer to him, like this passage (on p. 323) about Tolstoy's sudden decision to learn Greek:
He sent for a theological student from Moscow to teach him the rudiments of the language. From the first day, the forty-two-year-old pupil threw himself into Greek grammar with a passion, pored over dictionaries, drew up vocabularies, tackled the great authors. In spite of his headaches, he learned quickly. In a few weeks he had outdistanced his teacher. He sight-translated Xenophon, reveled in Homer, discovered Plato and said the originals were like "spring-water that sets the teeth on edge, full of sunlight and impurities and dust-motes that make it seem even more pure and fresh," while translations of the same texts were as tasteless as "boiled, distilled water." Sometimes he dreamed in Greek at night. He imagined himself living in Athens; as he tramped through the snow of Yasnaya Polyana, sinking in up to his calves, his head was filled with sun, marble and geometry. Watching him changing overnight into a Greek, his wife was torn between admiration and alarm. "There is clearly nothing in the world that interests him more or gives him greater pleasure than to learn a new Greek word or puzzle out some expression he has not met before," she complained. "I have questioned several people, some of whom have taken their degree at the university. To hear them talk, Lyovochka has made unbelievable progress in Greek." He himself felt rejuvenated by this diet of ancient wisdom. "Now I firmly believe," he said to Fet, "that I shall write no more gossipy twaddle of the War and Peace type."And in reading the gossipy twaddle itself, I've come across another puzzle (like the покой-ер-п one discussed here), which I hope my Russian-speaking readers may be able to solve. In Book One, Part III, Chapter 3, cranky old Prince Bolkonsky, noticing that his timid daughter Marya is looking terrified of his mood as usual, says: "— Др… или дура!…" Which is to say: "— Dr… or fool!…" I'm wondering what that first "Dr" might be; it looks like he's starting to say something and then substituting "fool," and my guess is дрянь [dryan'] 'trash; good-for-nothing person,' but I'd be curious to know how Russian readers interpret it. (Ann Dunnigan simply translates "Fool!")
Mark Liberman provides the best discussion you are likely to see of the tangled history of these words, and specifically of the use of "personal infer," the oldest example Mark could find being "Why, in the name of all that's consistent, you don't mean to infer that you love this fellow?" from John Brougham's play Flies in the Web (Mark couldn't find a date for the play, but it's clearly before Brougham's death in 1880). Mark's conclusion:
So whatever is going on with infer as "imply", it's not just a recent mistake in linking similar words to complex concepts. There's a long history of erratic specialization (from the original sense "bring in" to the much more limited meaning "deduce") and sporadic generalization (from contexts where "deduce" might be taken to mean "suggest").I
I'm not going to get into the politics of the mess in the north Caucasus except to say that there are no good guys, but I have to get a minor linguistic gripe off my chest: all the news broadcasts are talking about "ah-SET-ee-ə" and the "ah-SET-ee-ənz." What's next, cro-AT-ee-ə? ve-NET-ee-ən art? I realize none of the broadcasters and reporters have ever heard of Ossetia before, but you'd think the patterns of English spelling would clue them in to its proper pronunciation, ah-SEE-shə. I suppose it's another case of hyperforeignification, like "bei-ZHING."
Incidentally, Ossetian (as every schoolboy knows) is an Iranian language, and the Ossetian name for Ossetia is Iryston, based on Ir, the self-designation meaning 'an Ossetian' (well, actually it specifically refers to the majority group of Ossetians, and the minority Digors resent the use of that name for the whole people, causing some Ossetes to identify with the medieval Alans and call Ossetia "Alania," but let's set that aside—if you're interested in the messy politics of Caucasian ethnic nomenclature and the Alans, read "The Politics of a Name: Between Consolidation and Separation in the Northern Caucasus" [pdf, html] by Victor Shnirelman); it used to be thought that Ir was derived from *arya- 'Aryan' and thus related to Iran, but Ronald Kim denies this in "On the Historical Phonology of Ossetic: The Origin of the Oblique Case Suffix," Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 123 (Jan. - Mar. 2003), pp. 43-72 (JSTOR); the relevant discussion is on p. 60, fn. 42. Kim says it may be from a Caucasian language, or it may be descended from PIE *wiro- 'man.' (The word Ossetian is based on a Russian borrowing of the Georgian term Oseti.)
Update. A couple of weeks later, having heard the SET pronunciation approximately six thousand times and my favored pronunciation not once, I am giving up and reconciling myself to the fact that, for whatever stupid reasons, the new pronunciation is firmly established and I might as well accept it. Already I hear it with indifference, and soon I'll probably start saying it myself; in a few years I'll look back at this post with amusement and try to remember what it was like to experience the shock of the new. Such is language change.
"The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell's recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict." The first entry begins: "Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head (ñ) all down the back. [N.b.: They seem to have screwed up the formatting, since an ñ does not resemble an arrowhead. –LH] Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite." Today's reads, in its entirety, "Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon." Should be good reading. Thanks, Paul!
I'd like to highlight a John Emerson contribution to this thread; another commenter had complained that Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary included the "word" zzxjoanw, allegedly a Maori word for 'drum,' and John linked to the Wikipedia entry:
Zzxjoanw is a famous fictitious entry which fooled logologists for many years....I have to admit, I feel the way Hughes no doubt did: who could take such a collection of letters seriously? And as John adds, "The pronunciation given, "shaw" makes it virtually certain that the hoax was a dig at the spelling-reformer and music critic GBS."Ross Eckler describes the hoax in his 1996 book Making the Alphabet Dance:
"The two-Z barrier was breached many years ago in a specialized dictionary, Rupert Hughes's The Musical Guide (later, Music-Lovers Encyclopedia), published in various editions between 1905 and 1956. Its final entry, ZZXJOANW (shaw) Maori 1.Drum 2.Fife 3.Conclusion, remained unchallenged for more than seventy years until Philip Cohen pointed out various oddities: the strange pronunciation, the off diversity of meanings (including "conclusion") and the non-Maori appearance of the word. (Maori uses the fourteen letters AEGHIKMNOPRTUW, and all words end in a vowel). A hoax clearly entered somewhere; no doubt Hughes expected it to be obvious, but he did not take into account the credulity of logologists, sensitized by dictionary-sanctioned outlandish words such as mlechchha and qaraqalpaq."
Jon Henley in The Guardian: "The end of the line?"
An unlikely row has erupted in France over suggestions that the semicolon's days are numbered; worse, the growing influence of English is apparently to blame. Jon Henley reports on the uncertain fate of this most subtle and misused of punctuation marks. Aida Edemariam discovers which writers love it - and which would be glad to see it disappear.As I told Paul, who sent me the link, I have to agree with Jonathan Franzen: "I love a good semicolon, but this sounds like one of those Literature is Dead! stories that the New York Times likes to run."
The erudite and generous MMcM has sent me a copy of Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary
This ties in nicely with Nicholson Baker's review (from the NY Times Book Review) of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, which I was reading just before the Byrne book arrived. Shea "owns about a thousand dictionaries," some of which he bought from a book dealer named Madeline, who owns 20,000 dictionaries. These are my kind of people. At any rate, Shea decided to spend a year reading the OED (supported by his tolerant girlfriend, a psychology teacher, one presumes, because he spends all day in the basement of the Hunter College library, trying to avoid eyestrain and madness: "Sometimes I get angry at the dictionary and let loose with a muffled yell"), and the book sounds like an enjoyable read, as of course is the review. I'll quote the odd-word bits:
There’s hypergelast (a person who won’t stop laughing), lant (to add urine to ale to give it more kick), obmutescence (willful speechlessness) and ploiter (to work to little purpose)... Acnestis — the part of an animal’s back that the animal can’t reach to scratch. And bespawl — to splatter with saliva. In Chapter D, Shea encounters deipnophobia, the fear of dinner parties; Chapter K brings kankedort, an awkward situation... He is fond of polysyllabic near-homonyms — words like incompetible (outside the range of competency) and repertitious (found accidentally), which are quickly swallowed up in the sonic gravitation of familiar words. And a number of Shea’s finds deserve prompt resurrection: vicambulist, for instance — a person who wanders city streets.Some of these are in Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary, but most aren't; I imagine if you spent long enough at it you could compile several such books without repetition. English is a bottomless word-hoard.
This is both frustrating and fun. Type in English words you think might be among the 100 most common, and if you're right, the world will appear in its box. Note that if you start typing in a three-letter word that happens to start with a two-letter word, the latter will appear instead, but you can then go back and start typing again and it will accept the longer word (if, of course, it's on the list). Warning: I'm pretty sure the list is flawed, because some of the words I (and people on the MetaFilter thread where I found it) tried have to be more common than a few of the ones they include. My score: 47. One person at MeFi claims to have gotten 74; I'm not sure I believe him. You have five minutes, and it's harder than you think.
I just discovered a new phrase and, as is my wont, am sharing it with the world, or at least that portion of the world as ignorant as I (I quote the OED s.v. hiding "A flogging, thrashing, beating"):
to be on a hiding to nothing, to be faced with a situation in which any outcome would be unfavourable or in which success is impossible, spec. (app. orig. in Horse-racing) that of being expected to win easily, so that one gains no credit from victory, and is disgraced by defeat. Cf. TO prep. 19a [Connecting the names of two things (usu. numbers or quantities) compared or opposed to each other in respect of amount or value, as the odds in a wager or contest, the terms of a ratio, or the constituents of a compound: Against, as against. 1530 PALSGR. 712/1 Twenty to one he is ondone for ever...].It's an extremely useful phrase; I guess "no-win situation" comes close, but it isn't nearly as colorful.
1905 A. M. BINSTEAD Mop Fair xi. 193 They will, like the man who was on a hiding to nothing the first time Tom Sayers saw him, ‘take it lying down’. 1964 C. P. SNOW Corridors of Power ii. 17 He wanted to get out of his present job as soon as he had cleaned it up a little—‘This is a hiding to nothing,’ he said simply—and back to the Treasury. 1975 Sunday Times 8 June 28/2 The Indian batsmen were on a hiding to nothing. They could not win. 1977 Times 29 Jan. 10/7 Derby know they are on a hiding to nothing at Fourth Division Colchester, who have a reputation as giant-killers. 1980 Spectator 8 Mar. 3/1 Lord Soames would have been on a hiding to nothing in trying to exercise gubernatorial authority and viceregal judgment.
A memorial post (in Russian) for Solzenitsyn (покойся с миром) over at Avva led with a quote from The First Circle that used the word фейхуа [feikhua], a variant of фейхоа [feikhóa] 'feijoa'; the translation was obvious, but (as often happens with unusual botanical words) I realized I didn't actually know what a feijoa was, or even how to pronounce the name. The Wikipedia entry explained what it was (and why you rarely see them in these parts: "maintaining the fruit in good condition for any length of time is not easy"), but didn't tell me how to say it, so I turned to my trusty Merriam-Webster Collegiate:
feijoa
Pronunciation: \fā-ˈyō-ə, -ˈhō-ə\
Etymology: New Latin, genus name, from João da Silva Feijó died 1824 Brazilian naturalist
What the...? If it's from a Brazilian name (pronounced fei-ZHO), why on earth would the two pronunciations be fei-YO-ə and fei-HO-ə? The latter I can understand, because there are a lot of Spanish loanwords (e.g., jalapeño) with j = /h/, but why j = /y/? And surely a fair number of people pronounce it the obvious way, with the normal English pronunciation of j, which is how I was mentally pronouncing it? So I decided to get a second opinion, and went to the OED, which had (I'm too lazy to try reproducing the IPA) fei-DZHO-ə (with the normal English j) and fei-YO-ə, in that order. Feeling somewhat comforted but still wanting backup, I went to the AHD, which had fā-zhô'ə, -jō-, -hō-; in other words, fei-ZHO-ə (with Portuguese j), fei-DZHO-ə (with English j), and fei-HO-ə (with Spanish j)—exactly the selection and ordering I would have chosen if I had the magical ability to impose pronunciations on a speech community.
But since the three dictionaries disagree so radically (M-W's favored pronunciation isn't even mentioned by AHD, and vice versa), I turn to you, o Varied Reader. If you know this fruit well enough to call it routinely by name, how do you say it: with joe, hoe, yo, or the foreign-sounding but etymologically accurate zho? (Or, god forbid, with yet a fifth version?) If you happen to know how those who deal with fruit professionally say it (if there is a consensus), that would be great added information.
One of the things that surprised me when I started reading War and Peace in Russian was that it wasn't particularly well written in the "fine writing," Nabokovian sense. The sentences were baggy, the words were not carefully harmonized, and there was an astonishing amount of repetition. But le style, c'est l'homme, and Tolstoy himself was baggy and unharmonized, and I was soon as caught up in the story as I had been when I read it in English.
But eventually I started realizing that his style worked in a way I wouldn't have expected, and I'll tell you exactly when this became clear to me. It's early in Book I, Part Two; the Russian army is holed up in Braunau, having failed to meet up with Mack's Austrian army, already surrounded at Ulm and surrendering to the French. Young Nikolai Rostov, serving with the Pavlograd Hussars, is sharing quarters with his squadron commander, the excitable and high-living Captain Denisov (based on Denis Davydov), who comes back from a night of losing at gambling and asks Rostov to hide a purse with his remaining money under his pillow; the purse later disappears, and the protracted wrangle over who took it and who owes whom an apology is interrupted by the announcement that the army is going into action.
Now comes Chapter 6, of which I present the first two paragraphs, in Russian and then in English (in the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude):
Кутузов отступил к Вене, уничтожая за собой мосты на реках Инне (в Браунау) и Трауне (в Линце). 23-го октября русские войска переходили реку Энс. Русские обозы, артиллерия и колонны войск в середине дня тянулись через город Энс, по сю и по ту сторону моста.The bolded words are all forms of the same verb in Russian, conscientiously turned into different phrases in English so as to avoid the cardinal sin of repetition (and two of them are melded into the single phrase "became visible, and"). This is one way of doing things, it lends variety, but in this case the variety destroys what Tolstoy is doing with that paragraph.День был теплый, осенний и дождливый. Пространная перспектива, раскрывавшаяся с возвышения, где стояли русские батареи, защищавшие мост, то вдруг затягивалась кисейным занавесом косого дождя, то вдруг расширялась, и при свете солнца далеко и ясно становились видны предметы, точно покрытые лаком. Виднелся городок под ногами с своими белыми домами и красными крышами, собором и мостом, по обеим сторонам которого, толпясь, лилися массы русских войск. Виднелись на повороте Дуная суда, и остров, и замок с парком, окруженный водами впадения Энса в Дунай, виднелся левый скалистый и покрытый сосновым лесом берег Дуная с таинственною далью зеленых вершин и голубеющими ущельями. Виднелись башни монастыря, выдававшегося из-за соснового, казавшегося нетронутым, дикого леса; далеко впереди на горе, по ту сторону Энса, виднелись разъезды неприятеля.
Kutuzov fell back toward Vienna, destroying behind him the bridges over the rivers Inn (at Braunau) and Traun (near Linz). On October 23 the Russian troops were crossing the river Enns. At midday the Russian baggage train, the artillery, and columns of troops were defiling through the town of Enns on both sides of the bridge.
It was a warm, rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could be clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down below, the little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed houses, its cathedral, and its bridge, on both sides of which streamed jostling masses of Russian troops. At the bend of the Danube, vessels, an island, and a castle with a park surrounded by the waters of the confluence of the Enns and the Danube became visible, and the rocky left bank of the Danube covered with pine forests, with a mystic background of green treetops and bluish gorges. The turrets of a convent stood out beyond a wild virgin pine forest, and far away on the other side of the Enns the enemy's horse patrols could be discerned.
Russian has a whole series of verbs relating to vision and other forms of perception that are the bane of translators; белеть [belét'], for instance, is defined as 'to show up white' in the Oxford dictionary, but when would you ever say something "shows up white" in English? In Russian, things белеют all the time: sails, clouds, faces, you name it, and each time the poor translator has to figure out what periphrasis to use, inevitably losing the compact force of the simple verb. Here we are dealing with the verb виднеться [vidnét'sya], which Oxford defines as 'to be visible.' Again, we rarely have occasion to talk about things being visible, but here we have виднеться used five times in rapid succession: the town, the vessels/island/castle/park, the left bank with its greenery, the convent, and finally the enemy. The thing is that the repetition doesn't stand out the first few times, because the Russian verb is utterly lacking in distinction: it's basically a placeholder, something to connect the reader/viewer to the things seen. It's the verbal equivalent of a hand pointing helpfully in the desired direction. It's almost as bland and featureless as "said," which we are used to seeing repeated over and over without really noticing it. It's a boring verb, and its repetition lulls rather than irritates.
And it is precisely that lulling effect Tolstoy is after. Here, he murmurs (after a brisk scene-setting paragraph), see this bucolic scene? Sun, rain, a little town, red roofs, a bridge, ships, an island, a convent... The barely heard mutter of Виднелся... Виднелись... Виднелся... Виднелись... виднелись... is like the soothing clack of the train passing over the rails as you drift off in your sleeping compartment, half-watching the countryside pass by outside. And then in the final three words of the paragraph his fuse reaches its end: виднелись разъезды неприятеля [vidnélis' raz"yézdy nepriyátelya], "were visible the mounted patrols of the enemy." We're not idle onlookers observing a quiet countryside, we're at war, and the shooting will soon start.
Note that it's not just the repetition that is lost; even the significant inversion of the last clause, placing the all-important word "enemy" at the end, is ignored by the Maudes: "the enemy's horse patrols could be discerned." The Ann Dunnigan translation I happen to own handles it no better: "the enemy's cavalry patrols could be seen on the hillside." The translators are painting a landscape, while Tolstoy is setting you up and delivering a sucker punch.
Onion Radio News. No more will English rules follow! Wordorigins via.
Back in 2003 (in my thousandth post), in a discussion of the general phenomenon of place names with and without "the," I mentioned the fact that Southern Californians use the definite article when referring to freeways ("the 405"), and there was some discussion of that in the thread. Now Kári Tulinius sends me a link to a Washington Monthly discussion by Kevin Drum, who provides "the long-awaited semi-official explanation for this phenomenon. It's official because it appears in an academic journal, but only semi because I remain a little skeptical anyway":
The article is called "The" Freeway in Southern California, by Grant Geyer, and it appeared as a note in the summer 2001 issue of American Speech. His story starts at about the time that LA's original five freeways were being built in the 30s and 40s:An interesting theory and a cogent objection. (With regard to NYC, a commenter in the linked Washington Monthly thread says, quite correctly, "New Yorkers never bother to learn the numerical designators. I drove there daily for years, and I still couldn't tell you what number the Van Wyck is, or the Major Deegan, or almost any of them for that matter.") I throw the floor open to suggestions.In about 1941, just before the completion of the first of the famous freeways, intercity traffic came into Los Angeles on the north-south axis on U.S. 99, U.S. 101, or California Route 1.... Before the freeways were built, locals generally preferred the old, time-honored street or road names instead of numbers in conversation. So for 'U.S. 99' they said San Fernando Road because the highway followed that particular named street, as far as the distant end of "town." Likewise, 'U.S. 101' was Ventura Boulevard and 'Route 1' was Pacific Coast Highway....Route 1 or Route 101 was not used in town.... My objection is that this is all pretty ad hoc. Basically, Geyer is saying that other big cities had named highways too, but they just didn't have quite as many as LA, so the never caught on. But if all your highways have names, and that's the original source of the, then why would it matter how many you had? You either get accustomed to referring to them by name or you don't, and if you do, you'd be just as likely as LA to evolve to using the with a numerical designator too. But nobody else did.
...
When the federal interstate system grew up, the southern California area got its share of funding and road numbers.... However, for the first 20 years of the interstate system, no one used the numerical designations.... The interstate routes around Los Angeles were called the Ventura Freeway, the Hollywood Freeway, the Santa Ana Freeway, the Golden State Freeway, the San Bernardino Freeway, the Pasadena Freeway, the Glendale Freeway, the San Diego Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway, the Harbor Freeway, the Riverside Freeway, and the Long Beach Freeway.....The strange-sounding usage of the plus number, as in the 118, was the natural result of an amazing proliferation of new, minor interstate cutovers, extensions, and bypasses that began about 1975.... [It] was even more pronounced when new major Los Angeles interstates sprang up without having any precursors and without being extensions of earlier, nonnumerical freeways. The first one I remember in this category was the 605 Freeway.