Joel of Far Outliers has been reading American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan 1859–73, by Hamish Ion, and as usual he shares with the rest of us particularly appetizing snippets; I was particularly interested in Legacies of Hepburn’s First Dictionary of Japanese, 1867:
Although Hepburn was discounting the early work of his friend Brown in claiming his was the first dictionary, it was an immense achievement, far surpassing any nineteenth-century rival. ... Even though Hepburn’s dictionary might have been more suited for those using colloquial speech than wanting to acquire the written language, it remains Hepburn’s greatest contribution to opening Japan, not only to missionaries but also to the English-speaking world. ... In September 1872, the Japan Weekly Mail noted that the second edition of the dictionary “is a fresh encouragement to foreigners in this country to pursue the study of the Japanese language, and to the Japanese it will afford invaluable assistance in the study of ours.” The newspaper predicted that its print run of three thousand would be quickly sold out. It was close to a century later – in the early 1960s with the publication of the Nelson dictionary – before another American missionary produced a dictionary that would have a similar profound impact on those learning Japanese. The Hepburn system of romanization of Japanese, which the earlier dictionary first introduced and the Nelson dictionary used, remains the standard system of romanization.I wish all of my readers a happy new year, and I personally hope it's considerably better than the one now ending.
Over eight years ago, in the very earliest days of LH, I posted a bitter complaint about the habits of the translator of the novel Ali and Nino: "She kept all the Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Russian terms from the novel in their German guises (the book was written in German), which produces an effect in English that is at best barbarous and at worst incomprehensible." A year later I had a similar complaint about a translation from Hungarian. Now here I am, back to kvetch about the same damn thing. I happen to have both the English translation (The Case of Comrade Tulayev, 1951) and the French original (L'Affaire Toulaev, 1949) of the best-known novel by Victor Serge (a Russian revolutionary who was born in Brussels, wrote in French, and passed from anarchism to Bolshevism to a disillusioned sort-of-Trotskyism, and who will always have a place in my heart for his wonderful remark to the Leninists he turned away from: "All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's this omelette of yours?"), so I decided to read them simultaneously. The translator, Willard R. Trask, practiced a slavish fidelity to French orthography that produces extremely annoying results.
I first realized the problem on page 3, when Serge's Romachkine was rendered "Romachkin" instead of the appropriate Romashkin. On page 7, Macha was kept intact instead of being changed to Masha. (On page 8, a salacious sentence was omitted, but that's another issue.) On page 15 Kouznetsoff (i.e., Kuznetsov) shows up as "Kutzetsov," whether through translatorial incompetence or typographical sabotage being impossible to determine, but on the very next line Guépéou has its accents stripped to appear as the absurd "Guepeou" rather than, as it should be, GPU (the secret police, successor to the Cheka and precursor of the NKVD). On page 29 there's a mysterious "Vorogen district"; this should be Voronezh, but here the error is Serge's (the French text has "Vorogène"). On page 36 the name of one of the protagonists is given as "Erchov"; it should be Ershov or Yershov (the character is an analogue of NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov). It's not just Russian names that are bollixed up, either; on p. 41 Serge's Sinkiang, which should have been kept intact, is transmogrified into "Tsingkiang" for reasons known only to Trask. (Oddly, a few pages later he manages to correctly turn "Mao-Tse-Dzioun" into Mao Tse-tung.) What on earth did he think he was doing? Even if he didn't know the first thing about Russian, he knew that no English-speaker was likely to pronounce "ch" as "sh"—"Macha" can only be read as a female equivalent of "macho," unless it's given an equally inappropriate Germanic "kh" sound (as in Mucha). And what is an English-speaker supposed to make of "Guepeou"? Shame on Willard Trask, who failed in the most basic task of a translator, that of producing an intelligible text in the target language.
An interesting sidelight unrelated to the transliteration issue is provided by a quote from Vasily Rozanov on page 28 of the translation; Trask renders the title of the quoted book as Isolation and Serge as L'Esseulement, both decent equivalents of the Russian Уединенное (Russian text). Serge has one of his characters quote a brief section from this marvelous collection of meditative and frequently funny snippets; Rozanov, whose first name and patronymic are Vasily Vasilevich, is imagining his own funeral:
И вот, везут-везут, долго везут: - "Ну, прощай. Вас. Вас., плохо, брат, в земле; и плохо ты, брат, жил: легче бы лежать в земле, если бы получше жил. С неправдой-то"...Serge renders this:Боже мой: как с неправдой умереть.
А я с неправдой.
«Le corbillard avance lentement, le trajet est long.»Which Trask translates:«Eh bien, adieu, Vassili Vassilievitch, on est mal dans la terre, mon vieux, et tu as mal vécu; si tu avais mieux vécu, il te serait plus facile de reposer dans terre. Tandis qu'avec l'iniquité...»
«Mon Dieu, mourir dans l'iniquité...
«Or je suis dans l'iniquité.»
"The hearse moves slowly, the road is long. "Well, farewell, Vassili Vassilievitch, it's bad underground, old man, and you lived a bad life; if you had lived better, you would rest easier underground. Whereas, with iniquity. . ."Most of this is OK, but Serge (and thus Trask) get the crucial word wrong: неправда [nepravda] doesn't mean 'iniquity' but 'untruth, falsehood.' It can also mean 'deception,' but not 'iniquity,' and here it is clearly part of the long and passionate Russian struggle summed up in Solzhenitsyn's title «Жить не по лжи» "Not to live by lies." A strange lapse."My God, to die in iniquity . . .
"And I am in iniquity."
Harry Eyres has an interesting Financial Times review of a couple of new versions of Le Petit Prince; what I wish to call your attention to here is this bit:
But for translators, the questions and problems are not so speculative but eminently practical. How, for example, do you translate that famous opening request by the Little Prince, which in French consists of the words: “S’il vous plaît ... dessine-moi un mouton.”But surely mouton can mean only 'sheep'; 'lamb' is agneau. Or am I wrong? (Thanks, Paul!)It sounds simple but mouton in French can mean either sheep or lamb. Sarah Ardizzone and Ros Schwartz, in her beautifully judged Collector’s Library version, come to different conclusions for excellent reasons. Schwartz opts for lamb because “‘Please ... draw me a sheep’ ... was not something I could imagine a child saying spontaneously.” Ardizzone takes the opposite view: “I actually like the plosive, slightly cartoony sound of ‘sheep’. I didn’t want any echoes of ‘lamb of God’ in what is already a spiritually charged text.” Ardizzone’s sheep had another advantage: it enabled her to translate the Pilot’s exasperated “Il me broute avec son mouton celui-là” (literally, “He gets on my nerves with that sheep/lamb of his”) as the brilliant “I wish he’d stop bleating on about his sheep.”
I just learned that Denis Dutton has died at only 66. Others knew him as a professor of philosophy or media commentator; to me he was the guy who ran the website Arts & Letters Daily, which I read every day (and occasionally corresponded with him about) back around the turn of the millennium and sporadically in the years since—it was always thought-provoking, but there was just too much else to read. If I knew that he was a native Californian, I'd forgotten it; he got his PhD in philosophy from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1975, so I might have passed him on the street when I was visiting my parents in that lovely city all those years ago. Since 1984 he's been teaching at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His voracious and wide-ranging interest in ideas and his enthusiasm for sharing them will be greatly missed.
It's very hard to translate Joseph Brodsky into English. God knows he never managed to do a decent job, and his approved translators tended to be bullied into falling in line with his ideas (see Daniel Weissbort's From Russian with Love
The savior was born
into fierce, brutish cold.
Shepherds’ small campfires blazed in the wasteland.
It continues with a flawless feel for Brodsky's sense of sound and rhythm. Read the whole thing; it's only ten lines.
Phil Gyford (who runs the indispensable Pepys' Diary site, one of the few I visit every day no matter how busy I am) has a lament for what's happening to the printed book. He ordered a copy of Volume 9
The paper is smooth and crisp, like the kind of paper you buy in reams to feed through your temperamental inkjet printer. It’s smooth, without the grain and texture of standard book paper. It’s also thinner: text from the reverse of the page, and even from the page after that, shows through, as you can see above.When a commenter says "Reissued and backlist books are often printed via POD instead of offset because of the riskier nature of producing thousands of copies and warehousing them," Phil responds "That the books are printed on demand isn’t the issue. I don’t really care how they’re printed, I care about the result and how it’s marketed. If the final object is shoddy but it’s sold as being the same as previous, higher-quality, items then that’s not an improvement to anyone but the short-term profits of the publisher." It probably won't come as a surprise that I agree.Then there’s the printing. Like the cover, there’s something slightly off about it. Not only does the paper look like slick office paper, but the printing looks like it’s been churned through an office photocopier. ... The newer version looks and feels inferior, cheaper, like a shoddy print-on-demand, self-published volume. And yet it costs the same and there’s no way of knowing what you’re getting. I assumed this volume would be the same as all the books I’ve bought in the same series, by the same publisher, in the same edition. But something’s changed, with no clue on the item’s Amazon page. ...
When publishers appear to love their own books so little, when they’re apparently happy to pass off a print-on-demand photocopy of a book as a full-price volume, it’s hard for the reader in turn to feel much love for these gradually disappearing objects.
I want to love books, but if the publisher treats them merely as interchangeable units, where the details don’t matter so long as the bits, the “content”, is conveyed as cheaply as possible, then we may be falling out of love.
A quick rundown of the LH-related presents unwrapped today:
Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier
Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman
The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition
Proper English: Myths and Misunderstandings about Language, by Ronald Wardhaugh
The Slang Dictionary; or, The Vulgar Words, Street Phrases, and Fast Expressions of High and Low Society by John Camden Hotten (London: John Camden Hotten, 1869) (Google eBook)
My daughter-in-law found the last at a library sale and knew at once I had to have it; it's worth it just for the list of Very Important New Books at the back. (The blurb for one of them: "One of the cheapest and most amusing books ever published. There are so many curious matters discussed in this volume, that any person who takes it up will not readily lay it down. The introduction is almost entirely devoted to a consideration of Pig-Faced Ladies, and the various stories concerning them." Italics in the original.)
And my excessively generous younger brother gave me four movies: Wild Grass (Alain Resnais), The Flower of Evil (Claude Chabrol), The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Eric Rohmer), and Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov). Not to mention some Tabu Ley Rochereau. I'll be absorbing all this for a long time... after I finish the blasted editing job I'm in the middle of.
I'll be opening most of my presents tomorrow, but I already have a couple of LH interest: Viktor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose
Not only do I love Shklovsky's writing for its own sake, but his approach to criticism is far more appealing to me than most; I always come away from him feeling like I've learned more about how literature works.To all of my readers who are celebrating the holidays: happy holidays!I opened it at random to page 3 and saw the sentence "Hey, you with the hat, you dropped a package!" This book was clearly meant for me.
Mark Liberman has a post at the Log about the U.K. term jobsworth (OED: "Brit. colloq. (depreciative). A person in authority (esp. a minor official) who insists on adhering to rules and regulations or bureaucratic procedures even at the expense of common sense"), which was as new to him as it is to me; it comes from the U.K. expression "it's more than me job's worth", meaning "I'd lose my job if I let you do that." A commenter adduces the German colloquialism Überzwerg, literally 'superdwarf': "typically a minor official who uses petty rules and regulations to make life uncomfortable for those he has power over." (The definition is illustrated by an appalling story about a train trip.) These are both excellent words, though the second would need to be adapted to be adopted ("superdwarf" or "overdwarf"?).
There's also an interesting thread about the value of comments for a blog, in which nice things are said about the commenters here at LH; as I write there, "There are a number of blogs I stopped visiting when they stopped having comments, and I would not bother maintaining Languagehat if I were just talking to myself — it's the commenters who make it interesting for me."
Enrico Brignano is a comedian from Rome whose ten-minute Dialetti italiani is a tour de force of mimicry. Once he stopped speaking standard Italian I couldn't understand more than a word here and there, but his stage presence is compelling enough that I didn't care. He goes from north to south, and your reward for sticking it out is a simultaneous performance as Godfather and cat. (Hat tip to IndigoJones.)
I was looking up something else in Brewer's ("devil's delight," which is how one of my dictionaries quaintly translates Russian столпотворение—it wasn't there, oddly, but Farmer and Henley have it: "Devil's-Delight. To kick up the devil's delight, verbal phr. (common). — To make a disturbance") and ran across the phrase "the devil to pay and no pitch hot," defined as "There will be serious trouble arising from this," with the explanation: "The 'devil' was the seam between the outboard plank and the waterways of a ship and very awkward of access. It also needed more pitch when caulking and paying, hence 'the devil'." This is of course nonsense (the expression "the devil to pay" comes from stories of making a pact with the devil; see this excellent discussion for details), but it led me to the fact that there is a verb pay meaning "To smear or cover (a wooden surface or join, esp. the seams of a ship) with pitch, tar, or other substance, so as to make watertight or resistant to damage," which comes from Middle French poier (in Old French from Normandy as peier), from Latin picāre 'to smear with pitch' (Latin pix 'pitch'). The latest OED citation is from 1985: Verbatim Summer 9/2 "Oakum is first driven into the seam with a caulking iron.‥ The seam is then sealed by ‘paying’ it—pouring hot pitch over the oakum from a funnel."
A Wordorigins post quoted the online OED's etymology of monkey-business:
[< MONKEY n. + BUSINESS n., probably after Bengali bā̃drāmi. Compare modern Sanskrit vānara-karman (< vānara monkey + karman action, work, employment), Hindi vānara-karma.]This is interesting enough on its own, but what leads me to post about it is this extremely informative comment from Aniruddha Sen:
Being a native Asian, south Asian and a Bengali-speaking native from India at that, I can vouch that bandrami connotes different shades of mischievousness that are not conveyed by monkey business. (a) Children are often accused of bandrami when they climb trees or tall structures dangerously, or tease a mate with unseemly gestures, or do several naughty things that no self-respecting monkey ever does; (b) adults commit bandrami when they do mischievous things not befitting their age; (c) when a male of the species homo sapiens sapiens tries to draw the attention of a female with unbecoming gestures. There are other shades of that ilk. (a) and (b) have mischievousness in common; and (a) and (c) share monkey-like gestures and postures as seen by a detached observer. That much fall legitimately within the monkey business ambit. The other shades of the Bengali meaning can only be understood when one considers that bandar itself is a swear word: it means (1) ugly, (2) irreverent, (3) mischievous, (4) clannish and (5) someone with aggressive posture.Mr. Sen then made a separate post to discuss his theory that "the commonest pan-Indian swear-word" s(h)ala, literally 'brother-in-law' (from Sanskrit shyalaka), which "became a swear-word perhaps because of the I-sleep-with-your-sister connotation," is actually a borrowing from Insha'llah, since according to his research "the swear-word starts appearing about a century after Islamic occupation"; sounds dubious to me, but I thought I'd put it out there for comment.The Bengali tongue is full of contradictions ill-understood by others. Elderly Bengalis often use the word bandar lovingly to refer to youngsters whom they like.
In this thread, Sili kindly shared this BBC Radio 3 link which has (six minutes in, after the end of a new oboe concerto by Marc-André Dalbavie) a twenty-minute talk by translator Robert Chandler on the life and work of Platonov (see this post and this post for background). It's pleasant to hear his voice, and he has some fine quotes. And after the intermission talk, there's a performance of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 6, which if you're as fond of Prokoviev as I am is an additional inducement to listen. (Available for the next five days.)
A longish Observer story by Tim Adams about Google Translate has some interesting discussion and quotes, but in my current befuddled state (brought about by excessive copyediting), what I most enjoyed was this (probably apocryphal) anecdote:
The impetus for Google's translation machine can be traced, corporate legend has it, to a particular meeting at the company's California headquarters in 2004. One of the search engine's founders, Sergey Brin, had received a fan letter from a user in South Korea. He understood that the message was in praise of the innovative scope of his company, but when Brin ran it through the machine translation service that Google had then licensed it read: "The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!"I was, however, annoyed by the final quote from the much-hyped Douglas Hofstadter, who "has been among the most trenchant critics of the hype around Google Translate. He argues that the ability to exist within language and move between languages, to understand tone and cultural resonance, and jokes and wordplay and idiom are the things that makes us most human, and most individual..." Yes, yes, that's all well and good, but it doesn't help me when I'm staring at a passage in Turkish or Korean or some other language that is a complete mystery to me. Google Translate does. Even Hofstadter gets around to admitting "I suppose that we will all bow to the pressures to use it at some level, but it will never get the flavour of phrases." Don't be so goddamn grudging, man. Google isn't going to put you out of business.
I'm about halfway through Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
One of the signs of the times was the revival of Moscow restaurant life in 1934. This followed a four-year hiatus during which restaurants had been open only to foreigners, payment was in hard currency, and the OGPU regarded any Soviet citizens who went there with deep suspicion. Now, all those who could afford it could go to the Metropole Hotel, where "wonderful live starlets swam in a pool right in the centre of the restaurant hall"...The intended word was sterlets, a sterlet being a small sturgeon that is the source of the finest caviar (and thus has been hunted almost to extinction in Russia). I personally find it ridiculous to use the word sterlet, utterly obscure in English, when in almost all cases (as here) sturgeon will do as well and be immediately comprehensible, but I'm glad it provided the opportunity for this wonderful image.
Update. I've just run across "Chelyushkin" (for Chelyuskin) in Robert Conquest's The Great Terror (page 326 of my 1990 paperback edition). I don't know if he was the originator of the error, but it's possible that Fitzgerald picked it up from him.
Speaking of Russia in the 1930s, I just ran across one of those obscure biographies that give you a little bit more of the awful picture. One of my pastimes is looking up information on obscure people so I can fill out their author pages at LibraryThing, especially when I am the only member who owns one of their books (so that nobody else is likely to do so); just now I was doing this for Rudzhero Gilyarevsky, author of my beloved Languages Identification Guide, picked up on my trip to the USSR in 1971 and read ragged (and heavily annotated) since then. I was delighted to discover there was a Russian Wikipedia article on him, which explained his odd name and provided a striking instance of someone clawing their way out of the misery of Stalinist repression. It turns out that his father, Ettore Macchi, was a captain in the Military Attache's office of the Italian Embassy in Moscow until he was recalled to Italy in 1929, the year Ruggiero was born. His mother, Ekaterina Krylaeva, was a dancer in the Kazan Opera; she was arrested in 1937, presumably for having had a relationship with a foreigner, and sent to the Gulag, where she remained until 1954. Ruggiero Macchi, or in Russified form Rudzhero Makki, was adopted in 1943 by Sergei and Zinaida Gilyarevsky; his adoptive father was a professor in the First Moscow Medical Institute. Thanks to that daring adoption of the offspring of an enemy of the people, doubtless made possible by wartime laxness, Rudzhero was able to go on to study at the Moscow Energy Institute and then Moscow State University, where he took a degree in Spanish philology in 1953 and got a PhD in 1958. Now he's an Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation, in charge of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Problems in Computer Science in the Office of Scientific Research on Informatics at VINITI; he lectures at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, is chief editor of anthologies and of the International Forum on Information, and is a member of the editorial boards of several journals and a member of several scientific councils. I wonder if he thinks about the father he never knew, whose fate after 1929, according to Russian Wikipedia, is unknown?
An n-gram is "a subsequence of n items from a given sequence." Google has come up with what it calls an Ngram Viewer that allows you to compare the frequencies of words in printed books over any span of time since the invention of printing. (It's case-sensitive, so you can discover, as Shaun Nichols did, that people stopped capitalizing "Socialism" around 1945.) You can read about it in this SciAm article by Katherine Harmon:
The researchers behind the Books Ngram Viewer admit it will not likely replace tried-and-true techniques of close reading.... Despite the program's capacity to churn out neatly organized analytics at the click of a button (labeled, cheekily, "search lots of books"), Aiden maintains that "we certainly don't view this tool as an answer machine." But certainly the program can work as a question generator.The first thing I did with it was to check linguistics versus philology; the graphs cross just before I was born.For example, the evolution of the frequency of "evolution" ... reveals some unexpected nuances. It was on a general upswing until the mid-1920s, then declined gradually until around 1945 (from about .0035 percent of words in the measured data that year to about .0025 percent). Why the dip—and is it significant? The researchers were unsure and offer this as an example of a lead in for further research, Michel notes.
The Books Ngram Viewer also can shed some light on the popularity of various people, revealing, for instance, a marked dearth of references to Jewish artist Marc Chagall in books published in Nazi Germany, suggesting widespread censorship, the researchers concluded in their paper. (For those more keen on following scientists, the frequency of "Albert Einstein" mentions surpasses those of "Charles Darwin" in the late 1960s, but both enjoy a rise in popularity from about 1975 to 2005, according to a recent search—and the researchers found that Freud ranks higher over time than Einstein or Darwin.)
Addendum. See Geoff Nunberg's post at the Log for more detail and some interesting commentary.
Mark Liberman's latest Log post sent me back to my 2008 post about the vexed issue of why Southern Californians use the definite article when referring to freeways (e.g., "the 405"), and the remark there that U.S. 101 used to be known as Ventura Boulevard made me wonder about the name Ventura—I've driven through there a million times and never thought to ask why it was called that (ventura is Spanish for 'fortune, chance, happiness'). So I reached for my trusty California Place Names: The Origin and Etymology of Current Geographical Names
The county, however, was given the abbreviated name of Ventura, and the town soon followed suit:
In 1891, on petition of the residents, the Post Office Dept. changed the post office name to Ventura: "Much mail and express matter designed for this office found its way to San Bernardino, and vice versa. Then the name was too long to write and too difficult for strangers to pronounce"... The new name was generally accepted, although the Southern Pacific did not change the name of the station until 1900. In 1905 Z. S. Eldredge wrote the following obituary to the old name in his campaign to restore Spanish names: "And now comes the Post Office Dept., which is the most potent destroyer of all. I have spoken before of the injury done the people of San Buenaventura. They cling to that name and use it among themselves. But they are doomed. Mapmakers, from the Director of the Geological Survey to the publisher of a pocket guide following the lead of the post office, call the place Ventura, and the historic name will be lost (San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 10, 1905).And now that I've written all that, in the course of googling the last quote I discover I have in fact written about this before (though much more briefly), back in 2003. So consider this a blast from the past, and a warning as to what will become of your memory as you pass gracefully through your fifties.
The internet helps fulfill a medieval will at HARAMBAM:
The Bodleian Libraries are the proud custodian of Maimonides' authorized manuscript copy of his major halachic work, the Mishneh Torah, a code meant to collect disparate rulings and to present them "succinctly and clearly, so that all the Oral Torah will be easily accessible to all." ... A later owner of the copy, a certain Eleazar, son of Perahya, stipulated in his will that this and the other volumes of the Code (now lost) should remain in the public domain for consultation....Click on "Read the Manuscript" and you get a beautiful, zoomable reproduction of each page. (Thanks, Paul!)In line with the will of Eleazar ben Perahya the Bodleian Libraries have always granted access to this precious document of Jewish Law. Conservation concerns and practical considerations, however, have thus far limited the possibility of consulting this authorized version of the Code. Modern technology once and for all has overcome these limitations and enables the Bodleian Libraries in an unexpected way to perform the religious duty (mizvah) of fulfilling the words of the deceased by giving universal access to the Mishneh Torah, authorized and approved by Maimonides.
No, that's not a typo, it's a convention:
When punctuation geeks assembled earlier this month at Punctuacon, our annual convention, we spent the usual two or three hours whining about the pathetic size of our gathering, compared to Comic-Con International in San Diego, Dragon*Con in Atlanta or any of those tiresome Star Trek conventions that draw multitudes to worship at the shrine of William Shatner.Read all about the octothorpe, its obscure origin and recent revival, at Robert Fulford's National Post story "What we have here is one of the great comeback stories in the history of competitive punctuation." (Thanks, Paul!)We have no heroes like Shatner, just ourselves and our proud tradition of judging and promoting the images and ideograms of language -- and our totally imaginary convention.
That should be enough, but a love for punctuation, signage and graphic symbols remains a lonely passion. It's hard not to be bitter.
Why can't the rest of the world understand that a well-designed semicolon or an expertly made STOP sign is every bit as enthralling as a mint Batman first edition, an early sketch of the Jedi, or a photograph signed by Margot Kidder herself? Why can't they care about the tragically missing apostrophe on the logo of a certain coffee-shop chain?
Still, Punctuacon was happier this year than usual, mostly because we could forget about what had become at previous conventions the most melancholy issue on the agenda: Who will save the octothorpe?
This is not a food blog, but how can I resist Rishidev Chaudhuri's post "Some notes on the grammar of the curry" at 3 Quarks Daily when it includes rhetoric like this?
But how to explain this fetishism of particular signifiers, this combinatorial generation of a menu from {chicken, lamb, shrimp} and some handful of sauces, these ungrammatical and unpoetic culinary utterances? How to explain the same sauce applied, with minor variations, to produce aborted versions of the same dish under many different names. What drives such promiscuous corruption of the understanding? Whence such systemic violence?Also, curry is an enticing thought as winter approaches (we're supposed to get snow tonight here in the Valley). And let me take the occasion to wish Robin, jamessal's bride, a speedy return to well-being and the leisure to resume her wonderful blog.Even the most materialistic among us must realize that if we have no hope of seizing the means of production, we can still hope to educate. The following curry is as an example, not an essential exemplar or generative grammar. All of these principles are violated somewhere; still, they are a glimpse into the overlapping set of rules and resemblances that make up the cuisines of South Asia, whose grandeur and allusive depth is matched only by those of the French and of the Japanese.
Researchers at the World Oral Literature Project have compiled a database of language endangerment, described in a Cambridge press release:
An open database of endangered languages has been launched by researchers in the hope of creating a free, online portal that will give people access to the world’s disappearing spoken traditions. ...Here's a Telegraph story about it by Andy Bloxham, and here's a column by Dr. Mark Turin, director of the project, who says:It includes records for 3,524 world languages, from those deemed "vulnerable", to those that, like Latin, remain well understood but are effectively moribund or extinct.
Researchers hope that the pilot database will enable them to "crowd-source" information from all over the world about both the languages themselves and the stories, songs, myths, folklore and other traditions that they convey.
Users can search by the number of speakers, level of endangerment, region or country. ... Of the 3,524 languages listed, about 150 are in an extremely critical condition. In many of these cases, the number of known living speakers has fallen to single figures, or even just one.
We will only succeed, however, if the project is of use and interest to indigenous communities themselves. While Cambridge may be the location where materials are hosted and maintained, both physically and digitally, communities will require copies of the output so that future generations can access and understand the cultural knowledge and language of their ancestors.(Thanks, peacay and Paul!)Generations of anthropologists have had the privilege of working with indigenous communities and have recorded volumes of oral literature while in the field, but many of our colleagues have not known what to do with these recordings once they finish analysing them. The World Oral Literature Project can provide a way for the material that has been gathered to be preserved and to be disseminated in innovative ways, when that is ethically and culturally appropriate.
Nicholas Ostler is one of LH's favorite authors of language books; I enthused about his Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
I should start by pointing out that the Big Idea of the book—the question of whether English will continue to dominate the world as it does now and if not, what will replace it—is not of great interest to me. I mean, I'm curious, of course, just as I am about how the world will end, but we'll find out about each when the time arrives, and in the meantime, speculation is basically navel-gazing. It's great for late-night bull sessions, but is not to be taken seriously, any more than the many "Iran [or other Currently Prominent Phenomenon]: Threat or Menace?" op-eds that fill the broadsheets. Fortunately, Ostler is incapable of writing an extended op-ed; his interest, like mine, is in the details... or, as Deborah Cameron puts it from the other side of the fence in her review in The Guardian: "The Last Lingua Franca is not the easiest of reads: Ostler does not have the populariser's gift for uncluttered storytelling, and is apt to pile up details without much regard for what the non-specialist either needs to know or is capable of retaining." Different strokes, as they say. So let's get to the details.
Ostler starts by distinguishing the use of languages, and English in particular, as native tongues from their use as lingua francas (or, as he irritatingly insists on spelling it, "lingua-francas"—punctuation is not his strong suit). This is an important distinction that is not often taken as seriously as Ostler takes it, and one of the things he does throughout the book is hammer home the implications in various situations. In the Preface he writes, "But when English is seen as a lingua franca [N.b.: he's also not consistent], it becomes possible to compare it with many languages that had this function to a greater or lesser extent in the past. What forces spread them, and how did they fare in the long term?" This (to me) is the meat of the book and the most interesting part, especially the chapters on Persian, though of course others will skim it in hopes of getting an answer about the future of English. He then goes on to look at "language politics in the modern world" and try to figure out where things are going from here.
Since what delights me about Ostler's books are the piquant and unpredictable details, let me cite a few of them here. On page 11, in discussing the language policies of Malaysia, he quotes a Malay sentence: "Bahasa jiwa bangsa, as they liked to claim: 'Language is the soul of the nation'." It's always nice to get a sentence in the local language, but the great thing is the footnote: "This is a simple sentence in Malay, but all its words are derived from Sanskrit: bhāṣā jīvanam vaṃśaḥ 'speech-life-stock'. This reflects the influence of Indian traders and adventurers in the early first millennium AD. Malay's roots are ancient, but they are not purely indigenous." He can't resist that sort of sidelight, and neither can I.
On page 40, a footnote to a discussion of the divergence of Nahuatl dialects into different languages after Spanish was made the only official language in 1770 gives some striking examples: "'He is not at home' is expressed as x-aak in Guerrero, amo-hka in Tezcoco, am-iga in Morelos, amo yetok in Puebla Sierra, and mach nikaan kah in Vera Cruz. In Classical Nahuatl, this would have been expressed as amo i-chaan-ko (kah), literally 'not his-home-at (is)'." (However, he doesn't actually call them different languages, saying rather "at least nineteen quite different forms, according to systematic tests of mutual intelligibility" and adding, "Some doubt whether [such tests] should be followed in total oblivion of Nahuatl's common cultural past"; he takes the same, to me reprehensibly unscientific, squishy approach to the question of whether Chinese and Arabic are one language or many. Politicians have to let politics bend their view of reality, but it's a sad business when non-politicians do the same thing.)
On page 49 he casually mentions Russenorsk, "used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among Russian and Norwegian traders on the arctic shores of Siberia"; I had never heard of it, and it's so obscure there's only one sentence on it in the Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, but it turns out somebody's written a nice little Wikipedia article on it, with bibliography. And on page 98 he tosses in a reference to the Tajik family name Shansabani, "which seems to be derived (consider the consonants!) from the Pahlavi name Wišnasb": hey, cool!
But even better are the careful explanations of difficult or unexpected situations. On page 86, for example, he quotes Ibn al-Muqaffa' as distinguishing "five languages (besides Arabic) in Iran," of which three are varieties of Persian: Pahlavi is said to be "the language of Isfahan, Hamadan, Nehavand, and Azerbaijan," Dari "of the court ... but also of the Sassanian capital city (Ctesiphon, on the Tigris), 'though in Khorasan ... the best Dari is heard in Balkh," and Parsi "the language of Fars ... but also of the mowhed Zoroastrian priests." He says this tripartite division "is somewhat confusing since the accepted analysis of historical Persian only distinguished two (similar) main dialects over the preceding millennium: viz, Median (later, Parthian) in the northeast, and Old Persian (later, Pārsīg or Middle Persian) in the southwest. ... But Gilbert Lazard (1993) has quite convincingly [explained that Parsi] is understood as traditional Persian..., Pahlavī had originally meant 'Parthian', and this may be what it means here, since the cities are about right for ancient Media.... Meanwhile, Darī refers in effect to New Persian: despite its title, this is the new, predominantly colloquial, version of the language, coming through in the capital but also out to the east."
And his explanation of how Elamite was used by Persians after they had conquered Elam (now Khuzistan) was a real eye-opener for me. I had known they used it officially for proclamations and such, but I was thinking of it as comparable to the Romans using Greek, or everybody in nineteenth-century Europe using French—languages they themselves knew. Not so: "Persians indeed early made a virtue of illiteracy.... When a Persian needed to send written communication or to store records, it was done for him in Elamite, this being the beginning of alloglottography (writing down Persian by the use of some other language), which was to continue in Persia ... for the next millennium... This did not mean that Elamite was widely learned, or even heard, by Persians. Rather Elamite-Persian bilinguals would be employed to use their writing skills, protecting their employers from the disconcerting experience of an unknown language by routinely translating the texts on request into, or out of, spoken Persian."
Well, I could go on, but you probably have a sense by now of whether you'd like the book. If you want to know the future of English, you'll have to read it—no spoilers here! Me, I think it's a blast, and I look forward to Ostler's next excursion into the multifarious history of the world's languages.
Erin McKean recently pointed out a wonderful entry in her Wordnik site: queez-madam, listed only in the Century Dictionary and defined as "The cuisse-madam, a French jargonelle pear." [Actually, it's also in the Funk & Wagnalls unabridged and in the Merriam-Webster New International, 2nd edition. Thanks, Philip!] The locus classicus for the word, and indeed the only place it appears to have been used in English literature, is this remarkable sentence from Walter Scott's Rob Roy, spoken by Andrew Fairservice: "He's no a'thegither sae void o' sense neither; he has a gloaming sight o' what's reasonable—that is anes and awa'—a glisk and nae mair; but he's crack-brained and cockle-headed about his nipperty-tipperty poetry nonsense—He'll glowr at an auld-warld barkit aik-snag as if it were a queez-maddam in full bearing; and a naked craig, wi' a bum jawing ower't, is unto him as a garden garnisht with flowering knots and choice pot-herbs." I really should dive into Scott one of these days.
A Financial Times story by Christian Oliver and Kang Buseong describes the problems of linguistic integration in Korea:
The North and South Korean languages have grown apart so severely over 65 years of division that both countries have agreed to collaborate on a joint dictionary to stem the growing confusions. North Korea’s language is filled with ideological terminology while South Korean is awash with foreign words.Thirsty South Koreans happily order a “juice” but North Koreans ask for “danmul” – literally “sweet water” – a word that is greeted in Seoul with either bemusement or derision depending on how forgiving the waitress is. ...
Han Yong-un, South Korea’s head of the dictionary project ... says the North has agreed to distribute the completed dictionary to libraries and universities. South Korea’s lexicographers, sponsored by Seoul’s unification ministry, plan to issue shorter volumes for professional spheres such as medicine and technology.I hadn't realized there were such significant differences, though of course it makes sense. (Thanks, IndigoJones!)In the simplest cases, problems derive from old regional differences, with North and South Koreans using different words for “geese” and “wolves”.
South Koreans import foreign words whereas North Koreans create indigenous ones. For example, shoppers in Seoul buying tights will simply ask for “stocking” whereas North Koreans have a pure Korean word “salyangmal” meaning “skin-sock”. Mascara in North Korea is “nunsseobmeok” or “eyelash-ink”.
For the South Korean dictionary compilers, the toughest words are political. Words such as “comrade” are far more loaded in North Korea, thanks to decades of Soviet influence. Most difficult is the word “juche” which is the North Korean state ideology, often translated as self-sufficiency. To South Koreans the word simply means “subject”.
I have been asked about the history of the construction "X much?" as a rhetorical response (e.g., "Bitter much? Overanalzye much? Ad hominem much?"). Unfortunately, this is one of those things that is impossible to google, or even find information on at the Log (putting "much" into the search box seems to bring up half the posts on the site). So I throw myself on the collective knowledge of my readers: is anyone aware of studies of the history of this template, whether online or off?
Further update. The construction has been antedated to 1978! (Hat tip to Josh Millard.)
Yet another update. Josh Millard, aka cortex, has made a MetaTalk post about this, using data from the various subsites of MetaFilter, and linguist iamkimiam made the following interesting comment:
Just at first glance, I'm really in awe at how productive "much" is. It can appear with states, actions, nouns, verbs, in different tenses/aspects, punctuation, and on. It also seems to verb nouns in many instances. It has a pragmatic distancing function as well (separating the speaker from the proposition/topic that they are responding to). In that sense, the "much" tag carries some heavy evaluation. Also, discourse framing.Update. I have done what I should have done in the first place, namely checked the OED, which just updated the much entry this year and has a section on this use:
colloq. (orig. U.S., freq. ironic). With a preceding adjective, infinitive verb, or noun phrase, forming an elliptical comment or question.
The use was popularized by the film Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the television series derived from it.
1988 D. Waters Heathers (film script) 15 God Veronica, drool much? His name's Jason Dean.
1988 D. Waters Heathers (film script) 86 Heather Duke. It was J.D.'s idea! He made out the signature sheet and everything. Now will you sign it. Veronica. (queasy) No. Heather Duke. Jealous much?
1992 J. Whedon Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film script) 8 A stranger, walking the other way, bumps into Buffy, doesn't stop.‥ Buffy. Excuse much! Not rude or anything.
1992 J. Whedon Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film script) 25 Pike and Benny have entered the diner, quite drunk.‥ Kimberly (to the other girls) Smell of booze much.
1998 M. Burgess & R. Green Isabella in Sopranos (television shooting script) 1st Ser. 1 42 Anthony Jr. Probably I can't go to that dance now either. Meadow. God, self-involved much?
2001 Cosmopolitan Dec. 178 You've seen them: the kinds of couples who finish each other's sentences.‥ Jealous much? Damn right.
Words without Borders has an interesting interview with Roberto Bui, aka Wu Ming 1, a member of the Wu Ming writing collective, on translating Stephen King into Italian. I can't say I'm as impressed with King's style as he is, but I enjoyed his comments on it. I disagree with this point, though:
He plays with all the singularities of the English language, precisely the stuff that can't be translated in any way! This is typical of, er, “monoglot” writers, by which I mean those writers who don't care about what happens to their works when they're translated into other languages.To conflate people who are "used to exploring foreign languages" with those who "care about translations," and to imply that the latter don't "play with all the singularities" of their language, is wrongheaded and insulting to almost everyone. To take two obvious examples, Joyce and Nabokov played with more singularities than most of us can even imagine, but they were also famously "used to exploring foreign languages," and I find it hard to imagine anyone thinking they didn't care about translations. It seems obvious to me that writing books and caring about translations are (or should be) two entirely separate activities, and anyone who deliberately restricts their palette when writing out of a concern for their translators is cheating both themselves and their readers. If there are "puns, neologisms, idioms, local slang and so on," the translator will just have to deal with them however seems best. They do not indicate that the writer is a monoglot, for god's sake. (Via wood s lot.)There are basically two kinds of novelists: those who care about translations, like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, because they're used to exploring foreign languages, and those who don't care, like Elmore Leonard or Uncle Stevie, because they're perfectly happy with inhabiting their native language, with no forays in other cultures and koines.
I've posted about Jesse Sheidlower, Ben Zimmer, and Erin McKean before (and have links to projects by all three in the sidebar), but I didn't realize they were all graduates of the University of Chicago, which has a nice online piece by Debra Kamin about them:
Getting people excited about the inner lives of words is the distinctive mission for a trio of University alumni who have become ambassadors of lexicography. Harnessing their Chicago educations in linguistics and English, the three “wordinistas” are putting a public face on modern language studies.[...] All of them are helping to shape perceptions about the importance of language, each with a slightly different bent.I liked this quote from McKean: "I perverted all of the classes I took at the U. of C. to be about dictionaries in some way. I took feminist theory with Lauren Berlant, and I wrote my paper about the acceptance of 'Ms.'" (Hat tip to Dave Wilton.)
Don't miss Matt's post at No-sword today on "the first Oriental branch of the Baker Street Irregulars, The Baritsu Chapter," and how the name comes from a mysterious Conan Doyle reference to "baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling," which turns out to be a mangled allusion to a long-forgotten martial art called bartitsu, invented in 1898 by Edward William Barton-Wright, a British engineer who had spent the previous three years living in Japan. A must-read for anyone interested in Japan, Sherlock Holmes, or "the worst excesses of British mustachery."
I have on more than one occasion had harsh things to say about the translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (e.g., here), but I recommend the half-hour Lapham's Quarterly podcast available at this page (it's currently at the top of the left column: "December 1, 2010 Pevear and Volokhonsky Podcast: Episode #6"). They have good things to say about Dostoyevsky's style and the reasons some people compare him unfavorably to Tolstoy or say his prose is bad, and it's interesting to hear their voices (what an odd accent Pevear has!) and to learn more about the history of their collaboration (they started out with poetry but have sensibly backed off from it, apart from the Zhivago poems). I also realized, listening to it, one reason for the problems I and others have with them: they are too comfortable with each other. They are clearly each other's first and most important critics, as is only natural for a married couple, and I'm sure they would merrily add "and sternest!"—but of course that's not true. They share a sensibility, an attitude toward literature and translation, and by bouncing their work off each other instead of a more objective outsider they never get the kind of painful but salutary criticism that would help them avoid solipsism. Instead, they get such criticism only when it's too late, after the work is published (and then far too little of it, since for whatever reason most reviewers take them at their own evaluation as the only people ever to do a proper job of translating Russian prose). Note the outrageous statement "It turns out that [people who accuse us of translating too literally] don't know English!" and Pevear's comfortable response to a question about his response to reviews: "When they say it's good, I agree with them!" (Whereupon everyone laughs comfortably.) I couldn't help but notice also that Pevear calls Dudintsev "DOO-dintsev" rather than stressing it correctly on the second syllable, which confirms his lack of familiarity with the language. [I am informed that either pronunciation would sound normal to a Russian.] (I also noticed that in the process of insulting David Magarshack, both of them pronounced his name "Ma-GAR-shack" rather than , as I have always said, "MAG-ar-shack"; does anybody know which is correct?)
In general, I was impressed with their take on Russian literature (and I liked the fact that with unwonted modesty they said they were reluctant to translate A Hero of Our Time because it would mean competing with Nabokov), but I was disgusted with the smug contempt with which they dismissed other translators. (They were relatively nice to Constance Garnett, but that's presumably because she's long dead and so frequently dismissed by others that she's no threat to their dominance.) In short, nothing surprising, but a good listen. Thanks for the link, Floyd!
Let's go for a walk at sunset.
We'll watch the snow blaze,
burn into night.
I've been waiting for night
to erase the meadow.
When the pictures are lost,
I can close my eyes,
I can vanish far
into sleep—where shattered
friends are waiting.
Their shaking hands reach
across the snow.
I run after one and cry—
leave me alone. He turns,
stares, opens his mouth
and can't speak.
The day my father died
I went for a walk.
The cold leaves crashed
onto the lawn and flared.
His eyes flared. Look—
the sky is flaring. That's it:
we're finished with day.
At last I can curl
into myself
—as the snow keeps glowing,
those hands are reaching . . .
I heard the whispers: he's gone,
leave him alone.
I stroked his hand for hours.
I don't know how to stop.
—Kathryn Levy
"Waiting for Night" reprinted by permission from Losing the Moon
I recently finished the copy of John L. Locke's recent Eavesdropping: An Intimate History
He pointed out that birds increase their chances of survival by monitoring the long-distance calls of other birds – signals that are not even intended for their ears. Such interceptions, McGregor noted, are ignored by all existing models of animal communication.... If real people also tune in to each other, and become usefully informed in the process, then theories of human communication must explain these things that real people do.That's an impressive and intriguing program for a study—a program, however, that this book only partially fulfills.But they have not done so. ... The reason why social scientists have failed to document equivalent levels of eavesdropping in humans, however, is not because they looked for it and discovered that there was nothing to be seen. They never looked in the first place.
Why they did not, I think, is linked to a long-standing tendency of philosophers and psychologists to put humans on a pedestal, to regard our species as more intelligent and rational than other animals. This view could not be sustained if humans were on a continuum with other primates and mammals, so they concentrated on the behaviors accounting for, and related to, Man’s best and highest accomplishments. Central to these was language, the symbolic code that enables speakers to consciously transmit thought to willing listeners. This kept other animals safely at bay but, paradoxically, also excluded important facts about human communication.
One problem is the lack of clear focus. Locke's discussion of the development of walled living, as reflected in various tribes in remote areas and as hypothesized for our distant ancestors, is fascinating and sometimes riveting (the Mehinaku of Brazil can not only recognize each other's footprints, they can draw them from memory!). I had never thought about what it must have been like to move from communal living, in which everyone knew what everyone else was up to and there was no such thing as private life, to a situation in which people had their own dwellings into which they could retreat; as Locke says, it required a long period of adaptation and turmoil. Interestingly, some groups, like the ǃKung of the Kalahari Desert (oddly for a linguist, he omits the initial !, representing a click consonant), use their huts only for storage and rarely enter them—they "rarely spend time alone," and "to seek solitude is regarded as a bizarre form of behavior." I would have preferred that he focus on this sort of material, and perhaps throw in a final chapter summing up more recent developments.
Unfortunately (from my point of view), most of the book deals with the last few centuries; there are some piquant anecdotes (and lots of illustrations of maids listening at doors and the like), but it's hard to see what any of it has to do with language. What's worse, it focuses entirely on Western Europe, really just on England and Paris, with a few excursuses into other parts. If you're going to discuss the history of eavesdropping, how can you simply omit the Middle East, Asia, almost the entire world? Those regions have as rich a history of masters and servants, slander and gossip, as England and France. It's all very well to say one man can't cover all that material; in the first place, by asking colleagues and making use of the internet he could certainly have done at least a superficial job of it (and let's face it, what he has is pretty superficial, as is only natural for a first study), but even if we accept that he had to limit his focus, he should have made it clear that he was doing so, and doing so with regret: "I hope that these first steps will be followed by scholars in Russia, China, Japan, and elsewhere who will mine the rich resources of their traditions..." But there is nothing like that, no indication that he is looking only at that tiny bit of civilization that happens to be convenient to hand and linguistically accessible. It all smacks a bit too much of traditional scholarship, in which it was assumed that if you covered the Greeks, Romans, French, and English, with a nod to the Germans, you'd covered all the ground that needed to be covered. I thought we had moved past that.
But that's something of a quibble. There's a great deal of interesting material here (did you know that "scolding" used to be an official crime, and that it could be committed only by women?), and it's a good first step in an unaccountably untrodden field. It gives me the same feeling of discovery, of widening horizons, I used to have in anthropology class, all those years ago.
The Theoretical Linguistics program at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest celebrated its twentieth anniversary with this delightful video. I'm so charmed I won't even vent about the worldview expressed in "We are the ones who make a brighter day by making theories"; they are, after all, members of the Theoretical Linguistics program. But I will explain one WTF moment by quoting a commenter at Language Log, where I found the video:
Let me clear this up: the person you see at 1:52 is indeed Miklos Torkenczy, but it's not his voice. The singing comes from the amazing Agnes Fule (and it's not a falsetto), who you can occasionally see in the background. This was Miklos's wish, who wanted to share his overflowing enthusiasm with the world, but was afraid of the damage he might cause with his own voice.Another commenter clarifies that the soprano/student's name is Ágnes (Ági) Füle. Enjoy! (Oh, and if you're curious about the word "Hang" in the credits at the end, it's the Hungarian word for 'sound,' of unknown etymology.)
C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they've read and enjoyed during the previous year, and he has once again begun the series with my contribution; here it is, featuring my wise words on Marshall Berman, Andrey Platonov, and Vladislav Zubok, all of whom will be familiar to regular readers of LH. I look forward to seeing what other contributors recommend.