HARD TO SPEAK SPANISH.

Frequent commenter Julia D'Onofrio linked to a delightful video on Facebook, and I'm linking it here because it's the best illustration I've seen of the wonderful and maddening diversity of the Spanish language as spoken across its geographical spread. Everyone from Puerto Ricans to Argentines is mocked, not to mention the thetheando inhabitants of the mother country and the hapless Americans the singers, Juan Andrés and Nicolás Ospina, pretend to be at the outset. So without further ado, I present Qué Difícil Es Hablar El Español. I'm pleased to say I understood most of it even though it's been forty years since I used my (Argentine) Spanish regularly, and I laughed a great deal.

Update. Studiolum has posted the lyrics, with translation, at río Wang.

For those of you who don't speak Spanish, here's Pico Iyer on "The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence":

I'm using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment. ...

Not every fashioner of many-comma'd sentences works for every one of us — I happen to find Henry James unreadable, his fussily unfolding clauses less a reflection of his noticing everything than of his inability to make up his mind or bring anything to closure: a kind of mental stutter. But the promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can't get your mind, or most of your words, around.

When I read the great exemplar of this, Herman Melville — and when I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" swells with clause after biblical clause of all the things people of his skin color cannot do — I feel as if I'm stepping out of the crowded, overlighted fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space, in myself and in the world. It's as if I've been rescued, for a moment, from the jostle and rush of the 405 Freeway and led back to something inside me that has room for certainty and doubt at once.

MORE ON MEH.

Back in 2007 I posted about "the dismissive exclamation meh"; now, in a new Boston Globe column, Ben Zimmer reports on an exciting new historical discovery:

Yiddish appears to be the ultimate source. I checked with Ben Sadock, a Yiddish expert in New York, and he turned up a tantalizing early example. In the 1928 edition of his Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary, Alexander Harkavy included the word meh (written in the corresponding Hebrew letters) and glossed it as an interjection meaning “be it as it may” and an adjective meaning “so-so.”

Ben discusses the historical development at greater length (and without the distracting use of Mitt Romney as a news tie-in) at this Log post, where you can see the actual Harkavy entry.

COMMENTS ON ETYMOLOGY.

Allan Metcalf at Lingua Franca writes about a publication I may just have to shell out for:

This week something rare, old fashioned, scholarly, and entertaining arrived via the U.S. Postal Service. As usual, I’m postponing other tasks until I have read it cover to cover. It’s a journal you’ve probably never heard of: Comments on Etymology. Rare I call it, because the journal has very few subscribers. And old fashioned, because it’s only on paper. It’s not available on the Internet.

For more than four decades, Comments on Etymology has been one of the least known and most enjoyable scholarly journals in the field of linguistics. And it’s the No. 1 source for the study of American slang. [...] What makes the journal so entertaining is, first of all, copious quotations from original sources, and second, lively discussions of the evidence, often leading to revised explanations. That’s because, in the words of Editor Gerald Cohen in a recent issue:

“Comments on Etymology … is a series of working papers, a sort of etymological workshop where ideas can be tested and developed (with valuable feedback provided) before being presented formally to the scholarly community.” [...]

It’s a rare publication indeed. You’re unlikely to find Comments on Etymology in your university library or on a colleague’s bookshelf. Cohen explains, “The number of subscribers is very low, primarily because I haven’t publicized the publication and have been content to mail the issues to whoever is interested.” But he adds, “If a few new subscribers come along, they will be very welcome.”

It's $16 for eight issues a year; if you're interested, send a check to Gerald Cohen at the address given at the link.

Totally unrelated: The Economist's style guide is now online. Thanks, Paul!

ANGLO-INDIAN DIALECTS.

The invaluable Dialect Blog had a post last year featuring a fifteen-minute film "created from outtakes of The End of the Raaj, a recent documentary about the Anglo-Indian community. This snippet discusses the Anglo-Indian dialect, and the various words and terms associated with this sub-culture." It's a lot of fun to see how much people enjoy talking about the words and phrases they associate with their in-group; I say "they associate" because many of the terms are actually not dialect-specific at all, like "His eyes are bigger than his stomach," but of course others are, and it's funny to see the filmmaker add his best guesses as to the spelling, often with a couple of question marks, as intertitles. My thanks to R Devraj for reposting it at his blog Dick & Garlick, since I missed it at Dialect Blog; if he sees this, let me implore him to add name/URL capability to his comment setup, since I am unable to leave a comment using the awful Google/Blogger system currently in place (and I'm sure I'm not the only one).

FUN.

I just saw the movie The Artist, and a delightful experience it was. It even started with a movie-within-the-movie called A Russian Affair that shows some written Russian (labels on a piece of electrical equipment). But this is not a movie review; I'm here to quibble about a bit of language usage. In a montage of clippings raving about another movie-within-the-movie, one of them reads "so fun." Now, I realize that (as the American Heritage Dictionary says) "there is some evidence to suggest that [the use of fun as an attributive adjective, as in a fun time, a fun place] has 19th-century antecedents," but as they also say, the usage only "became popular in the 1950s and 1960s," and this use of "so fun" (rather than the standard "so much fun" or "such fun") would have been impossible in edited text in 1929, when the movie is supposed to have come out. All that effort expended on (gorgeous) period furnishings and automobiles, and nobody noticed so glaring a linguistic anachronism! Fie, I say! (Don't worry, I'm not terribly serious about this; it's the most minor of blemishes, and was doubtless noticed only by codgers like me—I grew up using fun only as a noun, and the newer usage still sounds wrong to me—but I do think it's worth pointing out.)

THE PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW.

The Public Domain Review has the terrifying potential to eat up indefinite amounts of one's free and not-so-free time. From their About page:

The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into this whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.

With our curated collection of exotic scraps and marvellous rarities and comprehensively linking to freely distributable copies of works in online archives and from far flung corners of the web, we hope to encourage readers to further utilise and explore public domain works by themselves. To this end we have also put together a “Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online”.

We also hope to act as a platform to writers and scholars to write about more unusual and obscure works which they might not get a chance to do elsewhere. [...]

We are working behind the scenes with institutions (universities, libraries, museums, etc.) to work to get them to fully open up their online public domain material, so that works in the public domain remain in the public domain when they go online. [...] We believe the public domain is an invaluable and indispensable good, which – like our natural environment and our physical heritage – deserves to be explicitly recognised, protected and appreciated.

A noble goal and a beautifully designed site. (Via stbalbach's MetaFilter post.)

AN APOSTROPHIC CHALLENGE.

Adam Kotsko at An und für sich (which I should really visit more often), annoyed by apostrophes, writes:

For instance, take the use of the apostrophe to designate either possessives or contractions. It seems to me that these apostrophes do not actually add any information that is not already supplied naturally by the context — if you left out all apostrophes, you could still tell which words were contractions (as opposed to homographs like “wont” and “cant,” which are rare to begin with) and, even more radically, I contend that you could tell whether it was a plural, a possessive, or a plural possessive.

To demonstrate this bold claim, I challenge our readers to come up with a sentence that is (a) somewhat plausible and (b) could be genuinely ambiguous if plurals/possessives were not distinguished using apostrophes.

As could have been predicted, his challenge was easily met, and he conceded defeat graciously; Charlie Collier added a comment that begins "ANCIENTGREEKMANUSCRIPTSHADONLYCAPITALLETTERSNOSPACESBETWEENWORDS..." to point out that just because you can do without something doesn't mean it's a good idea to, something that should be more generally remembered. But what I really came here to post about was Adam's excellent opening paragraph:

I am teaching a writing-intensive course this semester, and one challenge is how to deal with students who “aren’t good at grammar.” On the one hand, one does want to help them write in the way generally recognized as “proper.” On the other hand, there is a level at which one must admit that there is something unjust about the way arbitrary conventions are used to judge intelligence — someone who writes in a non-standard way is not regarded simply as non-conformist, but is often judged as being somehow dumb.

How I wish more people understood and internalized that point. A large part of my motive for starting this blog was to get people to do so.

LANGUAGE DIVERSITY CHART.

The Economist has a nice post in its Graphic Detail series ("Charts, maps and infographics") showing language diversity around the world: "The chart below measures language diversity in two very different ways: the number of languages spoken in the country and Greenberg's diversity index, which scores countries on the probability that two citizens will share a mother tongue." At the top are Papua New Guinea (with 830 indigenous languages) and Congo; at the bottom are Cuba (with two languages) and North Korea (with one). (Thanks, Kobi!)

ACCENTS ON THE JERSEY SHORE.

I have not actually seen MTV’s show The Jersey Shore, but being a sentient American in the year 2012, I am of course aware of it, and I was amused by Dialect Blog's post about it, pointing out that "Three out of eight of the original cast members are in fact from Staten Island, a working-class borough of New York City. Hence, their accents are more traditional New York than contemporary Jersey, exemplified by JS cast member Vinny Guadagnino" (whose non-rhotic accent you can enjoy in a clip provided in the post). I got there via Dave Wilton's Wordorigins.org post, where Dave says he "can attest that this post is dead-on. The locals could spot the bennies easily, based largely on accent," and adds an excursus on the word benny:

Benny is a mildly derogatory, Monmouth and Ocean County, New Jersey term for a tourist from upstate or New York. It’s fading from use now, but you’ll hear it occasionally. It even made an appearance on The Jersey Shore. ... The origin of benny is uncertain. It could by from a New York term meaning “Jew,” but if so, it has lost all anti-Semitic connotation in the move south. Other explanations I’ve heard, but have no evidence for and which I suspect are etymythologies, are that the word is from people who come to the shore for the “benny-ficial rays of the sun” and from the fact that way back when, many people came to the beach bearing lunches packed in a shoe boxes from a Benny’s shoe store, which was somewhere up north.

I was reminded of grockles.

A RISKY GAME.

Anne Trubek has a piece in The Atlantic about the manuscript and a rare book collection of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, hardly an untapped topic—I've seen many discussions of it over the years, and if I recall correctly its eager pursuit of living authors has figured in a satirical novel or two. But this one ends with this intriguing passage:

But it’s a risky game, this betting on contemporary authors. What if Denis Johnson’s hardcovers get remaindered? What if Norman Mailer does not stand the test of time? With an eye toward protecting investments, Staley does his part to promote his authors. Alice Adams, the novelist and short-story writer, was a major acquisition in 2000 and now seems to be the subject of a subtle awareness campaign. Staley admits as much, saying he works at “keeping writers like Alice Adams before the public.” His employees follow his lead. En route to the Wallace archive, one staffer pointed out to me the 27 boxes comprising the Adams collection. Later, another employee, while showing me DeLillo’s letters, offhandedly mentioned her love for Adams’s stories. “She really should be better-known,” the woman said, looking up at me hopefully.

I find the idea of archivists trying to promote their authors pretty hilarious; I suppose they can't be blamed for trying, God love them, but they should really leave publicity to the experts and canon formation to the public at large. (Thanks, Paul!)

PLAGIARY.

I was reading Lizzie Widdicombe's sad and funny New Yorker piece about the hapless plagiarist Quentin Rowan, a/k/a Q. R. Markham, "author" of the spy novel Assassin of Secrets, which immediately upon publication was revealed to be a Frankenstein's monster of chunks of other novels (and nonfiction works), busily stitched together by someone who badly wanted to be a writer but didn't actually know how to write. While I intensely dislike plagiarism (being an old fuddy-duddy), I admire this guy:

The peculiar thing about Rowan’s case is that he could have obtained a degree of social permission simply by being honest about borrowing from other writers—by doing what Jonathan Lethem did, or by claiming that he was producing a “meta” work. We live in an age of sampling, from “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” to Skrillex remixes. “We love remakes. We love makeovers,” the literary theorist Avital Ronell said, when I asked her about the case. She suggested that Rowan “could have used a dream team of literary theorists to get him out of trouble.” But Rowan told me that he’d never considered selling his novel as a mashup, even though, after news of the plagiarism broke, there was even more interest in reading it. (Its Amazon ranking jumped from 62,924 to 174.) “I honestly wanted people to think that I’d written it,” Rowan said.

He could have played the get-out-of-jail-free card of postmodernism, but no, he owns up to his desire and his sin, and good for him. Now let him find an honest way to make a living.

At any rate, I was discussing this with my wife, and she asked me where the word plagiarism comes from. So I looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary, which told me to see plagiary (and how come the peevers don't complain about the replacement of this fine old term by the clunky newfangled plagiarism?), which said: "Latin plagiārius, kidnapper, plagiarist, from plagium, kidnapping, from plaga, net; see plāk-¹ in Indo-European roots." So now we know: a plagiarist is someone who throws a net over other people's words and kidnaps them.

Update. See Michael Hendry's comment below for the origin of the metaphor in Martial 1.52: "literally plagium is the stealing of someone else's slave, or the forcing of a free man into slavery. This is the only passage in classical Latin where the word, or any of its derivatives, is used (even metaphorically) of literary theft."

(For another take on plagiarism, see this seven-year-old LH post.)

ALLEGRO FORMS IN PEKINGESE.

Victor Mair had a recent post at the Log in which he discussed some bits of spoken Peking Chinese that have been mashed into unintelligibility (if you're not part of the in-group):

This afternoon I passed by a group of high school kids from China going down the street outside of Williams Hall, the office building in which I work. One of the girls said merrily, "Bur'ao", by which she meant Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) bù zhīdào 不知道 ("[I] don't know").

The retroflex final -r is well known for northern varieties of Mandarin, but in Pekingese it seems that the mighty R has the ability to swallow up whole syllables, as in the example quoted in the previous paragraph.

He provides a number of other examples (not all involving -r), and in the comments he adduces the English parallel "sup," which he heard in a bar full of sailors: "They were all giving high-fives to each other and saying that. I had absolutely no idea what it meant. I knew that it must be something very common in their English (in fact, it was the most frequently uttered expression in that bar), but I felt so silly not being able to figure out what such a common expression meant. [...] It took me several tries before I found someone who was patient enough to explain to me that it meant 'What's up?'"

I suppose most languages must have such forms; in Russian, for instance, there's "чё."

NE STANU VZROSLOI.

I'm reading my first truly contemporary Russian novel, Не стану взрослой (Amazon) by Andrei Kuzechkin; it came out last year and is set in 2009 (Michael Jackson has just died). I'm only starting the second chapter, but there are already enough linguistically interesting bits I want to share that I thought I'd post about it. To start with, how do you translate the title? The actual equivalent they're using is Young 4 Ever (and I presume a translation of the book is forthcoming under that title), but how to render the actual Russian title in English? In a sense it's simple, "I Won't Grow Up" or "I Won't Become an Adult"; the problem is that in Russian взрослой is clearly feminine (which means there's no risk of a reader's being tempted to apply it to the male protagonist), and there's no good way to include that in English. "I'm a Girl Who Won't Grow Up"? "I Won't Become a Grown Woman"? No, I don't think it can be done with any elegance or concision.

To move on to the text of the novel, in the first chapter one of the characters says "Я понимаю, что ежа голой задницей не удивишь" [I realize you can't astonish a hedgehog with (i.e., by showing it) a bare ass], which greatly amused me; Google tells me the more common form uses the more vulgar word for 'ass/arse': ежа голой жопой не удивишь. A few pages later there occurs this interesting bit of prescriptivism: "Слово “компьютер” она произносила с отчетливым “е” вместо привычного “э” в последнем слоге. И у этой женщины — высшее образование и должность бухгалтера!" [She pronounced the word komp'yuter with a clear ye in place of the usual e in the last syllable. And this was a woman with higher education and a job in accounting!]. And the first page of Chapter 2 has three such bits in a row. First the protagonist calls Koreans the worst StarCraft players in the world and says "Вот поэтому мы их и дерем как сидоровых коз" [That's why we beat the crap/stuffing out of them—literally 'beat them like Sidor's goats']. I'd never heard the "Sidor's goats" expression (usually in the singular: драть как Сидорову козу), but it's one I like and will try to remember. Then he says to Vadim, the guy he's just beaten at StarCraft, "Ты надеялся удивить меня “зерг рашем”? Серьезно?" [You were hoping to surprise me with "zerg rashem"? Seriously?] I was completely thrown by zerg rashem; fortunately, Google came to my aid again and explained to me that the Zerg are "a race of fictional parasitic insectoids and the overriding antagonists of the StarCraft series" and "The term 'Zerg Rush' or 'zerging' has entered video gaming jargon to describe sacrificing economic development in favour of using many low-cost and weak units to rush and overwhelm an enemy by attrition or sheer numbers. The tactic is infamous, with most experienced RTS players being familiar with the tactic in one form or another." So it's just one of the many, many English words and phrases taken over intact in the youthful Russian of the novel (and the -em is the instrumental ending), but not being a player of video games I had no chance of getting the allusion. Then there comes this description of Vadim's linguistic habits (Russian after the cut):

He's constantly shoving in bits of internet jargon. Instead of "funny" he says "lol" or "ololo," instead of "uninteresting" he says "UG" (short for unyloe govno [downer shit]), he calls girls "chan" like they do in Japan.

All I can say is: ololo!

The original Russian:

Постоянно вворачивает словечки из интернет-жаргона. Вместо “смешно” говорит “лол” или “ололо”, вместо “неинтересно” — “УГ” (сокращение от “унылое говно”), девушек называет “тян”, на японский манер.

SIGN UP TODAY.

A couple of opportunities, of different sorts:

1) Megan L. Risdal says:

I’ve been working on a research project for a while now with a former professor and we received IRB approval yesterday to launch our survey of language attitudes, grammaticality judgments, and personality factors. So if you’re reading this and you have a few minutes to spare, I’d love for you to take our survey. We are hoping to capture a large, diverse demographic so we’re disseminating our survey far and wide.

Go to the link for her link.

2) The International Translation Center, under the auspices of Cardinal Points (see this LH post), is dedicating its annual contest to Marina Tsvetaeva: "The First Prize is a compass and $300 (US). The shortlisted translations will be published in both Cardinal Points and Стороны Света journals, as well as on the RT-Russiapedia website." See that last link for submission guidelines, and good luck!

WHY THE ILIAD?

Edward Luttwak has a review of Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Iliad that disposes briskly of the ostensible subject ("Mitchell took it on himself to produce and circulate an Iliad that is improperly abridged, indeed mutilated") but has a number of things to say about the question he is really interested in: why is the Iliad so lastingly popular, considerably more so than its opposite number ("for all its well-remembered adventures and faster pace, the Odyssey has always been outsold – out of 590 Homer papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt at the last count, 454 preserve bits of the Iliad"). I'd like to present here a passage with some fascinating tidbits about availability in unexpected countries:

The only Chinese Homer used to be Donghua Fu’s 1929 version of the Odyssey (Ao-de-sai) published in Changsha in 1929, but that renegade engineer and pioneering Chinese grammarian translated an English text. To translate Homer once is inevitable treason, but twice? Things are far better now that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the study of ancient Greek and Latin at its Institute of Foreign Literature. Luo Niansheng, once its most distinguished classicist, who studied in the United States and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens before the Second World War, died in 1990 while translating the Iliad. His version was completed by Wilson Wong, who learned his Greek at Moscow State University in the 1960s, and who went on to translate the Odyssey as well, in verse form. Until then, China’s only translation from the Greek had been in prose, by the celebrated Yang Xianyi, who with his wife, Gladys Taylor, translated many Chinese classics into English as he lived through the hellish vicissitudes of China from 1940 till his death in 2009, including his and his wife’s separate imprisonment. Wong and Niansheng, who also translated Aeschylus’ tragedies, propelled the first Chinese-Ancient Greek dictionary, published in 2004. By then, another member of the Institute, Zhong Mei Chen, who studied Homeric Greek at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University after a spell at Brigham Young University in Utah, had published poetical new translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The Luo Niansheng/Wilson Wong Iliad is on sale online, with a handsome Zeus on the cover, for just 19.60 yuan, or $3.10 at the skewed exchange rate. By contrast, writing in Al-Ahram’s English edition in 2004, Youssef Rakha complained that Ahmed Etman’s new prose translation of the Iliad into Arabic was ‘unaffordably priced at LE250’ or $41.44, although he acknowledged that Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture was publishing a presumably much cheaper paperback edition of Suleyman al-Boustani’s pioneering 1904 verse translation of both Homers. Etman – a professor of classics at Cairo University and chairman of the Egyptian Society of Graeco-Roman Studies, as well as a talented playwright – was quoted in the article explaining why Homer was not translated into Arabic until 1904, and then by the Maronite Catholic al-Boustani, even though his writings were ubiquitous in the Greek-speaking lands that came under Arab rule in the seventh century: ‘Homer is all mythology,’ Etman says, ‘his numerous divinities alone would have been all too obviously incompatible with the Muslim creed. Early Arab authors were too concerned with religion to consider promoting such mythology, however familiar they might have been with Homer and however much they might have admired him.’

(Thanks, Paul!)

DIDICOI.

My wife and I have been enjoying a DVD of the delightful British detective series Midsomer Murders (thanks, Eric!), and the episode we watched last night, "Blood Will Out," taught me a new word, didicoi. It's apparently a purely U.K. term, because none of my U.S. dictionaries have it, not even the imposing Webster's Third New International, but the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has it: "didicoi ... a Gypsy or other nomadic person. Origin C19: perh. an alt. of Romany dik akei 'look here'." The etymology doesn't look very convincing on the face of it, but after all they do say "perhaps," and it's often hard to figure out where such dialect terms come from. At any rate, I was wondering if my non-Yank readers are familiar with it, and if so whether it has a derogatory connotation or is a reasonably neutral term. It's certainly an enjoyable word to say.

ARROWROOT.

We were listening to the radio this evening and a woman was being interviewed about a doughnut recipe that involved arrowroot. The interviewer asked jovially "So is it the root of the arrow, then?" and they had a good laugh; I, of course, headed for the dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary had a particularly good "word history" sidebar, which I will now pass on to you:

The arrowroot is just one of many plants that the European settlers and explorers discovered in the New World. The Arawak, a people who formerly lived on the Caribbean islands and continue to inhabit certain regions of Guiana, named this plant aru-aru, meaning "meal of meals," so called because they thought very highly of the starchy, nutritious meal made from the arrowroot. The plant also had medicinal value because its tubers could be used to draw poison from wounds inflicted by poison arrows. The medicinal application of the roots provided the impetus for English speakers to remake aru-aru into arrowroot, first recorded in English in 1696. Folk etymology—the process by which an unfamiliar element in a word is changed to resemble a more familiar word, often one that is semantically associated with the word being refashioned—has triumphed once again, giving us arrowroot instead of the direct borrowing of aru-aru.

So it's like "sparrowgrass" for asparagus, except that it's become the normal term. Who'd have guessed?

Update. Ian Preston, in the first comment, links to the relevant section in William C. Sturtevant's "History and Ethnography of Some West Indian Starches" (in The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals, ed. Peter Ucko and G. Dimbleby, Chicago: Aldine, 1969), which pretty convincingly demolishes the aru-aru theory: "According to Barham, a Jamaica physician writing before 1711, the plant Sloane labelled Canna Indica was called 'arrow root' because it was first known as an Indian antidote for poisoned arrow wounds, for which the juice was taken internally and the bruised root was used as a poultice on the wound." Sturtevant's conclusion:

The historical development in the West Indies seems clear: an Indian antidote for poisoned arrow wounds, adopted by non-Indians as an antidote for other poisons then extended to other medicinal uses, then used as a food for the sick at about the same time as it became a source of starch for other purposes with starch gaining techniques very likely transferred from those used with manioc.

DOWNTON ANACHRONISMS.

My wife and I are as hooked on Downton Abbey as everyone else (in fact, we just got the DVDs of the first two seasons so we can see the original U.K. versions and watch them whenever we want), so I've been interested to see the recent spate of investigations into the language used. Ben Zimmer has a post at Visual Thesaurus listing "lines that seem a bit questionable" and "assessing their accuracy for the time period"; Ben Schmidt at Sapping Attention ("Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America") has a post with a similar goal but a more comprehensive approach:

So I thought: why not just check every single line in the show for historical accuracy? Idioms are the most colorful examples, but the whole language is always changing. There must be dozens of mistakes no one else is noticing. Google has digitized so much of written language that I don't have to rely on my ear to find what sounds wrong; a computer can do that far faster and better. So I found some copies of the Downton Abbey scripts online, and fed every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English Language, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.

He finds some "egregious, howling mistakes," and the detailed discussion is quite fascinating. Finally, Mark Liberman at the Log investigates "Just sayin'". It's really very hard to get period dialog right, though that's no excuse for "logic pills" or "get knotted."

THE DAWN OF RECORDED SOUND IN AMERICA.

The Smithsonian has hundreds of the earliest audio recordings ever made, but they have been considered unplayable and nobody knew what was on them. Recently, the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory collaborated to make optical scanners capable of recording the patterns, and some of the results are becoming available. You can get a basic introduction to the situation at the National Museum of American History's blog: Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America, and Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice, and here's a YouTube playlist of six Volta Labs recordings; it sends shivers up my spine to hear a voice saying "It's the eleventh day of March, eighteen hundred and eighty-five" (though the silly-sounding high-pitched trills somewhat ruin the spell). There are many more links at this MetaFilter post, where I learned about the restoration.

RUSSIAN BAWDY.

Occasional commenter (and gracious hostess) dameragnel has sent me a couple of her favorite off-color Russian expressions; I share them here, along with her remark: "I would love to know if others have heard these and would very much enjoy their comments and additions to the list." (As they say on Википедия: Внимание! Ненормативная лексика или непристойное изображение!)

1. When things seem to be going from bad to worse:
Как пошло пизде на пропасть, и старцы ебут.

2. As a judgement of a woman; I like this one for its Gogolian syntax:
Ни сиськи, ни письки, ни цвета лица.

3. This one isn't dirty but interesting in that it is what girls were taught for enticing a man. The instructions are about where to look (the угол, the upper right or the upper left). You can see a version of this in action if you watch Angelina Jolie at a photo op or in an interview:
В угол, на нос, на предмет.

(LH again:) The first includes two of the basic Russian "bad words," пизда 'cunt' and ебать 'fuck'; one of my favorite expressions involving the first is пизда пизде рознь 'one cunt isn't like another,' used to warn against lumping unlike things together, as a medieval philosopher would say "distinguo." And the rhythm and tone of the second reminds me of the chorus of Shriekback's immortal "My Spine (Is the Bassline)": "No guts! No blood! And no brains at all!"

DOUBLE MODALS.

One of my favorite nonstandard bits of English is the double modal, as exemplified by sentences like "You might should do that." They are a peripheral part of my dialect thanks to my Ozark ancestors, and while I don't use them on a daily basis, I delight in tossing them into the mix once in a while; they give me that warm down-home feeling. A few years ago the Log had a post on them (with some followups linked in the "Updates" at the bottom); now they've become all the rage in the linguablogosphere (Lingua Franca, Sentence first), thanks to the appearance on the scene of MultiMo, the Database of Multiple Modals, created by Paul Reed and Michael Montgomery of the University of South Carolina. The database "brings together the research and investigations from more than forty years of scholarship, primarily in the Southern United States, Scotland, and Northern England" and "includes almost 2000 examples, nearly all documented MMs, in a manner designed to spur further research using them"; it is accompanied by "a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the published scholarly research" and "a commentary section that provides pertinent comments on MMs from scholars and a variety of other sources either printed or online." If you want to take part, contact one of the administrators for a username and password. You might could enjoy it.

ENOT.

My wife and I watched a PBS show about raccoons yesterday and were astonished—I had no idea how ubiquitous, resourceful, and rapidly evolving they are, and it seems clear that they'll wind up taking over the world from us and probably running it better. At any rate, I was pleased that I remembered the Russian word for them, енот [enot, pronounced something like "ye know't"], and after the show I decided to look up the etymology. Vasmer says "Возм., заимств. через нем. Genettkatze или голл. genetta из франц. genette, исп., порт. ginetta, источником которого является араб. jarnait 'соболиная кошка' (i.e., it may be borrowed via German Genettkatze or Dutch genetta from a Romance form deriving from Arabic jarnait). What amused me was the entry in Dahl, who doesn't usually do much in the way of etymology (Russian below the cut):

small American animal of the bear familly, raccoon, poloskun-bear [medved'-poloskun; poloskun 'raccoon,' from poloskat' 'rinse,' poloskat' 'splash around, paddle'], Ursus lotor. The first raccoon furs were brought to Saint Petersburg, to the Cabinet [presumably the Kunstkamera], and a Greek named Gennadi was in charge of them; the buyers called them genadievy ["Gennadi's"], from which the name enot is supposedly derived. But the raccoon civet is called Viverra genetta, and although that's a completely different creature, isn't it more to the point to look for a connection here? [Sample sentence:] Raccoon furs are in the most general use among us. In southern Siberia there is a raccoon called locally manal and mangut, which by its description is very similar to the American.

I love that kind of discursive, semi-encyclopedic definition.

Original Russian:

небольшой американский зверь семьи медведей, ракун, медведь-полоскун, Ursus lotor. Первые меха енота привезены были в Петербург в Кабинет, и заведывал ими грек Геннади; покупщики прозвали их генадиевыми, из чего, будто, сделали наконец енот. Впрочем, вивера енотовая называется Viverra Genetta; и хотя это вовсе иное животное, однако не ближе ли к делу искать тут связи? Енотовые меха у нас в самом общем употреблении. В южн. сиб. есть зверь енот, местно манал и мангут, по описанио весьма схожий с американским.

CLICKS IN ENGLISH.

Melissa Wright, a linguist at Birmingham City University, specializes in "the relationship between the phonetic-linguistic details of everyday talk and the interactional structures within which (and through which) that talk is produced"; at her home page, she says of her PD thesis: "I examined the phonetic and interactional organisation of naturally-occurring British and American English conversation. I showed that there are complex and systematic mappings between clicks and interactional structures in talk, a finding which is striking given that clicks have so far been regarded by linguists as functioning only paralinguistically." Her recent paper "On clicks in English talk-in-interaction" (Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41: 207-229; abstract) has been briefly described in this Scientific American article by Anne Pycha as follows:

Speakers, it turns out, use clicks for a previously overlooked purpose: as a form of verbal punctuation in between thoughts or phrases. Melissa Wright [...] recently analyzed click sounds in six large sets of recorded English conversations. She found that speakers used clicks frequently to signal that they were ending one stretch of conversation and shifting to a new one. For example, a speaker might say, “Yeah, that was a great game,” produce a click, then say, “The reason I’m calling is to invite you to dinner tomorrow.”

This pattern, which occurred for both British and American speakers, suggests that clicks have a meaning similar to saying “anyway” or “so.” That is, clicks provide us with a phonetic resource to organize conversations and communicate our intentions to listeners. This finding had previously eluded linguists, whose research often focuses on words and sentences in isolation. Wright was able to uncover the new pattern because she analyzed clicks in the context of complete conversations, suggesting that this method could be important for making new discoveries about the nature of language.

I don't know if the "new discoveries about the nature of language" thing is from Wright's paper or added by Pycha to spice things up; it raised my eyebrows, but not as much as the succeeding paragraph about, yes, the origin of language, for which see this exasperated 2003 LH post. (Thanks, Paul!)

PERLMANN'S SILENCE.

This Guardian review by Alberto Manguel makes Perlmann's Silence by Pascal Mercier sound like something I'd enjoy:

Throughout the days preceding the conference, Perlmann has with him a paper by a Russian linguistic, Vassily Leskov, on how memory is informed by language. Suddenly, when he can't avoid stating the subject of his own (unwritten) presentation, Perlmann gives Leskov's subject as his own. With the help of a dictionary, he translates the Russian paper and copies it for the other participants. Then Leskov announces his arrival. The story acquires here a Hitchcock-like suspense. Suicide and murder are contemplated. Complications multiply. Perlmann's anguish grows.

(I don't know whether "linguistic" for "linguist" is a typo or a mistake on Manguel's part, but either way it's comforting to see the Grauniad live down to its standards of copyediting.)

I'm not going to make a separate post for this, but if you're interested in Serbian/Serbocroatian/whatever you call it, you'll be interested in Monumenta Serbica. Thanks, Paul!

MONTIGOMO IN OGONYOK.

Remember this post from two years ago? The post was about Chukovsky and Gumilyov but the thread started with a discussion of how to translate люблю (literally 'I love') and wound up as an extended investigation of the possible sources of Chekhov's "Montigomo the Hawk's Claw." Well, Sashura, who sparked the investigation, has an article (in Russian) in today's Огонёк about that very topic; if you read Russian, it's well worth your while, and if you don't, you can get the basics from the LH thread I linked to. What I want to mention here is the sentence "Особая благодарность здесь посетителям блога американского лингвиста Стива Додсона Languagehat.com, часто публикующего заметки о русской литературе" [Special thanks to the habitués of the blog of the American linguist Steve Dodson languagehat.com, which often publishes notes on Russian literature]. You can all take a bow.

A BOOK FROM THE SKY.

Victor Mair has a typically informative and enjoyable post over at the Log that has a lot to say about (in the words of its title) "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation"; what I want to highlight here is the following passage about an astonishing and (to my mind) brilliant work of art/épatage:

The ultimate sendup of Chinese character formation is Xu Bing's famous Tiānshū 天书 (A Book from the Sky), which consists entirely of characters that look like real characters, but are in fact all fake. When A Book from the Sky was first exhibited in Beijing in 1988, it caused enormous consternation, because those who came to view it felt that the characters were familiar, but no matter how hard they strained, they could not make sound or sense of a single character in the entire lot. Sounds and meanings could arbitrarily or imaginatively be assigned to each and every one of Xu Bing's 4,000 characters from the sky. All of the strokes and all of the components are "legal" in the sense that they occur in officially authorized characters, but they have been combined in "illegal" ways. That is to say, they don't add up to any characters that occur in historical texts or dictionaries. Once they realized that they had been "had", conservative viewers were outraged because they thought that Xu Bing was making fun / light of them and their revered writing system. It wasn't long before the exhibition closed and Xu fled to the United States in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

At the "Tiānshū" link you can see an image of the book; I wish I owned a copy. Xu Bing is right up there with R. Mutt as far as I'm concerned.

MONDAY BEGINS ON SATURDAY.

I'm reading Понедельник начинается в субботу (Monday Begins on Saturday, Wikipedia), by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, and I'm enjoying it as much as I did their earlier novels (see here and here). So far it's funny rather than deep/tragic like the others (I've just started the second of the three sections), but what continues to amaze me is the literariness of it. American sf of the sixties had quite a few literary references, but it seems to me they tended to be more show-offy: "Look, I'm putting in an allusion to Hegel ["The Only Thing We Learn," by C. M. Kornbluth] or an obscure quote from Joyce [James Blish, A Case of Conscience]!" With the Strugatsky brothers, I get the sense that, like every other Russian author, they're drawing effortlessly on the entire history of their literature, which they expect their audience to be as familiar with as they are. When the protagonist arrives at the izba on chicken legs in the first section, the passage is chock-full of allusions to Pushkin's "Ruslan and Lyudmila"; the very first line, "Я приближался к месту моего назначения" [I was approaching the place of my appointment], is a direct quote from Pushkin's "The Captain's Daughter," and expected to be recognized as such; there are quotes from and allusions to Gogol, Lermontov, Lev Tolstoy, A. N. Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy, and many others, not to mention foreign writers like Ueda Akinari (very moving if you've seen Ugetsu, which contains the referenced scene), the Bhagavad Gita, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, etc. It doesn't feel like showing off because that's what all Russian literature is like (as discussed so well by Mikhail Gronas—see this post), which is one reason I enjoy it so much. Of course all literature includes references to other literature, but that's especially true of Russian, and the more of it I read the more I enjoy reading it.

Of course, I don't get all the allusions on my own, which is why I'm glad to have found this page, which annotates the book (and is part of a site that does the same for all the Strugatskys' work). The internet: long may it prosper!

BAFFLING ENCYCLOPEDIA.

A piece by Robert Woolsey of KCAW describes what Zackary Sholem Berger, who sent me the link, justly calls a "comic-tragic" story:

A new encyclopedia of the Tlingit language has teachers in Sitka scratching their heads. The massive work by New Zealand scholar Sally-Ann Lambert is extraordinarily detailed, and the product of years of effort.

The problem is: The language in the book is not recognizable by contemporary scholars, or Native Tlingit speakers.

I won't try to summarize the story, but I will say that if you produce a "Hlingit Word Encyclopedia" that is unintelligible to actual Tlingit speakers, you've gone seriously astray.... although the author's "rationale for the huge investment in time and energy in the book may ultimately have little to do with whether or not it is accepted." It's a weird world, folks.

I'M DONE WORK.

A recent post by Anatoly (in Russian) sent me to this post at Ganesha's Scarf, which describes a phenomenon of Canadian speech of which I had been entirely ignorant:

Yesterday Libby informed me that for the past YEAR she has thought that I had some grammar problem because I kept saying I was done things… “I’m done work,” I’m done my sandwich,” I’m done Bossypants so now you can take it”, etc. Apparently she didn’t want to point it out lest she embarrass me, until the other day when she heard another Canadian interviewed who kept saying the same thing. (btw for everyone who has no clue what’s wrong with these quotes, apparently most people would say “I’m done with work” “I’m done with my sandwich” [...]

This blogpost is very likely the first website to write anything about the issue. All I’ve managed to find is a lot of arguing on various forums on whether it should be “I’m done dishes” or “I’m done with homework.” The forums confirm that this is Canadian and common to some parts of the East Coast – NJ, New Hampshire, Philadelphia.

The last bit about the East Coast of the U.S. sounds unlikely to me; I think I'd have heard of it in that case, and Anatoly says it's confined to Canada. Is anybody familiar with this? (There must be linguistic literature about it, but I don't know how to search for it.)

READING NOTES ON RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY.

Kenny Cargill has a relatively new blog on Russian history, culture, language, and literature ("I will also be discussing many readings from my M.A. thesis treating Fyodor Dostoevsky's significance as a public intellectual and journalist during the 1870s"); it's been around since August 2010, but there are only seven posts so far. The two most recent are a review of The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English, by Rachel May, which I got for Christmas and am looking forward to reading. I found this paragraph a little odd:

If readers could only become familiar with some translation theory, then perhaps they would be receptive to these more avant-garde translations. In particular, Lawrence Venuti in his The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation has contributed the notion of "abusive translation," meaning translation that deliberately subverts English stylistic conventions, in providing an academic framework in which to appreciate translations that privilege fidelity to the original text's linguistic structure over all other considerations. Such a technique is ultimately bound to contribute more to the literature of the target language: "If a work is worth translating, then it should not just slip unobtrusively into the target language. It should be allowed to stretch and challenge that language with the same vitality that its original possesses — possibly even a greater vitality, born of new linguistic and metaphorical contrasts" (8). The problem is, however, that most English-language critics and readers, and particularly those monolingual readers who have no way of understanding or appreciating how the target-language translation mimics the source-language text, will naturally privilege fluency, comprehensibility and even some stylistic normativity over experimentation.

The very name "abusive translation" suggests that it's a bad thing, but it's described as a good one. The problem (in my view) comes when the alleged mimicry of the source-language text, rather than preserving "the same vitality that its original possesses," is actually adding an apparent vitality (or Verfremdungseffekt) that is not there in the original; this is precisely the problem with the much-lauded Pevear and Volokhonsky, and I disagree that the pushback against them means that "we as readers in English want to read translations that adhere to John Dryden's 'imitation' principle of translation, that is we want to read what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pasternak would have written had they been born in England or America, and not in Russia." I would say rather that it means we want exactly as much weirdness as the author put into the text and do not need added weirdness sprinkled in by the translator for the frisson of exoticism. At any rate, I look forward to reading more by Cargill, whether I agree with a particular point or not. The waterfront he covers is one I frequent myself.

SOME LINKS.

People have been sending me interesting links that I thought I'd pass on to y'all:

1) A Brief History of Blurbs, by Alan Levinovitz. You knew, of course, that the word blurb was coined in 1906 by Gelett Burgess, but did you know that quasi-blurbs (though not on the outside of books) can be traced back to ancient Rome and medieval Egypt, where authors and booksellers "were soliciting longer poems of praise (taqriz) from big-shot friends in the 1300s"? Read some truly loathsome examples of hyperbole, fakery, and shameless cronyism, and writhe in agony at the very idea of blaps and blovers.

2) If you read Russian, Mischa Gabowitsch has collected slogans of the current Russian demonstrations, at this blog, which features photos, links, and a corpus of hundreds of slogans in Russian and other languages, from Czech to Japanese. Mischa says, "It is part of a research project to document the role of the Internet in shaping the language of civil society in Russia."

3) Avery Morrow has an very interesting page about "The Undecipherable Poem, No. 9 of the Manyoshu." Not only has the poem never been deciphered, it's omitted by all English translators; it's not even in my heavy old 1940 Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai edition. I very much like the rendition "Wyrg gende acbire madentag wher myne Seko once stode, at the rootes of Itsukashi." (Via the latest post at No-sword, about poem #1 of the Man'yōshū, the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry.)

4) Aspiring young translators will want to know about the fourth annual Rossica Young Translators Award, which "is open to anyone who will be 24 or younger on the deadline for submissions, which is 15 March 2012. Entrants are required to translate 1 of 3 extracts from recent Russian novels." If you're interested, go here and download the brochure containing the extracts and terms and conditions.