How time flies! As always, I thank my commenters, without whom I wouldn't bother blogging; this time around, I thought I'd link to a selection of posts, one from each year, that I remembered with fondness as I skimmed through the archives:
2002: WHAT HAPPENED TO 'THOU'?
2003: HMONG/MIAO.
2004: MORE BAD WRITING.
2005: DIVAN.
2006: THE MULTIFARIOUS AUBERGINE.
2007: TRANSLATING SUBTEXTS.
2008: NORMAL.
2009: WAR AND PEACE: THE SUMMING UP.
2010 is the year in which we currently are, so history comes to a .
Addendum. Frequent commenter Sashura has done a very flattering post at Tetradki celebrating my octennial, for those who read Russian. (He calls me "русовед и славолюб" ['Russian-knower and Slav-lover'], imitating the fictional writer Evgeny Sazonov's "людовед и душелюб" ['people-knower and soul-lover'], itself a takeoff on those time-honored Russian insults людоед 'cannibal' and душегуб 'murderer' [literally 'people-eater and soul-destroyer' respectively].)
Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org presents this video with the words "This is a great little story about the expectations people have about language," and I won't add anything to that except that it choked me up a little. It will take less than ten minutes of your time, and it's worth it.
Dave of Balashon - Hebrew Language Detective (which I welcomed here and have since linked to less often than I should), has done a post—the last in a series on the five grains of the Land of Israel—on the Hebrew word כוסמת kusemet, which now means 'buckwheat' but once meant... well, that's not clear, but I urge you to read his thoughts on the subject. And his final paragraph describes an interesting morphological/semantic split:
As we mentioned, Ben Yehuda made no reference to this usage. And in halachic literature, kusemet continued to refer to spelt. But even heavyweights such as these didn't have control over the living language of Modern Hebrew. And the language seemed to come up with a solution of its own, and a strange on at that. Kusemet continued to be used for buckwheat, but the plural, kusmin כוסמין, was reserved for spelt - and you can actually find the two next to each other in the supermarket, even produced by the same company.(In the course of his discussion, he links to this old LH post about emmer, spelt, and Italian farro; as usual, the thread wandered into a discussion of hats, snake goddesses, and what have you.)
Copy Editing at The New Yorker with Mary Norris. As I said here, "That was interesting, although I rapidly tired of the interviewer’s snarky-twelve-year-old style (apparently mandatory these days). But from her description of the painstaking process of editing and fact-checking, you’d never guess how error-ridden the magazine is these days."
What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor, by Lori Fradkin. As I said here:
That was amusing, and I certainly identified with some of her stories, though starting off with the “douche bag” business can only reinforce the standard image of copy editors as humorless pedants who wield dictionaries as bludgeons. I agree with the commenter who said “I enforce Chicago and Webster’s 11th with shock and awe, though I am flexible and respectful of variance and alternatives, as long as they are consistent.” To my mind, a slang term like douchebag is a prime candidate for flexibility, especially at a popular magazine like New York. Me, I would have issued a memo the first time the subject came up, saying “Look, guys, Webster’s says it’s two words; if it’s important to you to spell it as one, I understand and will abide by it, but I want it on record that I provided the dictionary spelling.” And then I would have let it go.And a response to the previous one, What it's really like to be copy-edited, by R.L.G. As I said here:
Except that he wrecks his own antiauthoritarian point when he says:In some cases I might disagree with our style book. I obey it nonetheless, because rulings, even when arbitrary, keep a style consistent, so readers aren’t finding “Web sites” here and “websites” there in the same article. Readers expect and enjoy uniformity as a mark of quality.Well, duh. Which is why style guides and dictionaries exist and are adhered to, so all his snarking about “the dictionary” is really kind of pointless, except to vent wounded authorial feelings.
I linked to an interview with the excellent translator Robert Chandler here; now I'd like to present a short essay he wrote on translating Pushkin's The Captain’s Daughter. It begins like this:
Five years ago, a Russian friend, hearing I was intending to translate ‘The Queen of Spades’, said, ‘That will be very difficult, harder even than translating Andrey Platonov. You’ll find you can’t afford to change a single comma.’ My friend proved only too right; every slightest liberty I had allowed myself in the first draft came to seem unacceptable. I imagined, however, that The Captain’s Daughter would prove easier. I remembered it as being less deliberate, less precise in both style and structure, than ‘The Queen of Spades’. I could not have been more wrong. Like the novel’s young hero, Pyotr Grinyov, Pushkin is a trickster. The Captain’s Daughter, apparently a mere historical yarn, is the most subtly constructed of all nineteenth-century Russian novels. It took me some time, however, to realize this.He describes the complex structure of the novel and goes on to discuss in detail some examples of Pushkin's sound play ("Pyotr’s French tutor, Beaupré, carries with him his own sound world, centred on two of the consonants from his own name. Pushkin’s first description of him begins as follows: Beaupré v otechestve svoem byl parikmakherom, potom v Prussii soldatom, potom priekhal v Rossiyu pour être outchitel.") Now I want to read the novel again.
(Thanks for the link, Giri!)
Addendum. G.L. at Johnson discusses Chandler's piece.
Stan Carey of Sentence first has an occasional feature he calls "Link love" in which he presents his readers with a bouquet of intriguing links; I hereby pass on to you Link love: language (20), which starts with "Emailing while sleeping" and concludes with a couple of rude bits from the Log. In between, one of my favorites was “Do you have a book with a title that was written by an author?”—a link to a 1978 cartoon by the wonderful Mark Alan Stamaty. I was working in bookstores in those days, and I can assure you that's just what it was like.
As lagniappe: "L'Office du Jèrriais est l'office tchi fait la promotion d'la langue Jèrriaise." Mèrci bein des fais, Geraint!
As I wrote here, I've been reading Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
The chapter starts with a potted history of the circumstances surrounding the composition of Dostoevsky's novel Besy, variously translated The Possessed and The Devils; proceeds to a plot summary and a discussion of whether it is a "flawed novel" (bringing in Joseph Frank for the prosecution and René Girard for the defense); and finally gets to what she really wants to talk about, the group of people she knew in grad school, which she compares unconvincingly to the circle of young Stavrogin-worshippers in the novel. This part reads like a higher-toned version of a True Confessions story (...so this incredibly charismatic guy hadn't slept with a woman in seven years, and then we got drunk and went to bed, and then he started acting weird towards me...). She finishes up, for unclear reasons, with a summary of Chekhov's story "The Black Monk." It's more like a series of blog posts than a coherent part of a book, and I think it would have been better omitted.
But that's a small part of the book, given undue prominence by being the last. The rest, while not necessarily more coherent, is better written and more interesting. As I said here, she has excellent taste in Russian literature, and I'm perfectly happy to listen to her talk about it, even if it's not part of a consistent narrative or argument. Indeed, the main narrative of the book is an account (broken into three parts—it was originally published in n+1) of a summer she spent in Samarkand studying Uzbek. Around this are interspersed "Babel in California" (also published in n+1 and focusing on an international Babel conference held at Stanford which included the translator Peter Constantine, whose translations she criticizes and whom, possibly for that reason, she renames "Michael"—indeed, she's curiously reticent about names throughout, for some reason disguising a "well-known twentieth-centuryist" as "Boris Zalevsky" on p. 61 and leaving the director He Ping unnamed on page 74), "Who Killed Tolstoy?" (originally published in Harper's; you can read it here), and "The House of Ice" (about the ice palace built for Empress Anna; this was published in the New Yorker in somewhat different form, which you can read here). Like I said, a mishmosh; it's a combination of My Thoughts about Russian Lit with My Cultural Adventures Abroad, both things I tend to enjoy.
I guess what bothers me about her, even as I enjoy her lively writing and keen eye, is her focus on the exotic, a category I think should be eliminated as far as possible, since we are not exotic to ourselves, only to those who do not care to get to know us well enough to get past the surface strangeness. In this, of course, she does not differ from most travel writers; there is an inexhaustible appetite for the odd, the fantastic, the unexpected, and it's quixotic to wish away such a basic part of human nature. But both Russia and Central Asia have suffered unduly from the exoticizing regard of foreigners, and her account of Uzbekistan makes the place too bizarre and inexplicable. If you're interested in an account by someone who grew up in the region and describes it with affection and understanding, I cannot recommend too strongly Marat Akchurin's Red Odyssey: A Journey Through the Soviet Republics
I've quoted John Derbyshire a number of times; here's a nice piece he wrote about his experience having one of his books translated by Alexei Semikhatov, an unusually scrupulous, thoughtful, and literate man. Derbyshire asked "an erudite Russian friend" to explain to him one of Semikhatov's Russian footnotes, which turned out to mean:
NOTE. The Russian language as spoken by educated people at the beginning of the 20th century clearly demonstrated the same effect, using tretievo dnia, "the third day," to indicate the day before yesterday. Nowadays this term has been almost completely supplanted by the word pozavchera, "day before yesterday." The word pozavchera was formerly considered as belonging to the speech of the common people.The erudite friend added "I have probably heard this expression tretievo dnia, but never used it myself. I always use pozavchera. In my opinion, this shows that your translator loves the Russian language." What better tribute could a translator ask?
Also, I very much like this passage near the end:
These kinds of encounters are common enough in the literary life. I am always heartened by them. The nations of the world are great lumbering behemoths ridden and directed, more often than not, by gangsters, poseurs, or buffoons. Nestled in their coarse hides, though, are parasites like myself and Aliosha, not much bothered by great matters of state or the antics of vapid "celebrities," but endlessly fascinated by language, history, mathematics, music. We must be baffling to the gangsters and buffoons, as baffling as they are to us. Sometimes the rougher kind of rider will, with a flick of his crop, flatten a few of us.Such is my view of life as well. (Thanks for the link, John!)
I learned about Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Timur was the opposite of Genghis Khan. The Mongols destroyed eleven centuries in 130 years; but Timur rebuilt it all in seventy years. This "Second Uzbek Renaissance" reached its fullest expression in the lifetime of Alisher Navoi. ...All of this is ludicrous (as Batuman puts it, "It was all just like a Borges story"), but I'm afraid this kind of thing no longer activates the ludic centers of my brain. As Jim Bisso said in the first comment to my first post, "The sad thing about Goropism is that within it lie the seeds of the evil nexus of nationalism, racism, and linguistic chauvinism." (A few pages earlier she tells the story of how the Soviets invented both Uzbek and "Old Uzbek," which is actually Chagatai, as part of their divide-and-conquer strategy in Central Asia. Alas, the Soviets are gone but the fruits of their strategy live on.)Navoi lived for four years in Samarkand: a city so deeply imbued with poetry that even the doctors wrote their medical treatises in verse. But before Navoi himself transformed the Old Uzbek vernacular into a literary language, all of this poetry was written in Persian. In his Muhakamat al-lughatayn, or Judgment of Two Languages (1499), Navoi mathematically proved the superiority to Persian of Old Uzbek, a language so rich that it had words for seventy different species of duck. Persian just had duck. Impoverished Persian writers had no words with which to differentiate between a burr and a thorn; older and younger sisters; male, female, and infant boars; hunting and fowling; a beauty mark on a woman’s face and a beauty mark somewhere else; deer and elands; being adorned and being really adorned; drinking something down all at once in a refined way, and drinking slowly while savoring each drop.
Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.
In a discussion of French chapeau 'hat' that developed in the meandering course of this thread, our caprine constituent AJP asked "m-l, is there a connection between chapeau and chapel (its current English meaning) based on physical resemblance?" And the learned marie-lucie replied:
AJP, an interesting question! I had to go check in the Trésor de la langue française informatisé ... Yes, there is a connection, but it is rather roundabout and has nothing to do with the physical appearance.You would think that, as a noted hat person, I would have known that, but I didn't. For comparison, here's the OED's etymology:In French chapeau (Latin cappellus) and chapelle (Latin cappella) are related to the old word chape which originally meant a kind of cape (Latin cappa), a wraparound garment. There is a well-known story about Saint Martin (the most popular saint in France), who was a Roman officer, cutting his cape in half with his sword and giving one half to a beggar. His own half (or what passed for it) became a relic preserved in a small addition to the palace of Charlemagne, which was named cappella from the cappa that was preserved in it (in French, Charlemagne's capital Aachen is called Aix-la-Chapelle for this reason). Later the word was applied to such additions to churches (often recesses off the nave), or to small churches dependent on larger ones or built for private use (ie not parish churches).
ME. chapele, a. OF. chapele (in ONF. capele, Pr. capella, It. cappella):—late L. cappella, orig. little cloak or cape, dim. of cappa, cloak, cape, cope (see CAP). From the cappella or cloak of St. Martin, preserved by the Frankish kings as a sacred relic, which was borne before them in battle, and used to give sanctity to oaths, the name was applied to the sanctuary in which this was preserved under the care of its cappellani or ‘chaplains’, and thence generally to a sanctuary containing holy relics, attached to a palace, etc., and so to any private sanctuary or holy place, and finally to any apartment or building for orisons or worship, not being a church, the earlier name for which was oratorium, ORATORY.Our m-l definitely wins for both concision and narrative oomph.
(Somehow, "Goin' to the oratory and we're... gonna get ma-a-a-ried" doesn't have the same ring.)
I recently got Brief Lives: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
This book satisfies the basic requirement of a hundred-page "Brief Life": it gives you the facts of the author's life and mentions his most important works, with a few quotes thrown in as flavoring. I regret to say it's not very well written or proofread ("ex-patriot artists"!). On a two-page spread (50-51), we get this unintelligible line from a translation (Piper apparently did them himself): "As though I enter for the first"; he says "Iphigenia was an exploration of what the romantic poet Felicia Hemans ... said was the experience of 'the bitter taste of another's bread, the weary steps by which the stairs of another's house are ascended'" when Hemans is simply rendering in her flat prose some of Dante's most famous lines ("Tu proverai si come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e com' è duro calle Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale"); and he refers to Iphigenia's ill-fated family, the House of Atreus, as "one of the most gruesome genealogies in human history" (history??). Furthermore, Piper has the bad habit of characterizing everything he writes about as "the greatest" this or that, as if he were trying to sell us a car rather than describe a writer's life. Still, if you want a quick introduction to Goethe, this is a perfectly serviceable one that could give you the impetus to seek out a longer, weightier biography or critical study.
John Wells, at his phonetic blog, has a post offering a professional analysis of just how an American voice teacher went wrong in a video clip in which she tries to teach the British "short o" vowel. I particularly like this paragraph:
Her happY vowel (at the end of coffee) is much too open. It approaches ɛ or perhaps more precisely [ɛ̝̈], which in England is highly marked both socially and regionally. Socially, it belongs in a variety of U-RP which is probably now entirely obsolete, a subvariety of what Cruttenden calls “Refined RP”. Alternatively, geographically it is associated with (the working-class accent of) central Northern places such as Leeds. No actor should use this kind of happY vowel for “British” unless playing an upper-class character in a play set a hundred years ago or more.His conclusion: "Tracy’s version of BrE represents an impossible mixture of different social classes and different geographical locations. Bits ... of it are Scottish, bits of it are northern English, bits are RP/southern. Some of it is caricature-upper-class, some of it is working-class. Nobody, but nobody, talks like that in real life." You can see the video at that link; here's a hilarious parody by a Brit explaining how to pronounce the American short o. (Both links courtesy of Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org.)
Kyoto University of Foreign Studies has an exhibition on "Crepe-Paper Books and Woodblock Prints"; there's lots of interesting stuff there, but I'll call your attention to the Preface, which discusses the phenomenon of "crepe-paper books," called chirimen-bon in Japanese (縮緬紙 chirimen is 'crepe paper'):
The term "chirimen-bon" refers to books that were made by crinkling "washi" (i.e., Japanese paper) printed with the contents (i.e., text and/or pictures) before binding them Japanese-style as pages. They are called "Crepe-paper books" in English. They arose in the Meiji period, with the publication of translations, made by Westerners residing in Japan, of old legends and tales. Typically, the text was illustrated by a Japanese illustrator in accordance with the plot, and hand-carved woodblocks were used for manual printing on high-grade "washi," which was crinkled before binding. Besides those relating legends and tales, there were some "chirimen-bon" written about Japanese culture. They come in a diversity of languages, mainly including English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Their success led to the publication of some stories, albeit few, set in other countries. With the help of sales contracts concluded with overseas bookstores, "chirimen-bon" found increasing favor in Europe, North America, and other Asian countries.I have a few such books around somewhere, relics of my early life in postwar Japan, and I'm glad to know something about their history. (Via No-sword.)
Toward the end of this long thread from February, we got onto the subject of the symbol # being used for pounds; I had never seen it, but was presented with enough convincing evidence that I threw up my hands and accepted it ("Huh, you learn something every day. I wonder how I managed to miss the # = lb. thing?"). Now Mark Liberman at the Log has a post on this very topic:
Yesterday, in discussing Kevin Fowler's song Pound Sign, there was some debate about the origin of the term "pound sign" for the symbol #. I suggested that it all started with the substitution of # for £ on American typewriter keyboards, but others argued that # was a standard symbol for pound(s) avoirdupois. I've heard this theory before, but I expressed skepticism about it because I've never actually seen the symbol used that way.I'm not clear on why he's so much more stubborn than me about accepting this use of the symbol, since he finds examples going back to 1923 and his commenters are as adamant about being familiar with it as mine, but he comes to this conclusion: "So I'm quite sure that this is why the engineers at Bell Labs called # "pound sign" — it corresponded to a Baudot code-point that had been used for £ in the UK and # in the U.S., probably since the late 19th century and certainly since the early 20th century." You can find out about Baudot code-points in his post, and there's already a lively discussion going on. (And that "Pound Sign" song is a lot of fun too.)
Ljiljana Progovac and John L. Locke have published an intriguing paper, "The Urge to Merge: Ritual Insult and the Evolution of Syntax" (you can download the pdf from that page; the article is, admirably, published under a Creative Commons license). Here's the abstract:
Throughout recorded history, sexually mature males have issued humorous insults in public. These ‘verbal duels’ are thought to discharge aggressive dispositions, and to provide a way to compete for status and mating opportunities without risking physical altercations. But, is there evidence that such verbal duels, and sexual selection in general, played any role in the evolution of specific principles of language, syntax in particular? In this paper, concrete linguistic data and analysis will be presented which indeed point to that conclusion. The prospect will be examined that an intermediate form of ‘proto-syntax’, involving ‘proto-Merge’, evolved in a context of ritual insult. This form, referred to as exocentric compound, can be seen as a ‘living fossil’ of this stage of proto-syntax — providing evidence not only of ancient structure (syntax/semantics), but also arguably of sexual selection.Their conclusion begins: "Not only do exocentric VN compounds suggest an ancient syntactic/combinatorial strategy, but their semantics and use also provide potential evidence of ritual insult and sexual selection at work, selecting for this basic/protosyntax." Now, all of this is pretty hand-wavey and involves unhealthy dollops of Chomskyan syntax (like this Merge business), but it's still an interesting idea, and of course I particularly enjoyed Section 4.4. "Availability across (Unrelated) Languages":
Exocentric compounds are found across not only Indo-European languages, but also non-Indo-European languages, with intriguing parallels in their morphological and semantic make-up. In Tashelhit Berber, a language belonging to the Afro-Asiatic language family, which is spoken in Southern Morocco, ssum-sitan ‘suck-cow’ (insect) is closely parallel to Old English burst-cow, which also meant ‘insect’. In addition, the drinking image for a miser drynk-pany is reminiscent of ssum-izi (suck-fly) in Berber (see Progovac 2006, 2007, for discussion and for additional examples and parallels).Of course, in my day we called those compounds "bahuvrihi," not "exocentric."It seems that this type of compounding appears in this VN order even in head-final languages, such as German (Tauge-nichts, lit. ‘be.worth-nothing’ = ‘good-for-nothing’, Habe-nichts ‘have-nothing’, comparable to English dreadnought and know-nothing). It is not clear, however, if any correlation is expected between the ordering in exocentric compounds and the current word order in any particular language, for two reasons. First, according to Kayne’s (1994) approach to cross-linguistic variation in word order, all languages are underlyingly verb initial, and any surface deviations from this ordering would be derived by various movement operations. If VN compounds involve no movement, as we assume (see Progovac 2007), then, at least for those that involve an internal argument, it is to be expected that even head final languages would have VN ordering in these compounds.
Second, and regardless of whether or not one subscribes to Kayne’s (not uncontroversial) approach, we argue that the VN compounds found in present-day languages are fossils of some ancient stage of language, whose word order is thus not expected to be identical to that of any present-day languages. Needless to say, in-depth analyses of these exocentric compounds in additional languages, preferably by their native speakers (given that these compounds are hard or impossible to find in official reference books) would shed further important light on the ideas presented in this paper, and we hope that our paper will stimulate such research.
Thanks, bulbul!
Felipe Martinez, an independent researcher from San Diego, California, is "investigating the absence of Brazilian author João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967) in the English-speaking world." To this end he has set up a website called "A Missing Book," where he invites "any and all inquiries, submissions of articles, essays, translations, etc. concerning João Guimarães Rosa." The first response links to this site, where you can read the entire (long out of print) translation of his masterpiece, the novel Grande Sertão: Veredas, translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís (Knopf, 1963). The second response says "I have cherished it from the first time I was lucky enough to read it and have made it my life’s mission as a writer and filmmaker to disseminate the reputation of this, one of greatest novels ever written." I've heard of it but never read it, which I guess is not an uncommon phenomenon.
The good people at Oxford UP sent me a copy of Ruth H. Sander's German: Biography of a Language
You will note that Chapter 2 talks about "The Germanic Languages," and that's one odd thing about the book: while German itself is the main focus, a great deal of space and attention is devoted to the other Germanic languages and the history of the peoples associated with them. I'm not sure the average student of German will be quite so interested in Gothic, English, and Yiddish as this book expects them to be. Another odd feature is the emphasis on history; of course, it's useful to be reminded of the context in which a language is used, but the long and detailed account of the Battle of Kalkriese (which when I was a lad we used to call the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest) seems excessive for a book with just over 200 pages of text, and what the account of Luther's marriage is doing there ("The Luthers had six children and, to all evidence, a loving marriage.... The highly competent Katharina... kept house, managed the family finances, cooked, grew a vegetable and fruit garden, raised pigs, and brewed beer for visitors and family...") is anybody's guess. And the first chapter, on Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic and the peoples who may have spoken them, is pretty much all speculation—interesting speculation, and presented as such rather than as fact, but still, in such a short book one might have expected a brief rundown of the known elements of prehistory and a quick transition to the documented facts of the language.
But I don't want to give the wrong impression by my carping and quibbling. This is a book that anyone with an interest in the Germanic languages that extends beyond sound shifts and syntax is likely to enjoy and learn from. It's quite well written for a scholarly book, and one thing that pleases me greatly is her habit of quoting other scholars, frequently in extenso, rather than paraphrasing them and stashing the source in a footnote. To give you a taste, here's part of her account of Luther's impact:
"Luther possessed a particular feel for the narrative quality of the originals," writes Winfried Thielmann, arguing further that Luther situated each utterance into its religious context, searching for the proper effect even of single words such as prepositions and adverbs, discussing these with the like-minded associates who flocked to visit him at Wartburg Castle (2007, 219–225). Erwin Arndt writes:And here's an interesting bit about his effect on grammar (Germanists can tell me if this is generally accepted):Seldom has a writer or poet of the early centuries penetrated through his work so deeply into the essence of language as did Martin Luther. . . . But through it all Luther's main interest was not even language itself, rather his first priority was the content. . . . From the beginning his compulsion for universal comprehension was a basic characteristic of Luther's German language creation. (Arndt 1962, 7.)Though it seems not to have been his aim, Luther's Bible translation turned out to be an artistic accomplishment, resulting in a beautifully realized religious document—and it ended by enriching, even ennobling, the German language. As Orrin Robinson writes, Luther "broadened irrevocably the range of registers and functions for which German, rather than Latin, was the preferred linguistic vehicle" (Robinson 2004, 232).
For example, although Luther initially decided to follow southeastern practice and drop a weak -e in both word roots and grammatical endings, in the end he brought back the unstressed -e in line with east-central German practice. Here we find that Luther's style choice affected even the grammar of modern German. The presence of the Luther'sche -e 'the Lutherian e' ultimately supported the preservation of the inflectional system (for example, subjunctive markers such as the e in ihr habet 'you might have') in standard High German (Robinson 2004, 235).And she has a healthy attitude toward loan words: "The borrowing of words into a language has historically had a positive, rather than a negative, influence on the borrowing language, enriching vocabulary but not causing language decline."
Long-time readers of LH will know my negative feelings toward the much-lauded translating duo of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (see, for instance, here); imagine, therefore, my pleasure on being sent a link to "The Pevearsion of Russian Literature" by Gary Saul Morson, and my disappointment on learning it was only an abstract. If anyone has a subscription to Commentary or otherwise has access to the full article, I'd love it if you'd e-mail it to me. Otherwise, feel free to discuss Peveolokhonsky, translation, or (as usual) anything else in the comment thread.
Update. I have been kindly provided with the article; many thanks!
A NY Times story by Simon Romero describes the unusually promising situation of the Caribbean language Papiamento:
Papiamentu, a Creole language influenced over the centuries by African slaves, Sephardic merchants and Dutch colonists, is now spoken by only about 250,000 people on the islands of Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba. But compared with many of the world’s other Creoles, the hybrid languages that emerge in colonial settings, it shows rare signs of vibrancy and official acceptance.Nice to see an upbeat story on a "small" language for a change. (Thanks, Bonnie!)Most of Curaçao’s newspapers publish in Papiamentu. Music stores do brisk business in CDs recorded in Papiamentu by musicians like the protest singer Oswin Chin Behilia or the jazz vocalist Izaline Calister.
“Mi pais ta un isla hopi dushi, kaminda mi lombrishi pa semper ta derá,” goes a passage in Ms. Calister’s hit song “Mi Pais.” (That roughly translates as “My island is a lovely place, where my umbilical cord forever lies.”) [...]
“While English and French Creoles get more attention, the extension of Papiamentu into different domains like writing, education and policy is incredibly high,” said Bart Jacobs, a Dutch linguist who studies Papiamentu. “This bodes very well for the language’s chances to survive, and possibly even thrive well into the future.”
Scholars, writers and composers here say Papiamentu’s resilience has roots in a mixture of radical politics and pragmatic planning. They often tie Papiamentu’s resurgence to a violent uprising against symbols of Dutch power on May 30, 1969, known here as Trinta di Mei. [...]
Papiamentu’s vibrancy is related to the creation in 1998 of the Fundashon pa Planifikashon di Idioma, a language institute that maintains an orthography. Papiamentu also thrives on the street level, with immigrants from Haiti and Suriname often picking up the language quickly and using it instead of Dutch.
Stan of Sentence First has a most enjoyable post about an excellent word:
On a walk last week, I overheard a woman speak a word (Irish English slang, chiefly Munster I think) that I hadn’t heard in a long time: cnáimhseáiling, or knawvshawling. The opening c or k* is pronounced distinctly: /’knɔːv’ʃɔːlɪŋ/. After making a quick note on Twitter, I was too busy to elaborate until now, but you won’t hear me knawvshawling. The word means muttering complaints, whingeing, sullen grumbling, finding fault, or — another very Irish idiom — giving out:His write-up is well worth reading; I will add a mildly interesting linguistic observation of my own. When I studied Modern Irish, it was the western dialect of Connemara that I learned, and in that dialect initial cn- is pronounced /kr/, so that the word cnáimh 'bone' (the first part of cnáimhseáil) is pronounced /krɑ:w'/, sounding something like "croive." But this word is apparently not used in Connemara, only in the southern dialect region, so that if I follow my natural inclination and pronounce cnáimhseáiling "croiveshawling," I'll be using a pronunciation no actual Irish person uses. Ah well, I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows.Finish your plate now and don’t mind your cnáimhseáiling.The Anglicised spelling knawvshawling is a loose phonetic approximation, as are knauvshauling and cnawvshawling. There are short entries in an online dictionary of Cork slang and a directory of Irish slang, but I think the word deserves a longer write-up.
Oh, if you're wondering about that asterisk after "c or k," it goes to the following footnote:
* I’ve just noticed how accidentally apt is this arrangement of letters.
Lord knows I get frustrated with the general level of ignorance concerning language and linguistics out there in the world; lashing out at it has been a feature of LH from the beginning. But I direct my fire at those who have a professional responsibility to know better, primarily journalists. Journalists reporting on language cannot be expected to know the facts as a linguist would (apart from those rare exceptions like Michael Erard, who took the precaution of getting an MA in linguistics before going into journalism), but they have the same responsibility to get the basic facts right as those reporting on astronomy, nuclear physics, or for that matter politics. When they fail egregiously, as they do on a regular basis, I let them have it.
But it is folly to expect a member of the general public to get things right. To expect the public at large to grasp the fundamentals of physics or chemistry is setting oneself up for disappointment, but at least they are taught these things in high school, so one can, if one is so inclined, blame them for being inattentive or for forgetting what they once knew. No one who has not taken a linguistics course can be expected to know about, let alone understand, the scientific view of language. So I was not pleased to visit Language Log this morning and find Victor Mair attacking the Chinese-American author Ruiyan Xu for a brief op-ed piece she wrote for the NY Times a couple of months ago (finding her "claims to be highly dubious, some to be rather troublesome, and yet others to be downright annoying") and saying "Mark Swofford, over at pinyin.info, has just written a masterful dissection: 'Chinese characters: Like, wow', 7/2/2010." Upon visiting pinyin.info, I found Swofford saying Xu writes like "a stoned grad student with a large vocabulary" and dissecting her little op-ed practically word by word as though it were a dissertation, or a paper in Language, scrawling contemptuously "No, no, and no.... No, that’s wrong...." and hauling out the big guns of sarcasm ("Alas, poor English! How confused we must be to be using a mere alphabet. Oh, if only we could achieve linguistic, aesthetic, and historical meaning!") and irrelevant snide observations ("The author of the poem... lived from 1140 to 1207 and was thus a contemporary of such Western poets as the troubadours Bertran de Born, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Giraut de Borneil — hardly poets whose work suffered for having been written with an alphabet"). I am reminded of Pope's line "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" (though I'm afraid I tend to remember it as I first learned it from William Rees-Mogg's famous 1967 Times editorial attacking the prison sentences handed down by a vengeful court to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, the title of which ended "....on a wheel").
What was Xu's sin? Talking about language in general and Chinese characters in particular the way virtually everyone who has learned any Chinese and is not a linguist talks and thinks about them. What was her main point? That something valuable is lost when the phrase 百度 bǎidù 'hundred times,' which in Chinese alludes to a well-known poem by Xin Qiji (or, for people who still use Wade-Giles, Hsin Ch'i-Chi), becomes in a non-Chinese context the meaningless Baidu. Is her point correct? Unquestionably. Does either Mair or Swofford appear to understand or care about it? No. They are far too concerned with bashing her for not being a linguist.
Now, if her little op-ed were somehow to become a major source of people's understanding of language, then sure, blast away; I attack Strunk and White on precisely those grounds. But to drag out an inoffensive little op-ed by a novelist who makes no pretense of being a linguist and is concerned with other matters and to attack it at such length suggests exactly the kind of seething rage the Loggers are always attributing to those who get upset about "incorrect usage" in English. If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I guess a foolish intolerance is the hobgoblin of frustrated specialists.
Incidentally, you can hear a musical rendition of Xin Qiji's poem here (you can find the poem itself at Swofford's post), and for sheer amusement value, here's what Google Translate does with it:
Dongfeng night, the Arcadia. More Blew, star like rain. BMW Man Road, Hong Thai car. Fung study on three dynamic, glimmer turn, fish and dragons dance night. Moth child Xueliu gold thread. Laughter floats. Searching for her 1000 Baidu public. Looking back, that person is in, the lights dim.
Formerly (and hopefully future) frequent commenter Xiaolongnu sent me a link to the Periodic Table of Swearing (click image for large version). This is a U.K. model, with entries like "Looking Like A Right Arsehole" and "Bollocks To That"; someone should do equivalents for the U.S., Australia, and other English-speaking regions. Actually, now that I think about that, someone should do equivalents for every language with a decent swearing culture.
I've been trying to investigate Schlegel's use of Arabesk 'arabesque' as a literary term (Nicholas Saul says in the "arabesque or hieroglyph" the "material is to be ordered into complex symbolic forms which allude ironically to the inexpressible absolute rather than attempt prosaically to embody it": The Cambridge History of German Literature, p. 230), because it influenced Gogol in his Arabeski (1835; Proffer writes: "There are two works of Gogol which nobody reads: The Arabesques is one and Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends the other"). Google Books sent me, inter alia, to Ginette Verstraete's Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce, and in perusing it I discovered that she translated Schlegel's Parekbase as parabasis. Why not "parecbasis," I wondered? So of course I went to the OED, where I discovered that parabasis does indeed have the required meaning ("In ancient Greek comedy: an interlude in the action of the drama in which the chorus dance and sing, addressing the audience"), but there is also a word parecbasis "A deviation, a digression," which has the remarkable property that "almost all early uses evidenced involve transmission errors":
1584 R. SCOT Discouerie Witchcraft XV. xxiii. 438 A parecuasis or transition of the author to matter further purposed. 1589 G. PUTTENHAM Arte Eng. Poesie III. 195 (margin) Parecnasis, or the Stragler. 1599 A. DAY Eng. Secretorie (rev. ed.) II. sig. Mm4v, Pareonasis [sic], or Digressio, a speech beside the matter in present spoken on, as to say, But here let me remember vnto you something of the deserts and eternized memory of your worthy and most vertuous parents. 1678 E. PHILLIPS New World of Words (ed. 4), Parechasis [1706 parecbasis], a digression, in Rhetorick, it is a wandering in discourse from the intended matter.Note. Closed due to a massive influx of spam. I will try opening it later, perhaps tomorrow, to see if the spammers have gotten bored and gone away; in the meantime, if you have a comment you'd like to add, drop me a line and I'll reopen it for you. [Later: Reopened it, had to delete a huge influx of spam. Bah.]
As I wrote here, I've been reading Tynyanov's Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [Smert' Vazir-mukhtara], "The death of the vazir-mukhtar [ambassador plenipotentiary]," and now that I've finished it, I'm trying to figure out why I didn't like it more than I did. Tynyanov is a fine writer (as well as a brilliant critic), and I certainly enjoyed his novella Podporuchik Kizhe ("Lieutenant Kije"), but I found the novel something of a slog. It wasn't just that the characters were uniformly unsympathetic, and it certainly wasn't a failure to paint an adequate background for the protagonist Griboyedov's doings—in fact, it was the well-drawn picture of Qajar Iran and its courtly intrigues that kept me going toward the end. No, I think Chukovsky hit the nail on the head in his diary entry for March 17, 1926, discussing the excerpts Tynyanov read him: "They were well written—too well written. He overdoes the archaic style. There isn't a line left unstylized. The result is overly concentrated, lacking in inner truth, smacking of 'literature.'" [Отрывки хорошо написаны — но чересчур хорошо. Слишком густо дан старинный стиль. Нет ни одной не стилизованной строки. Получаются одни эссенции, то есть внутренняя ложь, литературщина.] And as I was trying to finish last week's New Yorker (the new one has already come), I found that James Wood, in his review essay on David Mitchell, has things to say that are equally relevant to Tynyanov:
Mitchell is ancestral in another respect, too. He may be self-conscious, but he is not knowing, in the familiar, fatal, contemporary way; his naturalness as a storyteller has to do not only with his vitality but also with a kind of warmth, a charming earnestness. This is why he can so speedily get a fiction up and running, involve the reader in an invented world. One would be hard pressed to separate the quality of his sentences from the quality of the human presence.[...]It is precisely War and Peace that kept occurring to me as a point of comparison as I read Tynyanov, who sometimes seems to be deliberately playing off its methods. It is, of course, unfair to use Tolstoy as a stick to beat another novelist with, but I think it's reasonable to point out the difference between Tolstoy's compulsion (the mot juste, as one expects from Wood) and Tynyanov's... desire to illustrate his critical theories? I'm frankly not sure what made him want to write historical novels (this was his second), but one doesn't get the sense that he had a burning need to tell us this particular story. And there is certainly none of the warmth and "charming earnestness" Wood sees in Mitchell; this is even more unfair, of course, but let's face it, "the quality of the human presence" is something most of us look for in a piece of writing, and here it's so dry and arm's-length it doesn't invite us in or lure us onward.Despite the novel’s liveliness and deep immersion in the foreignness of its world, there is something a bit mystifying about its distance from contemporary life, something a little contrived in its brilliant autonomy. The publisher promises “a bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history,” and this is not wrong, except that choosing rarely visited points in history for novelization seems to lack inner necessity. Mitchell’s new novel has already been likened to Tolstoy, but Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” because he felt compelled to examine and dramatize a great national crisis, and it is that compulsion that makes “War and Peace” a novel of the eighteen-sixties, and not merely “a novel of 1812.”
I think the main point Tynyanov wanted to emphasize is the ways in which a title, and the role that goes with it, can take over a life (and cause a death). Here are a few salient quotes involving the Persian phrase vazir-mukhtar 'ambassador plenipotentiary,' which provides both the book and its hero with a title:
Abu'l-Kasim-Khan came up to him in a gold-embroidered robe and bowed low:After his death (which is slipped in casually), it is repeated several times that "the Vazir-Mukhtar continued to exist" [Вазир-Мухтар продолжал существовать]. When a false story of his death, putting all the blame on him, is told to and accepted by the Russian court:
"Bon voyage, votre Excellence, notre cher et estimé Vazir-Mouchtar."
Griboedov sat in the coach.
Thus he became the Vazir-Mukhtar.[Абуль-Касим-хан подошел к нему в шитом золотом халате и низко склонился:
- Bon voyage, votre Excellence, notre cher et estimé Vazir-Mouchtar.
Грибоедов сел в карету.
Так стал он - Вазир-Мухтаром.]He stopped understanding the rank of ambassador plenipotentiary.
The Persian word Vazir-Mukhtar seemed to him more understandable.[Он переставал понимать звание: полномочный министр.
Персиянское слово Вазир-Мухтар казалось ему понятнее.]And it was true that the Vazir-Mukhtar saw himself in mirrors. But he tried not to look for long. The tenfold, brightly colored Vazir-Mukhtar did not bring any special pleasure to Alexander Griboyedov.
[И правда, Вазир-Мухтар видел себя в зеркалах. Но он старался не смотреть долго. Удесятеренный, расцвеченный Вазир-Мухтар не приносил особого удовольствия Александру Грибоедову.]
The Vazir-Mukhtar moved no more.And in the final chapter, when another Russian is named ambassador to the Qajar court: "The Vazir-Mukhtar was now another" [Вазир-Мухтар был ныне другой]. In a way, he's making the same point he did with Lieutenant Kije, but the novella was a lot shorter, and funnier.
He did not exist either now or earlier.
Eternity.[Вазир-Мухтар более не шевелился.
Он не существовал ни теперь, ни ранее.
Вечность.]
This is totally irrelevant, but I can't resist quoting a paragraph from David Mitchell's new novel that Wood also couldn't resist quoting; it shows why I like Mitchell so much, and why I'm looking forward to reading more of him:
“On Mr Grote’s last trip home,” obliges Ouwehand, “he wooed a promising young heiress at her town house in Roomolenstraat who told him how her heirless, ailing papa yearned to see his dairy farm in the hands of a gentleman son-in-law, yet everywhere, she lamented, were thieving rascals posing as eligible bachelors. Mr Grote agreed that the Sea of Courtship seethes with sharks and spoke of the prejudice endured by the young colonial parvenu, as if the annual fortunes yielded by his plantations in Sumatra were less worthy than old monies. The turtledoves were wedded within a week. The day after their nuptials, the taverner presented the bill and each says to the other, ‘Settle the account, my heart’s music.’ But to their genuine horror, neither could, for bride and groom alike had spent their last beans on wooing the other! Mr Grote’s Sumatran plantations evaporated; the Roomolenstraat house reverted to a co-conspirator’s stage prop; the ailing father-in-law turned out to be a beer porter in rude health, not heirless but hairless.”
In a recent post, Anatoly discusses his occasional reluctance to look up English words he doesn't know, preferring to deduce their meaning from context, a habit which occasionally leads him astray. (This is not a problem for me; I obsessively look up words, fearful of missing a shade of meaning that's important in context.) He says the actual meaning sometimes turns out to be a letdown, but this was not the case for the word gossamer. It is indeed a great word, and I wonder how many languages have a specific word for (in the OED's definition) "A fine filmy substance, consisting of cobwebs, spun by small spiders, which is seen floating in the air in calm weather, esp. in autumn, or spread over a grassy surface"? The etymology is both straightforward (goose + summer) and mysterious: why "goose summer"? OED:
The reason for the appellation is somewhat obscure. It is usually assumed that goose in this compound refers to the ‘downy’ appearance of gossamer. But it is to be noted that G. mädchen-, altweibersommer mean not only ‘gossamer’, but also a summer-like period in late autumn, a St. Martin's summer; that the obs. Sc. GO-SUMMER had the latter meaning; and that it is in the warm periods of autumn that gossamer is chiefly observed. These considerations suggest the possibility that the word may primarily have denoted a ‘St. Martin's summer’ (the time when geese were supposed to be in season: cf. G. Gänsemonat ‘geese-month’, November), and have been hence transferred to the characteristic phenomenon of the period. On this view summer-goose (which by etymologizing perversion appears also as summer-gauze) would be a transposition.
Victor Mair has a post at the Log featuring "Brian Holton's ongoing translation of Shuǐhǔ zhuàn 水滸傳 (Water Margin; All Men Are Brothers) into Scots, part of which is available online." Holton calls his version "The Mossflow," a wonderful term which the DSL defines as "a wet peat bog, a quagmire, swamp." Mair gives as an example the following passage:
那时西岳华山有个陈抟处士，是个道高有德之人，能辨风云气色。一日骑驴下山，向那华阴道中正行之间，听得路上客人传说：" 如今东京柴世宗让位与赵检点登基。"
At that time on Huashan, the West Sacred Mountain, lived a Taoist hermit named Chen Tuan. A virtuous man, he could foretell the future by the weather. One day as he was riding his donkey down the mountain towards the county town of Huayin he heard a traveller on the road say: "Emperor Chai Shi Zong has surrendered his throne to Marshal Zhao in the Eastern Capital."Holton renders it thus:
In thae days there wis a hermit hecht Chen Tuan bydin on the Wastlin Tap o Mount Glore: he wis a kennin an gracie sowl at bi glamourie cud guide the wind an wather. Ae day whan he wis striddlin his cuddie doun the brae ti the Gloresheddae Road he heard an outlan bodie sayin “Richt nou in the Eastren Capital Chai Shizong hes reteirit an Gaird-Marischal Zhao hes taen the throne”.I love this sort of thing and wish to encourage it. Also, if you follow the first link to Mair's post, you will find a vigorous discussion in the thread on language, dialect, and fāngyán 方言 'topolect.'
Anatoly recently posted about the Acapela Text to Speech Demo, saying he was struck by how well the Russian voice (Алена) rendered the text he entered. I tried it with both Russian and English and was similarly impressed. So I ask the same question he did: is this a particularly good, cutting-edge, site, or is this pretty standard for the current technology? If so, it's come a long way since I last noticed it.
I presume we all know about the first appearance of the word America on the Waldseemüller map of 1507; what I, at any rate, didn't know was that the text of the map and accompanying book, and hence the coining of the word, is thought to be the work of Waldseemüller's friend Matthias Ringmann. As a Fourth of July post, therefore, I offer "How America got its name: The suprising story of an obscure scholar, an adventurer’s letter, and a pun," a lively Boston Globe piece by Toby Lester. A sample:
The author, for example, demonstrates a familiarity with ancient Greek, a language that Ringmann knew well and that Waldseemüller did not. He also incorporates snatches of classical verse, a literary tic of Ringmann’s. The one contemporary poet quoted in the text, too, is known to have been a friend of Ringmann.Waldseemüller the cartographer, Ringmann the writer: This division of duties makes sense, given the two men’s areas of expertise. And, indeed, they would team up in precisely this way in 1511, when Waldseemüller printed a new map of Europe. In dedicating that map, Waldseemüller noted that it came accompanied by “an explanatory summary prepared by Ringmann.”
This question of authorship is important because whoever wrote “Introduction to Cosmography” almost certainly coined the name America. Here again, I would suggest, the balance tilts in the favor of Ringmann, who regularly entertained himself by making up words, punning in different languages, and investing his writing with hidden meanings. In one 1511 essay, he even mused specifically about the naming of continents after women.
I confess I felt a sting from this offhand remark: "After studying the classics at university he settled in the Strasbourg area, where he began to eke out a living by proofing texts for local printers and teaching school. It was a forgettable life, of a sort that countless others like him were leading." Yeah, well where would your texts be if there were nobody to proof them, eh?
Plato's Protagoras, a translation is "an attempt at a collaborative translation of Plato’s Protagoras, a beautiful and challenging dialogue. The (lead) author is Dhananjay Jagannathan, a graduate student in ancient philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford." You can read a little more about it here:
The basic principle is this: every day for a few months, I will post roughly a page of the dialogue on a blog (http://openprotagoras.wordpress.com/), side by side in Greek, in my own translation, and in Jowett’s classic 1871 translation that appears commonly online. I’ve invited readers to comment and offer suggestions to improve the translation. My goal is to communicate Plato in English the way readers of his would have interpreted his Greek, aiming to capture his range of styles (colloquial conversation on the street, philosophical debate, rhetorical displays, poetic analysis, and so on) in a contemporary idiom. The nature of the project requires a wide readership for its success, so I hope you will pass this along.So I am passing it along, with best wishes for its success.
Robert McCrum’s new book Globish, about how English is becoming the world language because it's so "unique" and "direct" and "universal" and what have you, has gotten a well-deserved thrashing from linguist John McWhorter in The New Republic. After some nice bits of paralipsis, or, if you prefer, preterition ("Never mind overall that a considerable proportion of the text is breezy recapitulation of English and American history with brief asides about implications for the development of English... And never mind the endless misinterpretations and downright solecisms...."), he gets down to the meat of his attack:
But the central problem is that McCrum’s sense that English is somehow uniquely “direct” and “universal” and therefore well-suited to bestride the world is false. In two ways.He goes on to explain why "Globish reinforces some questionable ways of thinking about language." It's a good demolition job that I commend to your attention. (Joel at Far Outliers points out a minor error: "Unfortunately, McWhorter confuses Papua New Guinea, where Tok Pisin is the lingua franca, with Papua, where Indonesian is the lingua franca. Otherwise, he’s right on target.")First of all, to the extent that McCrum is taking this from English being light on conjugation suffixes (in the present, just little third-person singular -s) and not having gender (no el sombrero for hat but la luna for moon as in Spanish), you can’t claim that this makes it easier for a language to be universal without looking at the fate of other languages. [McWhorter uses the "murderously complex" Russian as a counterexample.]
Then McCrum errs in a second way. He misses that to the extent that geopolitical dominance and linguistic structure can be correlated, it’s in that the dominance causes the grammatical simplification, not the other way around.[...] McCrum knows this – but misses that it upends his paradigm. The Vikings didn’t pick up English because it was enticingly “universal” – they made it easier by picking it up.
As I enter my sixtieth year, I take pleasure in all the people life has put in my path (which of course includes you LH readers); on a less elevated plane, I take pleasure in the chicken curry and homemade peach ice cream I'm now digesting and in the presents generous kith and kin have showered me with, the more LH-relevant of which I will now mention, so you will know what I am experiencing in the weeks to come. From my wonderful wife, a CD of The Indestructible Beat of Soweto
From Sven & Leslie, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation
Update. Just received a package from bulbul in far-off Slovakia: a copy of Язык старой Москвы [The language of old Moscow], a "linguistic-encyclopedic dictionary" of the language of Moscow of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by V. S. Elistratov. Looks both enjoyable and useful—Ďakujem!