Search Results from languagehat.com
I'm still reading the Gorky translation discussed here and here (I'm now on the second volume, V lyudyakh [Among people, tr. as In the World]), and in Chapter 8 there's a nice anecdote about how the young narrator, forced to...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 3, 2010 10:34 AM
The farther I read in Chukovsky's diary, the more at a loss I am to understand on what basis they abridged the English version. They entirely omit the Nov. 20, 1919, entry, which describes the opening and setup of the...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 13, 2010 02:34 PM
My wife asked me why "refrain" means such different things as a noun and as a verb, and the answer turns out to be interesting: the two have completely different histories. The verb refrain is (via French) from Latin refrenare,...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 2, 2010 11:05 AM
I've finished reading Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air (see this recent post), and I'm already looking forward to rereading it in a few years—it's one of those books you keep going back to as you accumulate...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 19, 2009 03:41 PM
This thread quickly wandered into a discussion of the wonderful 1952 film version of The Importance of Being Earnest directed by Anthony Asquith, with Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford, Dorothy Tutin, Joan Greenwood, and of course Edith Evans as the definitive...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 30, 2009 08:52 PM
I occasionally run across clippings I tucked into books years ago, and I just found one that had a quote so marvelous I had to share it with you all. A Scott Kraft piece on the Lumière brothers in the...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 23, 2009 07:18 PM
Anatoly makes a very interesting point about change in Russian usage since the nineteenth century (Russian below the cut):On of the things that strikes me in Anna Karenina (which I'm rereading) is how ty [intimate 'you'] and vy [polite 'you']...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 17, 2009 09:49 AM
Because of my diverse set of interests, plus my dogged insistence on looking up references to even the most minor names I run across in a text, I sometimes happen on striking coincidences that bring together utterly different realms, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 14, 2009 07:55 PM
Don't miss the Poemas del río Wang post about one of those astonishing 19th-century wanderers long forgotten in the rush to delineate the world and its history in nationalist terms, with neat little boxes in which Persians live in Persia...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 13, 2009 08:38 PM
István Deák has a NYRB review of a couple of books about Hungarian exiles in the U.S. that starts with a few jokes ("Another story was about a meeting of top US atomic scientists at which, when Enrico Fermi has...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 12, 2009 08:54 PM
The excellent folk at OUP sent me their latest magnum opus, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, and I've been marveling at it for the last month. Well, to be more specific, I spent some time circling warily...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 11, 2009 06:21 PM
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, by John McWhorter, is an enjoyable but odd book. It's basically a combination of two items, each of which would ideally be very slim: a primer on descriptivist views of language...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 1, 2009 08:17 PM
Back in June I discovered a book I immediately lusted after, The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century by Bernard Comrie, Gerald Stone, and Maria Polinsky. Alas, list price was $260.00, and used copies started at over $100, so I...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 27, 2009 06:02 PM
In checking the bibliography of a book I'm copyediting, I hit an article titled "La typologie des catalogues d’Éhées: un réseau généalogique thématisé." I was stopped in my tracks by the bizarre (to me) word Éhées; I could make no...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 20, 2009 10:39 AM
My brother is on his way back to California after a week spent letting us show him the delights of autumn in New England, and one of our field trips was to Historic Deerfield, which was an enlightening experience (although...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 17, 2009 05:15 PM
How can I resist sharing Roger Ebert's essay on the books in his life? Not only will it set off sympathetic vibrations in anyone who loves owning books (I don't understand you "I can get it at the library" people—what...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 10, 2009 09:06 AM
A reader sent me a link to Fora Reader, which calls itself "a foreign reading tool with a simple-dedicated-embedded browser, rapid word translations, dictionary management, and text annotation for viewing with any web browser":Written in the Java programming language, Fora...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 1, 2009 08:34 PM
My wife and I have been watching the new Ken Burns series on the national parks (nice images to take to bed), and tonight's episode had quite a bit about Mount Desert Island. Half the time they pronounced it DE-sert...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 29, 2009 09:53 PM
I recently mentioned mimes (probably, I fear, in a disparaging way) and my wife said "Isn't that supposed to be /mimz/ [i.e., as if written meems]?" I was astonished and said I'd never heard or imagined such a pronunciation, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 28, 2009 09:26 PM
No, no, not that one, a peaceful one a century earlier. My pal Jason at Henry Holt sent me a copy of Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt, which arrived at the perfect time, just...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 20, 2009 01:39 PM
I'm reading a book that's alternately irritating and fascinating, Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich. It's one of those "I decided to cure my first-world angst by impulsively moving to someplace new where I would be thrown into a...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 13, 2009 08:20 PM
Helen DeWitt, the wonderful writer who blogs at paperpools, has an intriguing idea in her post mute inglorious Nabokovs: spend a few hours introducing people to three different languages, just enough to read a few lines by a great writer...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 12, 2009 09:48 AM
I was reading Tony Judt's NYRB "Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009)," an obituary for a man I was not as aware of as I should have been, when I was caught up short by this quote from Kołakowski: "A mere feeling of...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 11, 2009 08:49 PM
Johann Georg Hamann is probably best known for being a godfather of Sturm und Drang and for saying poetry was the earliest form of language, but he wrote about all sorts of things (usually in brief articles packed with allusions),...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 10, 2009 04:16 PM
I just ran across a very interesting talk (pdf, Google cache) given by Suzanne L. Marchand in 2001; called "German Orientalism and the Decline of the West," it's apparently a teaser for a book she's currently writing "about the study...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 8, 2009 12:13 PM
I've written about Sapir-Whorf (e.g., here and here) and about the Pirahã (e.g., here and here, and good lord, has it really been five years?), and there's nothing particularly new in Joshua Hartshorne's "Does Language Shape What We Think?" in...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 21, 2009 05:01 PM
From Edgar Allan Poe's Marginalia (Part XI, Graham's Magazine, February 1848; the reader should be warned that he is using, and punning on, the now obsolete point 'punctuation mark'):That punctuation is important all agree; but how few comprehend the extent...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 3, 2009 09:27 AM
An interesting Olivier Razemon piece (in French) in Le Monde solves the mystery of bar-tabacs with semi-exotic names like Maryland, Celtic, and Brazza:For Jean-Louis Vaxelaire, author of a number of writings on proper names, the only plausible explanation was "the...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 2, 2009 06:52 PM
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has put online Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter's Plant Names in Yiddish, which it published in 2005. (Dr. Schaechter died in 2007; I wrote about him here.) You can download it from a link on this...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 30, 2009 05:23 PM
My wife and I are still reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, a fat and satisfying novel about the French Revolution, and I thought I'd pass on this paragraph from page 400 of my Penguin paperback (the narrator...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 19, 2009 10:54 AM
Last year I mentioned Greg Ross's excellent miscellany-blog Futility Closet; now John Cowan points me to a recent post called "Calendar Trouble," presenting five pairs of mismatched Slavic month names, the first two being:In Macedonian, Listopad means October. In...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 18, 2009 08:26 PM
I am not referring to this kind of muffin (for a time I had apple-oat-bran muffins for breakfast every day, but that was another life) but to the nineteenth-century term meaning a poor baseball player, one who frequently muffs (misplays)...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 15, 2009 08:38 PM
The Russian blogger natabelu has a post reproducing a correspondence carried on in the last years of his life by the wonderful children's poet, critic, and essayist Korney Chukovsky (whose amazingly sensible book on language I celebrated here and here)....
Posted in languagehat.com on July 4, 2009 09:55 PM
Chocolate & Zucchini, according to the About page, "is a blog written by Clotilde Dusoulier, a 29-year-old Parisian woman who lives in Montmartre and shares her passion for all things food-related -- thoughts, recipes, musings, cookbook acquisitions, quirky ingredients, nifty...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 30, 2009 05:41 PM
The Daily Growler's latest post talks about the creatures that inhabit the Southwest: "the coyote, the bobcat, the puma, the Gila monster, the vinegaroon..." Hold on, said I, "vinegaroon"? Not in M-W, so I tried Wordnik, and there it was,...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 26, 2009 08:24 PM
My wife and I are now reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety in the evenings; I've been a fan of hers ever since reading Eight Months on Ghazzah Street some years ago, and this fat historical novel about...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 17, 2009 08:17 PM
Ben Zimmer over at Word Routes has a post on one of the most disputed word histories ever, that of jazz. Was it first used for baseball, music, or something else? In San Francisco, New Orleans, or elsewhere? The earliest...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 8, 2009 09:27 AM
An e-mail from a reader reminds me of something I meant to blog ages ago: back in January, Mark Liberman at the Log posted a nice chart of the ways different languages have of expressing what we English-speakers term "Greek...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 4, 2009 04:49 PM
My wife and I finished Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone (starts off a little dull, but becomes quite absorbing) and decided to follow it up with another Canadian novel, this one translated from French: Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner....
Posted in languagehat.com on May 27, 2009 08:12 PM
Dick & Garlick ("Notes on Indian English, Hinglish, slang & pop culture") is always an interesting read, and R Devraj's latest post discusses the north Indian use of convent as "a generic term for an English-medium school. Hence, convented, adj.,...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 21, 2009 10:33 AM
I've finished Beckwith (see my earlier posts: 1, 2, 3), so it's time for the summing up. Since I'm going to have some strongly negative things to say, I'll reiterate that despite its faults the book is more than worth...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 9, 2009 06:39 PM
I am delighted to report that regular LH commenter Siganus Sutor, under the nom de blog Siganusk, has started Martian Spoken Here ("Mauricianismes et autres petites entorses à la langue"). As he says in his introductory post, his starting point...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 3, 2009 09:25 AM
Yves Bonnefoy is one of my favorite French poets, and (as I said here) I would never dare try to translate his gorgeously opaque off-classical poems myself. But at wood s lot I found a link to this fine version:...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 23, 2009 10:41 AM
My wife and I heard an NPR report featuring Lera Boroditsky and her work on the effects of grammatical gender on word associations; it sounded more solid than the usual pop-psych stuff that gets breathlessly touted by the media, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 10, 2009 05:02 PM
It's just as well I've finished Book III of War and Peace, because I need to put it aside for a few weeks to read Ronen (see this post); I'll take the occasion to pass along some things I've run...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 5, 2009 08:35 PM
My wife and I have just finished reading Life: A User's Manual, and we're still reeling and wondering what just happened. (Why were there all those detailed descriptions of paintings and tabletops?) Wonderful book, but we need to let it...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 1, 2009 09:13 PM
In the TLS, Rachel Polonsky (author of a notoriously vicious review of Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia—see this discussion) reviews a new translation of Eugene Onegin and Andrew Kahn's Pushkin's Lyric Intelligence (I hate joint reviews,...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 31, 2009 02:12 PM
Lively lexicographess Erin McKean (a long-time LH favorite) writes in the Boston Globe about "the changing language of crosswords":Last year, during the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, host and puzzlemaster Will Shortz held aloft a tiny object. It was barely visible...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 24, 2009 02:43 PM
Orhan Pamuk was recently given an honorary doctorate by the University of Rouen; his acceptance speech is devoted to Flaubert, whom he (like many modernist authors) idolized as a young man: "And he addresses to his mother the sentences I...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 23, 2009 09:36 AM
1) Joel of Far Outliers usually posts extended excerpts from his reading (usually historical/cultural, and always interesting), but occasionally he favors us with glimpses into the Austronesian languages of his academic studies, and he's now doing a three-part series (the...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 16, 2009 09:56 AM
In the comment thread for this post, Grumbly Stu wrote: "I just discovered that for my entire life I have mistaken the meaning of 'scatty'. I meant disorganized / disheveled." (Scatty is British slang for 'crazy.') I just ran across...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 18, 2009 05:08 PM
In reading Life: A User's Manual, my wife and I have found that the reward for making your way through Part One's bewildering descriptions and brief references to the lives of the inhabitants of the apartment building which is the...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 15, 2009 09:24 PM
As I said here, my wife and I are reading Life: A User's Manual, and we're enjoying it a lot even though we have to take on faith that all the seemingly unrelated bits and pieces will add up at...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 9, 2009 04:02 PM
I learn from Geert Jan van Gelder's TLS review that there is a new, three-volume "complete" edition of the Arabian Nights (subtitled "Tales of 1001 nights," thus covering all bases) published by Penguin and translated by Malcolm C. Lyons. The...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 30, 2009 06:16 PM
Joe Clark has very kindly put up a snatch of an interview in Occitan on Flickr. As he says, "Do not be surprised if Occitan sounds like French as spoken in a Spanish accent." If you can't understand it, no...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 22, 2009 05:51 PM
I had known that J. B. Van Helmont (1577-1644) invented the word gas based on Greek χάος 'chaos'—it makes sense if you know that in Dutch, the letter g is pronounced kh—but I had no idea he also created blas...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 18, 2008 08:00 PM
Some students at MIT have created an online edition of Ezra Pound's famous 1914 anthology Des Imagistes. (The linked Wikipedia article has a great Richard Aldington quote about the title: "What Ezra thought that meant remains a mystery, unless the...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 16, 2008 11:52 AM
This USA Arts interview with Nabokov was filmed, I believe, in early 1965, since he says he's still working on the Russian translation of Lolita, which he'd finished by March of that year; its 25 or so minutes are broken...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 14, 2008 11:11 AM
I'm still reading David A. Bell's The First Total War, and in explaining his theory of how, paradoxically, the new concept that war was an aberration that could and should be eliminated led to the modern type of "total war"...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 13, 2008 08:07 PM
From the LA Times blog:Today, Three Percent announced its long list for the best translated novel of 2008. The 25 titles include works originally published in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian, German, Arabic, Greek, Catalan, Icelandic and Hebrew. The Times...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 8, 2008 09:37 PM
I keep going back to Mandelstam, one of the most important writers to me even though I often find his thought hard to follow, and my latest attempt at his 1922 essay "On the Nature of the Word" (О природе...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 7, 2008 10:23 PM
From the preface to Remy de Gourmont's Book of Masks (Le Livre des Masques, 1896):Conformism, imitativeness, submission to rules and to teachings is the writer's capital crime. The work of a writer must be not only the reflection, but the...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 6, 2008 09:53 AM
Earlier this year I wrote briefly about the linguistic situation in War and Peace; now I'm reading Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and finding more material, which I will quote here for those interested. (I suspect...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 4, 2008 09:09 PM
Thanks to a comment from Aldiboronti in this Wordorigins thread, I learned an interesting fact: the word truce is essentially just the plural of true. As the OED puts it:[ME. trewe and triewe, mostly in pl. form trewes and triewes:—OE....
Posted in languagehat.com on November 24, 2008 07:58 PM
The latest post by the estimable Conrad, along with the ensuing comment thread, prompts me to share with you all the remarkable life of H. W. Bailey. The Wikipedia entry is a good start:Bailey was born in Devizes, Wiltshire, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 21, 2008 02:59 PM
Over a month ago, I got a review copy of Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language: Almost Everything You Didn't Know You Didn't Know About Language and Languages and almost immediately fell in love with it. I kept meaning to write...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 16, 2008 09:27 PM
Reading this New Yorker piece by John Seabrook, I hit the sentence "The word 'psychopath' (literally, 'suffering soul') was coined in Germany in the eighteen-eighties" and of course turned immediately to the OED, where I found that the entry had...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 13, 2008 01:46 PM
My brother sent me a link to this NY Times story by C. J. Chivers about an American, Isaiah (Cy) Oggins, who became a spy for Stalin and was murdered in a Soviet prison camp. (The author mentioned in the...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 12, 2008 07:34 PM
Andrey Zaliznyak, a Russian historical linguist, gave a talk last month "On professional and amateur linguistics" that can be read (in Russian) here (found via Anatoly). I recommend it to anyone who can read Russian; for those who can't, I'll...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 11, 2008 04:19 PM
I've been reading C. V. Wedgwood's classic history The Thirty Years War in an attempt to understand a very messy period of European history, and am finally, among many other things, getting a handle on who was Calvinist and who...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 7, 2008 04:32 PM
A couple of years ago I wrote about the fact that the American moose is the same as the European elk (the American "elk" being an entirely different creature), citing Mallory and Adams' The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 27, 2008 10:02 AM
I recently ran across a Russian word unknown to me, мухояр [mukhoyár], an obsolete term for a kind of cotton fabric mixed with silk or wool. It looks like a purely Slavic word, perhaps having something to do with муха...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 19, 2008 10:36 AM
Francis Deblauwe of Word Face-Off ("Comparing the evolution in internet-popularity of words and phrases") has had the excellent idea of comparing the popularity of multilingual synonyms in multilingual countries in this post, "Library vs. Bibliothèque vs. Bibliotheek vs. Bibliothek in...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 6, 2008 02:44 PM
Anatoly, in this post, mentions facts about the history of French and Russian pronunciation I didn't know; I'll translate:Ricard in "History of the French Language" [I don't know what author or book is referred to here —LH] mentions that in...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 5, 2008 06:04 PM
Having returned to my reading of War and Peace in Russian, I was looking up a dance teacher mentioned in the text named Petr Iogel (for some reason called "Vogel" in my Dunnigan translation, and I wish I knew what...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 3, 2008 09:03 PM
The Anglo-Norman Dictionary was announced in the late 1940s and began publishing in 1979, the last fascicle coming out in 1994; Glanville Price in his review for The Modern Language Review said it "is likely to have a major impact...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 25, 2008 08:29 PM
Everyone knows about Anne Boleyn, one of Henry VIII's unfortunate wives, and the more persnickety among us know that her surname is properly pronounced Bullen, but I did not know until today that it is from the name of the...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 18, 2008 10:28 AM
A correspondent reminded me of a site I keep running across but for some reason have never blogged about: the Medieval Names Archive. The first line on the main page is "This collection of articles on medieval and renaissance names...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 13, 2008 09:24 PM
Having finished the first major section of War and Peace, ending with the Battle of Austerlitz in November/December 1805 (the novel was originally going to be called The Year 1805), I am once more struck with what a good writer...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 2, 2008 03:21 PM
I've found a nut too tough for me to crack, and naturally I'm tossing it in the direction of the Varied Reader. Frequent commenter (and slayer of prescriptivist dragons) jamessal sent me a quote from Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 31, 2008 05:53 PM
A comment by marie-lucie in this thread (which has now reached the hundred-comment mark thanks to the usual digressions, in this case involving edibles) is so interesting I thought I'd give it its own post:At a time when I was...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 25, 2008 08:56 AM
Thanks to Wordorigins.org, I've learned one of those useless bits of information I love: André Citroën, founder of the eponymous auto company, was of Dutch origin, and, as the linked Wikipedia article says, "The Citroen family moved to Paris from...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 20, 2008 10:00 AM
I don't think I've seen languages interwoven in quite this way; if you know both French and English, it's a very enjoyable read:To answer the question I'm always asked [voyons réfléchissons] No I do not feel that there is a...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 19, 2008 09:30 AM
When we last saw our heroes in the "war" part of War and Peace, they were hightailing it east, away from the victorious French, in the autumn of 1805, hoping to meet up with the reinforcements coming from Russia before...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 14, 2008 03:49 PM
One of the things that surprised me when I started reading War and Peace in Russian was that it wasn't particularly well written in the "fine writing," Nabokovian sense. The sentences were baggy, the words were not carefully harmonized, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 3, 2008 12:38 PM
I've been reading one of my birthday gifts, Heath W. Lowry's The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (thanks, Jim!), a brilliant reanalysis of the early Ottomans that proves (to my satisfaction, anyway) that far from being fearsome warriors for...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 15, 2008 09:24 PM
Mendele (Forum for Yiddish Literature and Yiddish Language) publishes a magazine, The Mendele Review, which recently devoted an issue to Waiting for Godot in Yiddish. "There are two known Yiddish translations of the play – Gizela Shkilnik's posthumously published version...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 10, 2008 07:40 AM
Mark Liberman at the Log has a great post on the history of the Place des États-Unis in Paris. It was called the place de Bitche, after a town in Moselle "which had valiantly resisted the Prussian invasion during the...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 6, 2008 05:56 PM
I've started reading War and Peace in Russian (something I've been wanting to do for many years), prompted by reaching that point in Henri Troyat's biography, and in the very first section I've noticed several items of linguistic interest. The...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 5, 2008 04:59 PM
As I mentioned last month, my wife and I are reading Middlemarch, which has epigraphs for each chapter, and the one for Chapter 30 defeated me. It's in French, a language I allegedly speak, but I couldn't make head nor...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 24, 2008 09:30 AM
I'm following up my Caucasus books by reading Henri Troyat's biography Tolstoy; normally I'm suspicious of biographies that "read like novels," but this one works for me so far, and it's now brought me to the Caucasus with the eager...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 20, 2008 08:50 PM
That is to say, French lexicographic materials. A correspondent writes:The Dictionnaire Littré de la langue francaise in now available on-line, free, at www.littre.com. It contains more than 80,000 definitions, 200,000 citations of authors and reference works, and synonyms, conjugations of...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 16, 2008 08:54 PM
A comment by Arthur Crown in this post led me to an excellent lecture by Dr. John B. Corbett preserved, with all its hesitations and fillers, at the SCOTS Project (which I blogged about here and here), about Thomas Urquhart...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 29, 2008 02:18 PM
Having learned from a correspondent that there is still no complete translation of Proust in Greek, I decided to find out when the full novel became available in Russian, and was surprised to discover it was not until 1999. I...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 28, 2008 03:13 PM
Joel of Far Outliers has a post that begins with his student years:During my dissertation fieldwork in Papua New Guinea over thirty years ago, I discovered that a bunch of Austronesian languages in Morobe Province mark their relative clauses in...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 22, 2008 09:32 AM
From an impassioned Poetry Foundation article on translation by Linh Dinh:One of the defining figures of Vietnamese literature, Phạm Quỳnh helped to modernize the language, encouraged the writing of short stories and novels, and the anthologizing of folk poetry. Admiring...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 29, 2008 11:19 AM
Having finished Proust, my wife and I have started reading Speak, Memory at bedtime, and I am reading the corresponding section of the Russian version, Drugie berega [Other shores], afterwards; I want to make a post about the amazing Russian...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 10, 2008 12:06 PM
I've been rereading Evgenii Onegin and appreciating more than ever the line-by-line brilliance of the poetry. When I was young and foolish and first studying Russian, I thought of Pushkin as a romantic; the first poem of his I read,...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 5, 2008 12:18 PM
Still reading Ostler, I've come to a nice quote from Plutarch about Cleopatra:There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 28, 2008 08:14 PM
One of American's national treasures, the poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, has died:“His public persona was a real crank, a gadfly, a loose cannon,” said Thomas Meyer, a poet and Williams’ partner for more than 40 years. “But there was...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 19, 2008 10:44 AM
There's a word tare, meaning "The weight of the wrapping, receptacle, or conveyance containing goods, which is deducted from the gross in order to ascertain the net weight" (OED), that I've looked up any number of times but never remember...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 16, 2008 04:01 PM
I've been reading Sergei Aksakov's Years of Childhood, a wonderful memoir of growing up in the region of Ufa in the 1790s. Aksakov became a well-liked theater critic (and the father of two famous Slavophile sons, Konstantin and Ivan). He...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 15, 2008 02:23 PM
Serge Schmemann has an amusing column in the NY Times on the subject of American attempts to pronounce Russian names:I saw it coming as soon as Tim Russert cornered Hillary Clinton into naming Vladimir Putin’s heir. She dodged, ducked and...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 14, 2008 01:56 PM
Marina Warner has a fine essay in the TLS called "Babble with Beckett: How foreign languages can provide writers with a way out of the familiar." Her main subject, obviously, is Beckett, but I want to highlight the material on...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 13, 2008 04:58 PM
OK, that may be too apocalyptic a question, but I'm astonished by the results of a study conducted by Dalila Ayoun of the University of Arizona and reported on by Heidi Harley at Language Log: "Fifty-six native French speakers, asked...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 25, 2008 10:40 AM
Occasionally I dive into Nabokov's insanely detailed commentary on Eugene Onegin for a bracing refresher, and recently my attention was caught by his perverse insistence (pp. 70-71) that the correct way to translate Russian shinel' 'greatcoat' is "carrick"—he goes so...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 20, 2008 05:51 PM
A while back I got M.J. Harper's The Secret History of the English Language in the mail from Melville House, its publisher. I didn't have time to read it, but I flipped through it and noted that it purported to...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 18, 2008 10:15 AM
A while back I got a package in the mail that turned out to be a gift from my pal pf (long-time readers may remember his adventures in Siberia): a copy of the NYRB reprint of G. B. Edwards' The...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 14, 2008 11:43 AM
One reason I love words and their histories is that there are too many of them to ever master; no matter how much I know, there's always plenty more I don't. You know the phrase truck farming? I always assumed...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 13, 2008 08:57 PM
Antoine Cassar calls these poems "mosaics" (adding a clarifying "multilingual sonnets"). I've seen plenty of poems that incorporate material from a second language, but I've never seen any with material from five woven together in this fashion:C’est la vie Run,...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 10, 2008 06:00 PM
Walter Benjamin, in an essay on Leskov (pdf, Google cache), makes a point that rings true for me and provides a rationale for my lack of interest in much "psychological" fiction:When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 2, 2008 11:18 AM
One of the gaps in my knowledge of Russian literature has long been Tyutchev, universally considered one of the three great Russian poets of the Romantic generation (alongside Pushkin and Lermontov). Now that I have a collection of his poetry...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 29, 2008 09:42 PM
JBooks has an online magazine, Secular Culture and Ideas, which is featuring essays on Sephardic Judaism. Vanessa Hidary writes "My Jewish Grandmother spoke Arabic," Pamela Dorn Sezgin writes about Dario Moreno and Sephardic Cosmopolitanism ("The Turkish Army served as a...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 28, 2008 09:30 PM
A language-learning site, Digital Dialects, "contains free to use interactive activities for learning languages and links to study resources." The word games they offer to make use of the vocabulary and phrases are fun but on the simple-minded side, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 19, 2007 02:41 PM
We recently discussed the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace; Sam Sacks has alerted me to a review (in Open Letters, of which he is the Fiction Editor) by the puckish Steve Donoghue (who claims he "served...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 10, 2007 11:10 AM
I'm finally starting to read Zamyatin's famous novel Мы (We), which I bought almost forty years ago as a beginning Russian student and long-time science fiction fan (I'd already read it in English). This prescient book, from which Huxley and...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 23, 2007 09:28 PM
Artur Janc's lingro is a very nifty piece of software that provides clickable word definitions for any webpage. The About page says: lingro was conceived in August 2005, when Artur decided to practice his Spanish by reading Harry Potter y...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 21, 2007 08:19 PM
Correspondent Christophe Strobbe alerts me to this post by Neal Whitman of Literal-Minded, about constructions like "others were attempted to be killed" with "its passive marking on both the matrix verb (was attempted) and the embedded infinitive (to be killed)—something...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 20, 2007 09:13 PM
Here's a splendid misappropriation of an English phrase that's made its way around the world, mostly unbeknownst to the speakers of English itself: Mark Liberman at Language Log reports on the international term making off, meaning "The recording of the...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 19, 2007 07:59 PM
A NY Times story by Joseph Berger (print version) is the first thing in a while that's given me a bit of hope about the American educational system:Seven-year-old Cooper Van Der Meer is learning Spanish as a second language. That’s...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 15, 2007 06:42 PM
That's Finnish for Linguistic Association of Finland, and its initials are SKY, and the SKY Journal of Linguistics is "a refereed general linguistic journal published on an annual basis. It contains articles, short essays or so-called 'squibs' and book reviews......
Posted in languagehat.com on November 5, 2007 10:08 PM
Jeremy Osner of READIN is trying to translate Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" (see here, here, here, and here) and says "I'm trying to put together a new translation of "Hymns to the Night", an updated version of MacDonald's translation,...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 20, 2007 09:06 PM
Actually, the Day itself was the 16th, but I've just found out about it, and an excellent perk—free access to Oxford Language Dictionaries Online—is available through this weekend (15-21 October 2007). So if you want to rummage around in the...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 18, 2007 03:40 PM
The other night, in our Long March through Proust (begun last November), my wife and I finally finished Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe)—it certainly ends with a bang!—and I now have a question and a complaint. The complaint...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 8, 2007 06:07 PM
I love being able to check referral logs and Technorati, because they introduce me to things I might not otherwise find. The latest is Unhappy Medium, the blog of a woman who had been anonymous but is now using her...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 7, 2007 01:49 PM
It's not often I scoop the Anglophone world on a news story, but this may be one such occasion—I can't find anything in English on the Cendrars scandal a Francophone reader noticed in Le Figaro (story by Raphaël Stainville, 28...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 3, 2007 09:07 PM
The discussion of pair of stairs got onto the subject of compass(es), and after discovering there were three words in Russian (компас [kómpas] for 'instrument for determining direction,' буссоль [bussól'] for 'surveyor's compass,' and циркуль [tsírkul'] for 'instrument for describing...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 7, 2007 08:33 AM
Weird etymology of the week: today I saw a reference to the verb cry being derived from an ancient Roman exclamation "Quirites!" '[Help,] citizens!' Outmoded folk etymology, thought I, but no, the OED agreed: [a. F. crie-r ...:—L. quiritare to...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 2, 2007 09:39 PM
The comment thread on this post quickly mutated into a discussion of the etymology of the word shark; commenter dearieme quoted Michael D. Coe as saying "Tom Jones has recently proved that 'xoc' [in Maya] is the origin of the...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2007 08:27 PM
1) Arnold Zwicky has an interesting Language Log post about "conflicts between faithfulness (Faith: roughly, stick to the original) and well-formedness (WF: roughly, make things fit your system)": for example, should the p in pH be capitalized if it begins...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 13, 2007 01:00 PM
1) Here's an example of why what I think of as the American use of should, exclusively to mean 'ought to,' is preferable to the traditional/U.K. use, in which it is also used in counterfactuals, the equivalent of American would....
Posted in languagehat.com on July 26, 2007 11:36 AM
I'm still reading Shklovsky (see this post), and have gotten to the section where, disgusted with the increasing chaos of the Provisional Government, he "went to the War Ministry at the Soviet and said I would go anywhere, only as...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 22, 2007 02:57 PM
In the process of packing I keep running across books I'd forgotten about, and one was so pertinent to my recent focus I started reading it immediately, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922 by Viktor Shklovsky. He's one of those seminal...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 20, 2007 06:53 PM
Trevor sent me links to three interesting-looking sites, and since I'm frantically boxing books, I'm just going to throw them up here and hope somebody likes one or more of them. Thanks, Trevor! Metro Gael: "Gearóid Ó Colmáin's blog consists...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 18, 2007 03:28 PM
We think of Lafcadio Hearn in connection with Japan, where he spent the last years of his life and wrote his most famous books (notably Kwaidan), but he lived for a dozen years in New Orleans; the Wikipedia entry on...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 11, 2007 04:46 PM
A correspondent sent me a link to a language blog I'd somehow missed, The Chocolate Interrobang ("where we savor discussions about language & grammar & syntax, and sometimes reminisce about diagramming sentences..."). There's a fair amount of tedious pop-grammatical blather...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 20, 2007 08:11 PM
In an effort to find out what exactly is going on in the famous scene in Le Côté de Guermantes when the narrator finally gets to kiss Albertine, a kiss that takes pages and pages to approach the young lady's...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 9, 2007 04:20 PM
A paper published recently in Science, "Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy" by Whitney M. Weikum et al, "shows that 4- and 6-month-old infants can discriminate languages (English from French) just from viewing silently presented articulations. By the age of 8...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 7, 2007 11:02 AM
Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat has a post on the Songhay languages, which he's studying for his dissertation; I hadn't realized that the group's membership in the Nilo-Saharan family was so shaky. (Lameen says "if it were spoken in the Americas,...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 27, 2007 11:26 AM
In the continuing adventure of reading Proust to my wife at bedtime, we've gotten well into The Guermantes Way and are comfortably ensconced in Mme de Villeparisis's godawful party, where everyone is busily engaged either in sucking up or in...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 23, 2007 10:46 AM
A friend wrote me to ask about the word samphire, and once I'd copied out enough material to give her an answer I thought I might as well share my research with all and sundry. So: First off, in case...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 11, 2007 10:38 AM
Thanks to aldiboronti at Wordorigins, I have the pleasure of presenting to you the online Sardinian dictionary (I linked the English version, but you can get it in Italian, French, German, and Spanish as well—just click on the appropriate flag)....
Posted in languagehat.com on May 10, 2007 04:57 PM
A story by Grégory Onillon at Libé describes how an American translator got fired for subtitling a Sarkozy appeal to the French to "s’unir à moi" as "to rally my inflated ego." An amusing sidelight is that the story mistranslates...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 6, 2007 08:45 AM
A Sunday Times article by Jonathan Bate explains how he investigated word use for his new edition of Shakespeare:The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: everyone knows the phrase. And most people know where it’s from: “To be, or not...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 15, 2007 08:03 PM
My recent immersion in multinational Alexandria has turned up some interesting sources; I'll link to a couple of them here. Racheline Barda's "Egyptian Jewry in modern times" (.doc file, HTML cache) begins with a description of the varied origins of...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 12, 2007 12:00 PM
I've finished Durrell but am still fascinated with Alexandria, so I'm reading Out of Egypt: A Memoir by Andre Aciman, a saga of his family's life in the city covering most of the twentieth century. It's apparently somewhat fictionalized, but...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 8, 2007 08:52 PM
Mark Liberman at Language Log has a post discussing political blogs in France. He makes a number of interesting observations; here's the meat of the post:The first thing that struck me about this phenomenon was that no one is paying...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 31, 2007 07:01 PM
Still reading Durrell (and now almost done with Balthazar), I ran across the word parquet used in the French sense of 'prosecutor's office' and decided to look it up in the OED. Much to my surprise, it turns out to...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 29, 2007 05:39 PM
I'm rereading Lawrence Durrell's Justine after many years, enjoying the writing as much as ever: "The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind..." But I just hit an example of something that baffles and infuriates me...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 23, 2007 05:46 PM
As mentioned in the thread that wouldn't die (where even as we speak le Cimentier Martien is leading a dubious group of revelers in some sort of catered affair), I am reading Proust to my wife in the evenings, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 10, 2007 11:09 AM
From Far Outliers, a news report on the establishment of a Kanak language academy:NOUMEA, February 27 (Oceania Flash) - New Caledonia's government has officially appointed late last week its Vice-President, Déwé Gorodey, to the position of Chairman of the newly-created...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 9, 2007 09:01 PM
1) From xkcd ("The blag of the webcomic"), Washington’s Farewell Address Translated into Everyday Speech:I’ve often heard that Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’ — the speech he sent out (in written form) to a bunch of papers at the end of his...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 6, 2007 06:55 PM
This is one of the more perplexing translation problems I've run across lately. As I mentioned in this LH thread, I've long been interested in Stratis Tsirkas' trilogy Akyvernites polities (Ακυβέρνητες Πολιτείες), but having had only the second and third...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 26, 2007 05:54 PM
On the LibraryThing page for Charles Duff I noticed that alongside Russian for Beginners, the book from which I taught myself Russian, were listed German for Beginners, Spanish for Beginners, French for Beginners, and Italian for Beginners (not to mention...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 22, 2007 03:54 PM
This is the kind of picky detail most people don't even notice, but that drives editors (and those with editorial brains) crazy. I just noticed that the LibraryThing page for Hilary Ballon's The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 18, 2007 07:19 PM
The word charivari "A serenade of ‘rough music’, with kettles, pans, tea-trays, and the like" (OED), the source of the fine American shivaree (Twain: "She turned on all the horrors of the ‘Battle of Prague’, that venerable shivaree, and waded...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 30, 2007 10:57 AM
Bulbulovo links to LibriVox, a site which "provides free audiobooks from the public domain." The vast majority (689) of the currently available texts are in English, but there are some in German (27), French (11), Russian, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Chinese,...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 29, 2007 05:22 PM
OddCast.com has created a demo of their text-to-speech technology that's fun and a little creepy (the animated woman's eyes follow your cursor, and sometimes a male voice comes out of her mouth). You can pick from thirteen languages (Catalan, Chinese,...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 26, 2007 12:03 PM
Tom, the correspondent who sent me the Romani links posted earlier today, has a question to which I do not know the answer, and I am hoping some of my readers do:Today the name of the Russian language in Russian...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 22, 2007 05:42 PM
I mentioned a while back that I was reading Proust to my wife in the evenings (in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation), and I've come across a word so obscure and entrancing that I had to tell you about it. As Swann...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 19, 2007 06:04 PM
The Gate2Home site "enables you to write in your language wherever you are in the world, with an online onscreen keyboard emulator":The need for this site arose due to the lack of possibility to change the keyboard language at internet...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 9, 2007 08:12 AM
My New Year's resolution was to be a nicer, more positive language blogger. No more slapping Safire around, no more holding journalistic slips up to public ridicule, none of that stuff; instead I'd praise the praiseworthy and let the broom...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 1, 2007 03:59 PM
I'm sure many of you have wondered, as I have, what the "correct" pronunciation of Pinochet's family name is. Well, Eric Bakovic has not only wondered, he's thoroughly researched it, and this post on Phonoloblog (a follow-up to his earlier...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 15, 2006 12:19 PM
Some tidbits from recent Language Log posts I can't resist sharing: 1) In Ben Zimmer's post on Apocalypto, he points out that Michael Phillips, in his Chicago Tribune review of the new Mel Gibson movie, says "Gibson and company chose...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 8, 2006 10:03 AM
Random finds while looking up other words in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate: capoeira 'a Brazilian dance of African origin': Brazilian Portuguese, kind of martial art, ruffian skilled in this art, fugitive slave living in the forest, from capão island of forest in...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 27, 2006 10:12 AM
For six months I read Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta to my wife at bedtime, and Friday night we finally got him to Jidda and a respite from dates and danger. To celebrate his, and our, deliverance, here are...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 26, 2006 03:42 PM
Internet commerce is a wonderful thing, but there's nothing like spending time in an actual bookstore. Today my stepson and his wife treated me to a visit to the Book Mill, where I found all sorts of great books. Before...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 24, 2006 08:43 PM
A great post by Céline of Naked Translations about the way her brain works while she's doing simultaneous translation:I was interpreting in a brewery a couple of weeks ago (yes, it was as fun as it sounds), and the person...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 19, 2006 11:10 AM
1) Nic Dafis of Morfablog alerted me to the BBC radio drama based on David Jones's In Parenthesis (which I discussed here, here, and here); it's an hour and a half long, and you can listen to it by following...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 16, 2006 11:37 PM
A BBC News story tells the story of a mysterious non-English-speaking burglar (an earlier story said "the authorities have no idea of his name, age, nationality, or even his language") who turned out to be Hassan Ibrahimi, from "a remote...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 7, 2006 03:00 PM
Brigid Brophy doesn't sound like my cup of tea, but Bernard Hoepffner (who's been working for a decade on a French translation of her In Transit that he can't get publishers interested in) has an interesting discussion of the problems...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 21, 2006 02:56 PM
The latest post on Far Outliers introduces me to a wonderful term which Joel cites (from his newly acquired Encyclopedia of Ships) as tumblehome, but which my own treasured copy of The Sailor's Word-Book gives as tumbling-home "The opposite of...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 17, 2006 11:14 AM
I didn't realize the Weekly World News had moved into Onion territory (I thought their stories were, like professional wrestling matches, supposed to be taken as true by the hypothetical simple-minded consumer, rather than being obviously for laughs), but I...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 16, 2006 11:34 AM
I'm as aware as anyone of the high percentage of words that don't have known etymologies (boy and dog, for instance), but every once in a while an example strikes me with particular force. Just now it was griot, in...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 13, 2006 02:27 PM
Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat (who has finished his dissertation, hurray!) has a new post about Tamazight (Berber) language activism:To my mind, this is perhaps the single biggest problem of some branches (certainly not all) of the Tamazight movement: they talk...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 29, 2006 10:13 AM
A wonderful Le Monde interview (in French) introduced me to Alain Rey, the chief editor and lexicographer at Dictionnaires Le Robert (considered the populist alternative to the magisterial Larousse). The article says "il y a aussi, et surtout, le fait...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 26, 2006 12:53 PM
Via Varieties of Unreligious Experience, I learn that the journal Oral Tradition is now online, or as they put it:On September 15, 2006, Oral Tradition enters a new chapter in its existence as an international and interdisciplinary forum for the...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 23, 2006 08:58 PM
A long article by Vera Ryklina in Русский Newsweek (in Russian, obviously) describes the rapid and probably irreversible decline in the use of the Russian language. Since the collapse of the USSR, it is studied and spoken less and less...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 22, 2006 03:37 PM
I'm reading In War's Dark Shadow by W. Bruce Lincoln (having been prompted by my Unread books post), and a particular usage is bothering me. Here's an example: "Among Russian writers and publicists, ignorance about the lives lived by such...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 16, 2006 12:20 PM
The wonderful German site Lyrikline showcases poets reading their own poetry in many languages: currently Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Belarusian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi (Persian), Finnish, French, Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish,...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 9, 2006 09:53 AM
A letter in Sunday's NY Times Book Review section made me wince, smile ruefully, and then wince again:To the Editor: Caroline Weber’s interesting review of “Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon,” by James Sullivan (Aug. 20), fails to...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 5, 2006 11:55 AM
In David Jones's hybrid masterpiece In Parenthesis, there's a soldier with the unlikely name of Dai de la Cote male taile; a footnote tells us to "Cf. Malory, book ix, ch. 1." Book IX, Chapter 1 of Le Morte d'Arthur...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 1, 2006 09:07 AM
There's a great thread over at Crooked Timber that starts with a comparison of the English and German versions of the Kant quote from which the blog title is derived ("Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist,...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 27, 2006 11:40 AM
Or so says the Guardian, in a story by Alan Smithers about a decline in the study of French and German: "The four most often spoken languages in the world are, in order, Mandarin, English, Hindustani and Spanish. Spanish is...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 25, 2006 09:35 AM
Thanks to a MetaFilter post, I have learned that the Foreign Service Institute language courses (for a long time available only as occasional finds in used book stores, where I bought them whenever I saw them) are being put online....
Posted in languagehat.com on August 17, 2006 08:56 AM
Remember my joy at finding a copy of a book of pronunciations that originally appeared in a regular column in The Literary Digest over 70 years ago? Well, the BBC is putting pronunciations of names and words in the news...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 15, 2006 12:08 PM
I hereby unleash the awesome power of the internet on a puzzle that's bothered me for more than a dozen years—or, to be more precise, one that bothered me when I first read Charles Doughty's wonderful Travels in Arabia Deserta,...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 26, 2006 08:36 AM
A miscellany: 1) A recommendation of scythes as a grass-cutting tool brought to my attention the fact that the shaft of a scythe is called a snath (description and picture here). I don't know why, but I really like the...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 25, 2006 09:22 AM
A correspondent sent me a link to a fascinating story (at Ioram's blog A pair of eyes in the Middle East, which seems to have gone silent since May). It starts:It's no big secret that nobody likes the newcomer. In...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 23, 2006 08:17 PM
Looking up Vyacheslav Ivanov—who a century ago ran an influential St. Petersburg literary salon in his turreted house, called the Tower—in Solomon Volkov's gossipy and irresistible St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, I found this:The Tower was imbued with an intensely...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 20, 2006 10:43 PM
Some time back I discovered the poetry of Gennady Aygi, a Chuvash who (at the suggestion of Boris Pasternak) began writing in Russian in the late 1950s. His poetry is very strange, not Russian-seeming at all; it was only when...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 19, 2006 09:10 PM
Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat has a thoughtful post on Moroccan linguistic and educational policy. He starts by linking to a brief MoorishGirl post on the subject ("I'm fully in favor of using Darija, because of the huge impact it would...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 17, 2006 09:36 AM
"Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity" (pdf, Google cache) is a riveting look at "the link between coercion and absurdity" by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (whom Yale has cravenly refused to rehire); though...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 11, 2006 04:45 PM
While reading David Rieff's NY Times Magazine article on Mexican politics, I was struck by a couple of names in this passage: "[López Obrador's] economic team is led by Rogelio Ramírez de la O, a Cambridge-educated economist who is well...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 5, 2006 11:12 AM
A story by Pam Belluck in today's NY Times describes the changing fortunes of the French language in Maine:Frederick Levesque was just a child in Old Town, Me., when teachers told him to become Fred Bishop, changing his name to...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 4, 2006 03:41 PM
I have to post about the National Spelling Bee that was broadcast last night; I'm fond of spelling bees in general (I still remember being furious with myself in grade school for blowing the word Christmas), but this one was...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 2, 2006 12:15 PM
Over at Poetry London there's a feature "Did Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound get it wrong? Four poets discuss the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry" in which John Weston, W.N. Herbert, Polly Clark, and Yang Lian respond...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 24, 2006 01:34 PM
In last week's New Yorker, Lawrence Wright writes about Syrian filmmakers in "Captured on Film." The article isn't online (though you can get a good summary, along with stills of the movies discussed, from the slide show with Wright's voiceover...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 19, 2006 01:35 PM
Lameen Souag of the always interesting Jabal al-Lughat has turned up the blog Awal_nu_Shawi about the language Tashawit (or Tachawit):Tashawit is a variety of the Berber language (a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family). It is spoken by Ishawiyen, the Berbers...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 15, 2006 09:49 AM
I'm a bit late with this, but I wanted to get enough of my books categorized that my own statistics page would make an impressive showing (I'll bet no other LT users come close to 145 languages!). Anyway, LibraryThing has...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 12, 2006 08:51 PM
Conrad H. Roth, the learned and acerbic proprietor of Varieties of Unreligious Experience (and self-described "unmoored intellectual desperately seeking a thesis-topic"), has a post that brings to my attention an unusual slang term. After a discussion of "the old WW1...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 24, 2006 05:09 PM
Yawning Bread is an interesting website run by Au Waipang, a Singaporean of Chinese descent, who in his about page explains:As both my parents were educated in English-language schools (run by Christian missionaries, as most English-language schools were in their...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 31, 2006 01:21 AM
Via a MetaFilter thread I learned of the existence of Parkour:Le Parkour (also called Parkour, PK, l'art du déplacement, free-running) is a physical discipline of French origin. It is an art form of human movement, focusing on uninterrupted, efficient forward...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 17, 2006 12:32 PM
A provocative rant by Kemal Kurt (translated by Marilya Veteto) on the subject of the validity and reception of writing by immigrants, with particular attention to Germany:The assertion that literature is only possible in one's mother tongue loses its validity...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 11, 2006 04:47 PM
This all started because while editing an article in MS Word for a veterinary journal, I noticed that the spellchecker did not recognize the word scrapie. That's odd, I thought—it's a reasonably common word that I (who am not given...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 31, 2006 10:09 AM
Mark Liberman has a Language Log post about an oddly formed adjective that's always pleased and puzzled me, Shanghainese. Where does that intrusive -n- come from? I assumed it had something to do with Chinese, but Mark provides more parallels:But...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 22, 2006 11:51 AM
From Sturrock's translation of Sodome et Gomorrhe:I addressed these words to Francoise: "You're an excellent person," I said smarmily, "you're kind, you've a thousand good qualities, but you're no further on than the day you arrived in Paris, either in...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 21, 2006 03:08 PM
By popular demand (in this thread), I am discussing the various words for 'eggplant' (Solanum melongena, a comestible with a far wider variety of shapes and colors than most of us are aware of—there's a very nice photograph of "a...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 16, 2006 07:06 PM
A comment by Ran in this thread was so interesting I thought I'd give it its own post. He quotes from Bescherelle: La Conjugaison pour tous, a comprehensive description of French verbal conjugation (I'll give his translation, slightly emended by...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 14, 2006 12:17 PM
In the course of investigating Joel Hoffman's book In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, I ran across David Steinberg's useful web page "History of the Hebrew Language" (which cites Hoffman in the bibliography). It's got tables...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 9, 2006 02:29 PM
The indefatigable aldiboronti (in a thread at his usual haunt, Wordorigins.org) has turned up another great resource, the Jewish Language Research Website:Throughout the world, wherever Jews have lived, they have spoken and/or written differently from the non-Jews around them. Their...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 4, 2006 09:52 AM
I just finished "Brokeback Mountain" (cached version; apparently the New Yorker has taken the story offline) and can't believe I never read Proulx before: she's a superb writer, and this is a great story. I just thought I'd mention that...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 17, 2005 05:48 PM
The Grand dictionnaire terminologique, part of the site of the Office québécois de la langue française, is a great resource. As mj klein of Metrolingua (where I found the link) says:You can look up French definitions, meanings between French and...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 3, 2005 05:29 PM
So MetaFilter member acoutu mentioned in an AskMeFi thread that her family name, Coutu, was traditionally pronounced "Koo-chee." Her explanation for this was that...my great-great-grandfather worked on the railroads with a bunch of Italians. Being an Italian in North America...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 19, 2005 05:16 PM
I ran across a scanned image of a Russian schoolbook page and started to read it when I was stopped cold by the second line: 2. Запишите 2-ой абзац текста, подчёркивая все орфограммы. [2. Write out the second paragraph of...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 15, 2005 07:52 PM
Ready Steady Book has a very fetching interview with Charlotte Mandell, a translator of French poetry and philosophy. Apparently it's her first interview, and she burbles happily: "Translators never get asked anything, so when someone listens to us we tend...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 14, 2005 12:49 PM
I just heard a radio news announcer say "In Beijing... uh, Beizhing..." My wife gets nervous when I swear at the radio, so I'll say it here: there is no /zh/ sound in Mandarin Chinese! Why on earth do people...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 10, 2005 10:11 AM
I'm afraid my delay in reading last week's New Yorker means that it's no longer on newsstands (and the article isn't online), but if you can find a copy, the November 7 issue has an article by David Remnick called...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 7, 2005 05:38 PM
While I was at the bookstore, I picked up the September issue of Poetry magazine on the strength of several poems (like "On the Metro") by C.K. Williams, with his wonderful long lines, and a long essay about Richard Wilbur,...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 23, 2005 05:09 PM
Bill Poser at Language Log has an excellent post on an important topic, the shortage of interpreters in all branches of the government. Knowledge of foreign languages has always been in short supply in America, but it used to be...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 19, 2005 06:59 PM
Two words that have nothing in common except that they're near each other alphabetically, they're so obscure they're not even in the big Webster's, and pronouncing them is no easy matter: Magh: "A member of the (largely Buddhist) people of...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 16, 2005 03:33 PM
"Which-hunting" refers to editing which and that based on the superstition that the former should be used with a nonrestrictive clause and set off by commas; editors enslaved to this doctrine scrutinize manuscripts for relative clauses and zealously change whiches...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 11, 2005 10:15 AM
Xavier Kreiss, a guest blogger at Naked Translations, has an interesting post on "The languages of Guernsey." It starts off:My mother is a Guernseywoman, and I've known and loved Guernsey all my life. The Channel Islands have always held a...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 6, 2005 04:24 PM
I liked floor_mice's post so much I thought I'd translate it for the non-Russophones among us:Not long ago we discovered a neighborhood... park? Well, a well-kept area under high-voltage wires, anyway, much like similar places in Russia where dog-lovers and...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 30, 2005 06:52 PM
Neal Durando, in An Abécédaire Fugitif, begins "My grammar has crossed the Atlantic four times since I began giving English lessons in western France three years ago," and goes on to list French words with associations they call up for...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 18, 2005 07:54 PM
David Ball discusses the hazards and delights of translating Alfred Jarry's notorious play Ubu roi:Flatten the language into ordinary English and the play simply disappears. For just as the plot and characters of Ubu seem to be taken from Shakespeare—but...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 8, 2005 05:16 PM
It turns out Eskimo doesn't mean 'eater of raw meat':In spite of the tenacity of the belief, both among Algonquian speakers and in the anthropological and general literature [...] that Eskimo means 'raw-meat eaters', this explanation fits only the cited...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 3, 2005 10:51 AM
The latest New Yorker is the Food Issue, featuring Judith Thurman on tofu in Japan, John Seabrook on fruit in Umbria, Malcolm Gladwell on creating the perfect cookie, and other appetizing articles, most of which are not online (including, alas,...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 1, 2005 04:13 PM
John Latta, poet and proprietor of the apparently now shuttered Hotel Point, has moved to Rue Hazard, where he has been doing some "rough translating" of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Ma Haie: Un privé à Tanger 2. He interrupts the numbered paragraphs...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 31, 2005 11:56 AM
This page, maintained by John Cowan, "comprises a list of 736 'essentialist explanations' of the form 'Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z'." I think quoting a few samples will give you the idea: English is essentially bad...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 30, 2005 05:13 PM
I do love a good language rant, as long as it's the sensible kind and not the usual prescriptivist lament, and fev of the copy-editing blog headsuptheblog (active since April) has a dandy one, called "Is that a mote in...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 28, 2005 04:34 PM
Frequent commenter Tatyana just sent me the word ouguiya, which is in the dictionary and legal for Scrabble use. I had never heard of it but was thrilled to know it existed; when I googled it, I discovered the equally...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 25, 2005 09:24 PM
OK, this is a little silly, but I can't resist: someone has decided that August 22 is National Punctuation Day. I'll take that as an excuse to pass along a history of punctuation (including English, Spanish, French, and East Asian)...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 22, 2005 06:07 PM
Reading Jonathan Franzen's annoyingly self-absorbed "My Bird Problem" in the latest New Yorker, one reason I kept going was the profusion of wonderful bird names: gadwall, veery, redstart, dunlin... Then I hit "parauque" (at the bottom of the middle column...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 13, 2005 11:19 AM
I was idly leafing through a book on Gunnar Ekelöf's "A Mölna Elegy" (don't ask me why, since I knew nothing about Ekelöf and have never been particularly interested in Swedish poetry) when I was struck by the mention of...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 31, 2005 09:08 PM
The Russian Primary Chronicle, or Повесть временных лет (Povest' vremennykh let, in traditional orthography Повѣсть временныхъ лѣтъ), is a remarkable document that has always been the basic source for the early history of Russia (or rather Rus, since "Russia" was...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 27, 2005 05:54 PM
Another entry from Davidson I had to share:Gallimaufrey (gallimaufry, and other variant spellings), an obsolete culinary term, corresponding to the French word gallimaufré [actually galimafrée—LH], meaning a dish of odds and ends of food, a hodge-podge. The obscurity surrounding the...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 14, 2005 02:46 PM
John Emerson of Idiocentrism (where incidentally you will find a new section on "Frankophilia": "All the way back to the Chrétien de Troyes and the Song of Roland, the French have had a knack for lewdness, irony, and the freedom...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 11, 2005 02:32 PM
An article by Howard W. French in today's NY Times does a surprisingly good job at describing the complex linguistic situation in China:DATIAN, China - As a crowd formed around a rare foreign visitor in this town's open-air market, the...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 10, 2005 12:30 PM
Marcel Barang has the noble goal of translating and publicizing modern Thai prose literature via his website (English and French versions). In the preface to his anthology The 20 Best Novels of Thailand, he explains why much Thai literature is...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 24, 2005 10:22 AM
Over at aprendiz de todo, Prentiss Riddle discusses the complex set of pronouns given in Sir Richard Winstedt's Colloquial Malay (Singapore, 1957):...there are not only separate sets of pronouns for different combinations of social ranks, but a distinct set reserved...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 22, 2005 05:28 PM
Pita's hat blog. It's nothing but hats... and it's in French! Need I say more? Check out this 1935 cover—there's a whole novella in that image. Or this wide-eyed and perhaps a bit complacent gaze from 1900: little does she...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 20, 2005 08:19 PM
Frequent correspondent Laurent sent me a most interesting advertisement, in which the letters of the word "Chevron" are made up of the words for 'energy' in a bunch of languages. I can identify most of them by using dictionaries and/or...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 12, 2005 04:33 PM
In my last entry the word theodolite cropped up in the OED's definition of circumferentor; I got curious about its etymology and looked it up, only to find:Origin unknown... The name, alike in the Latinized form theodelitus and the vernacular...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 11, 2005 08:57 PM
Another goodie via Derryl Murphy, "Expos' move marks end of baseball era in French," by Christopher J. Chipello of The Wall Street Journal:For more than three decades, Jacques Doucet was the French-language radio voice of Major League Baseball. Many Montreal...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 6, 2005 04:19 PM
In case you've ever wondered whether to keep the particle "de" when referring to a person of Frenchness, here's the answer (courtesy of this thread at the newly resuscitated Wordorigins):The rule is this - a "de" attached to a single-syllable...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 2, 2005 01:53 PM
I'm delighted to report that R. Devraj, whose marvelous blog Dick & Garlick I discovered a while back, has picked up where he left off back in November, with posts on the dismissive term vernac, the "hybrid French-Tamil expression" bonjour...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 1, 2005 10:49 AM
A NY Times article by Craig S. Smith, "Académie Solemnly Mans the Barricades Against Impure French," describes the sedate, not to say molasseslike, activities of the Académie Française, which "has been toiling for 70 years on the dictionary's ninth edition...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 31, 2005 04:59 PM
I had always assumed that press in the sense 'force someone to become a sailor' (as in the phrase press gang) was simply a transferred use of the ordinary verb, but a lively book I've just stumbled on, The Press-Gang...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 18, 2005 09:27 AM
Reading Fred Anderson's superb Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766, with its penetrating insights into every side's point of view and what really mattered in the end (the Battle...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 5, 2005 05:45 PM
OK, first go read Gary Shteyngart's The Mother Tongue Between Two Slices of Rye (from the Spring 2004 Threepenny Review). It's very funny.When I return to Russia, my birthplace, I cannot sleep for days. The Russian language swaddles me. The...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 4, 2005 12:10 PM
I'm basically going to repost here an entry from No-sword, because it's an interesting question that I'm completely incompetent to answer, and I thought perhaps some of my more theoretically inclined readers might have some interesting comments:Japanese is considered to...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 30, 2005 08:11 PM
The poet Robert Kelly has been quoted on LH before; here are his thoughts on the main focus of this blog:Sermon on Language This - I mean whatever comes to mind when you read this - is an organization -...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 26, 2005 02:03 PM
The new movie The Interpreter doesn't sound very good (reviews use words like "bloated" and "hooey"), but the gimmick of an invented language, Ku, provided with grammar and vocabulary by an actual linguist can't help but attract my interest; fortunately,...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 22, 2005 08:38 PM
Beth at Cassandra Pages has posted an entry that does an excellent job of recounting the kinds of interactions that can defeat us when we're trying to operate in a second language, and the way it makes us feel:“It doesn’t...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 15, 2005 12:32 PM
Edward Tregear's Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary (1891), the work which made him a Fellow of the French Academy (according to this reference site, which misspells his name and thus is perhaps not entirely trustworthy), has been put online by the New...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 8, 2005 08:46 AM
There's no point my going on about what a great writer Bellow was; if this is news to you, go read him. But the hullabaloo about his death has led me to a couple of odd mysteries. For one thing,...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 6, 2005 11:01 AM
I haven't lambasted William Safire for a while now, and after his recent "Kifaya!", helpfully describing the meaning ('enough!'), usage (political protest), pronunciation, and even derivation (quoting Hans Wehr's Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic) of the titular exclamation, I was...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 5, 2005 07:11 PM
A couple of interesting stories from the New York Times. I can't get a blogsafe link for the first, so it may disappear in a few days: Composing the Work an Ill-Fated Poet Never Began, by Alan Riding, describes a...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 1, 2005 10:53 AM
I don't usually do the meme thing, but I've succumbed before, and when Cassandra beckons, who am I to decline? So here goes. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Have you...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 31, 2005 12:44 PM
I somehow have managed not to mention Andrew Joscelyne's Blogos here (though I did mention Aristotle's use of the word), so let me remedy the omission. From the About page: Blogos puts the logos in the blogosphere. It covers language...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 8, 2005 04:22 PM
The Department of French Studies of Louisiana State University has a web page called Un glossaire cadien-anglais/A Cajun French-English Glossary:A number of resources exist for those looking for Cajun French vocabulary, but all of them pose problems for LSU students...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 1, 2005 12:44 PM
While trying to look up something else in my big Russian-English dictionary, I happened on the entry Вирсавия [Virsaviya] f bib Bathsheba. Well, that's odd, thought I: Virsaviya doesn't sound much like Bathsheba (who was King David's wife and Solomon's...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 26, 2005 12:41 PM
Thanks to Céline of Naked Translations, I've learned a new French expression: découvrir le pot aux roses, which she says means 'to find out what's going on' and my Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French by René James Hérail and Edwin...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 18, 2005 10:31 AM
This fine site has everything you're likely to want to know about lingua franca (Wikipedia), "a mixed language... [formerly] used for communication throughout the Middle East." The Prefatory Note says:I am happy to present the fourth edition of the Lingua...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 6, 2005 02:47 PM
I just discovered an important fact about the pronunciation of a common English word—something that doesn't happen very often any more. A comment in a (silly) MetaFilter thread informed me that the word trait was traditionally pronounced exactly like tray,...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 28, 2005 05:59 PM
Unfortunately, the trial period is half over, but there are still a couple of days of free access:Free Open House - Access millions of articles from thousands of publications including journals, magazines, newspapers, images and more, For Free January 24...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 26, 2005 09:05 AM
Christopher Sundita's Salita Blog "is dedicated to his thoughts about the language situation and the over 160 languages in the Republic of the Philippines." His "obligatory introductory post" says:Salita is a Tagalog word. Its meanings include word, speech, talk/speak and...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 24, 2005 06:07 PM
Lexicographer Erin McKean is a senior editor at OUP as well as editor of Verbatim, "the only magazine of language and linguistics for the layperson." Yesterday on Public Radio International's show "The Next Big Thing" she said she wanted to...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 9, 2005 09:42 AM
Mark Liberman has a most interesting Language Log post about two forms of encoded language, Vietnamese nói lái and French contrepets. The latter is a form of potential punning that depends on imagined malapropism; as Mark puts it:These are exemplified...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 8, 2005 06:57 PM
Iain Higgins' contribution to History and Archives: Sextet, a collective editorial in Issue 178 of Canadian Literature ("Iain, who came on board in 1995 as poetry editor, has overseen special issues on 'Poetry and Poetics' and on 'Nature/Culture.' He wrote...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 3, 2005 08:44 PM
I'm finally reading Gogol's Dead Souls in Russian, and a few pages into Chapter Four I encountered the following line (addressed by the cheerful scoundrel Nozdryov to the protagonist, Chichikov, who has just refused to join him because of pressing...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 31, 2004 03:12 PM
Dinesh sent me a link to an online version of Poul Anderson's essay "Uncleftish Beholding," a discussion of atomic theory that "shows what English would look like if it were purged of its non-Germanic words, and used German-style compounds instead...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 28, 2004 10:00 AM
A Los Angeles Times story by Christopher Bodeen describes the efforts of the Chinese government to suppress the so-called "dialects" (actually separate languages spoken by millions of people: Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, &c) in a surprising context: Tom and Jerry cartoons.Dubbed...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 23, 2004 09:58 AM
The medievalist historian who writes the blog Blitztoire has an entry, "Du positivisme historique à la critique des blogs" [From historical positivism to the criticism of blogs], in which he quotes a trenchant passage he ran across in Introduction aux...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 21, 2004 09:55 AM
A correspondent has proposed an interesting question:I am trying to find out about communities in the US/Canada that have historically been non-English speaking and are still hanging on to their native tongue (no matter how tenuous that grip may be)....
Posted in languagehat.com on December 20, 2004 08:45 PM
The magnificent Lexilogos site links to all manner of reference works involving language: family names, etymology, place names, slang, and much else, usually starting with French and continuing with a scattering of other languages. To give just one example, check...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 18, 2004 08:19 AM
Geoffrey Hosking, in his superb Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917, describes an early-nineteenth-century attempt to produce a Russian-language Bible:An integral part of Alexander's concept was the idea of making the scriptures available to all the peoples of the empire in...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 15, 2004 11:55 AM
John Emerson has put online (at Idiocentrism) a transcription and translation of a few passages from what sounds like a remarkable book, the sixteenth-century Portuguese Menina e Moça. Here is Emerson's description:The main narrator is doubly exiled, first from her...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 14, 2004 02:38 PM
Céline of Naked Translations has an amusing post about her difficulties trying to translate English into French and being told that her versions are too... French:Coordinator: "Please write your ideas on the flip-chart." Céline: "Veuillez noter vos idées sur le…...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 13, 2004 11:55 AM
This Nation review by Lee Siegel of Chekhov's The Complete Short Novels, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, expresses concisely why I like Chekhov so well:"Zhizn zhizn" goes a Russian saying: Life is life. Experience ultimately defeats the most...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 5, 2004 11:44 AM
This CBC News story made me quite happy:This is a tale of two cities — or, rather, of two cities' names. And it reveals how we sometimes have a dickens of a time spelling foreign nouns in English. The story...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 30, 2004 10:52 AM
Or, in its own words, Langue sauce piquante: Le blog des correcteurs du Monde.fr: the blog of the proofreaders of Le Monde. If you know French, or are trying to learn, this is a great way to immerse yourself. A...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 28, 2004 02:58 PM
Jane Kramer's New Yorker article "Taking the Veil," about the French law (Article 141-5-1 of Law No. 2004-228) forbidding conspicuous religious symbols in public schools (not online), has a couple of problems dealing with French that I thought were worth...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 17, 2004 09:00 PM
A NY Times article by Marc Lacey, "Using a New Language in Africa to Save Dying Ones," tosses together a mishmash of vaguely related topics and tries to make them cohere; fortunately, I don't have to bother going over it...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 14, 2004 02:25 PM
Herewith two words whose pronunciation is not obvious; one is known to me, the other is not. I'll start with the latter. 1) A spadia is "a strip just wider than a column, overlapping the front page" of a newspaper...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 10, 2004 08:28 PM
Longtime readers will know of my great fondness for the writing of Adam Gopnik; as I have said, he has been the main reason I keep subscribing to The New Yorker, and his absence from its pages recently (apart from...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 9, 2004 06:14 PM
Koant (a Breton name, incidentally) has created a French-language community blog, Madame Martin, on the model of MetaFilter and MonkeyFilter (of which he is a member); it's only been around for a few weeks, which means that (if you're francophone)...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 4, 2004 08:17 PM
Cape Breton (French: île du Cap-Breton, Scottish Gaelic: Eilean Cheap Breatuinn, Mi'kmaq: U'namakika) is a linguistically complex place. Many Mi'kmaq (Micmac) still speak their Algonquian language; it's "the only area in the world - outside of Scotland itself - where...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 25, 2004 11:31 AM
Judith Shulevitz's NY Times review of The Five Books of Moses: A Translation With Commentary by Robert Alter not only raves about the book ("Alter's magisterial translation deserves to become the version in which many future generations encounter this strange...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 21, 2004 06:32 PM
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 15, 2004 09:37 PM
AESOPICA.NET: Aesop's Fables Online presents "1418 English fables, 646 Latin fables and 780 Greek fables (translations provided), as well as links to French (La Fontaine) and Spanish," in the words of aldiboronti at Wordorigins, who once more has dug up...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 13, 2004 11:20 AM
The Glossaire franco-canadien et vocabulaire de locutions vicieuses usitées au Canada is a Project Gutenberg reprint of an 1880 book by Oscar Dunn explaining, and frequently deploring, the local form of French. Anyone interested in the subject should find it...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 4, 2004 04:08 PM
I'm reading Russia, by Donald Mackenzie Wallace, an indispensable text for any English-speaker who wishes to understand the country in tsarist times (there were three editions, in 1877, 1905, and 1912; I'm reading an abridgment of the last, but the...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 28, 2004 10:10 PM
Last year I reported on James Murray's letter of application to the British Museum Library, which did not get the future editor of the OED a job despite his acquaintance with "the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin &...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 28, 2004 05:28 PM
A comment thread at pf has inspired me to deal with the vexed question of the various names for the capital of Kyrgyzstan. From 1926 to 1991 it was Frunze, which is not problematic (except for the Kyrgyz—see below), Frunze...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 25, 2004 02:06 PM
Today's NY Times has an article (by Stacy Albin) called "You Say Prosciutto, I Say Pro-SHOOT, and Purists Cringe." I had hopes for this article; the local variant of Italian spoken in New York and New Jersey (I don't know...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 20, 2004 05:22 PM
Wordful is a new language site from Australia whose creator says:Words. How I love 'em. This is where I'll share my love for word histories, names and anything else wordy that pops into my head.This is obviously a good premise...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 18, 2004 11:55 AM
Greg Lindahl's home page links (under "Publishing") to a series of Renaissance books he's hosting, including a couple of dictionaries, Cotgrave's A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (and its associated proverbs) and Florio's Italian/English Dictionary, both from 1611;...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 16, 2004 03:12 PM
This article by Robert A. Leonard is as good a summary of how Black English should be viewed as any I've seen:Any professional linguist will tell you that, as a language system of communication, black English and standard English are...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 11, 2004 02:45 PM
Another specialized multilingual site: Chess Pieces in Different Languages, the creation of Ari Luiro. Not only are the words for 'chess,' 'check,' and the pieces given in 64 languages, but there's a nice historical introduction, piece by piece:Words for chess...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 11, 2004 01:00 PM
First off, I want to thank everyone who left informative comments on my Hiatus post. (I should add that wolfangel was quite correct that people would often switch to English when they heard I wasn't a native speaker, but I...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 5, 2004 04:41 PM
I'm too tired to get into the linguistic aspects of my visit, but I want to thank Beth and J. for welcoming us, pouring good wine into us, and making such good conversation that we hated to leave; I also...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 4, 2004 10:38 PM
I know, I know, I just took a week off, but I'm going to do it again. I have some vacation time to use up, and the Republican convention seemed an excellent time to get out of town. So I'm...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 29, 2004 08:56 PM
Last year I had a brief entry ON TRANSLATING NAMES (whose comment section degenerated lamentably and had to be closed); it's a subject that's long interested me, and I'm glad to report that there's a detailed discussion of it in...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 24, 2004 04:18 PM
I'm reading a powerful, important book that I can't with a clear conscience recommend. The book is War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, a journalist who's been covering war zones since El Salvador in 1982...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 23, 2004 08:23 PM
An excellent List of European cities with alternative names [Margaret of Transblawg has brought it to my attention that it's also a Wikipedia entry, which is probably the original]:Most cities in Europe have alternative names in different languages. Some cities...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 14, 2004 09:01 AM
I quickly weary of long theoretical treatises, but I never tire of reading detailed histories of the forms and usages of vocabulary items, and many such are available at W. Rothwell's Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub. I discovered this through a reference...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 5, 2004 04:58 PM
As a follow-up to my LITSEI/GIMNAZIYA post, another example (also from The Russian Language Today) of convergence of originally distinct terms:The title of the head of city administration, previously predsedatel' gorodskogo soveta 'Chairman of the City Council', has been changed...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 31, 2004 09:03 PM
According to a Zachariah Wells column in maisonneuve, Canada is suffering from a lack of poetry translated from foreign tongues into English.As renowned poet and translator A. F. Moritz put it to me, “If you don’t bring over the most...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 26, 2004 04:05 PM
I've been slowly working my way through The Russian Language Today, by Larissa Ryazanova-Clarke and Terence Wade—an excellent and detailed discussion of the changes in Russian since 1917—and have gotten to the section on "The restoration of pre-Soviet lexis in...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 26, 2004 10:30 AM
Hayden Carruth, as I've said before (hi, Moira!), is one of my favorite American poets; tonight I was reading my wife a poem of his called "Vermont" (1975, available in Collected Longer Poems) and came across these lines (towards the...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 22, 2004 10:31 PM
The creators of Etymologic! call it "the toughest word game on the web," and for all I know they may be right.In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 19, 2004 10:08 PM
PhiN. Philologie im Netz "is a journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies."It publishes articles and reviews within an interdisciplinary framework. The PhiN "Forum" is open to shorter statements, discussions, dialogues, and interviews. Contributions are welcome from all areas of...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 19, 2004 03:29 PM
Language hat is going to spend the next week in California. Regular blogging will resume July 18; in the interim, I urge you to visit the excellent sites blogrolled at right, and (for those of you in climates resembling that...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 10, 2004 12:00 AM
In a sort of raucous melange of my recent posts Braw and witty (the Scotticizing of Aristophanes) and Patapoufs! Anthropophages! (the comic use of French puns and insults), I bring you King Gubu, the Irishization by Tom Quinn of Alfred...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 1, 2004 09:07 PM
In his fine Threepenny Review essay French Without Tears, Luc Sante (whose last name is pronounced SAHNT [according to the author himself, who was kind enough to drop by the comment section to correct my mistaken two-syllable version]) reminisces about...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 30, 2004 03:46 PM
PF, in the course of his troubadouresque wanderings, has washed up for the night here in Peekskill, where he has brought to my attention the remarkable Douglas Young translations from Greek into Scots, in particular his translation of The Frogs...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 28, 2004 11:18 PM
A charming NY Times story by Melissa Sanford on the perilous flight training of urban falcons (the NY Times link generator won't give me a blogsafe link for some reason, so this link will rot in a week) says "It...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 28, 2004 02:39 PM
The Dico du Net is a collaborative French dictionary of words having some relation to the internet; its ambit includes:des domaines aussi variés que : le référencement, la mesure d'audience, l'hébergement de sites, la création de sites web, le développement de...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 22, 2004 04:34 PM
MadInkBeard is a blog dedicated to the idea of formal constraints in writing; as the About page says:I've been interested in the (mostly French) group called the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) ever since I discovered the writings of Italo...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 18, 2004 10:59 AM
No-sword has posted another entry (earlier LH posts on this here and here) about wacky Japanese verbal forms, this time involving an English suffix:Here are some words that would probably be understood by a Japanese speaker my age: wakattingu komacchingu...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 15, 2004 08:11 PM
An ionarts post on the new French translation of Ulysses from Gallimard includes a tantalizing excerpt of Bruno Corty's interview with the head editor of the translation, Jacques Aubert, in Le Figaro Littéraire. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 15, 2004 10:41 AM
George[s?] Coedes (more properly Cœdès) was a remarkable scholar who "bestrode the field of Southeast Asian study for over half a century." What I am concerned with here, however, is his name. I don't know how to pronounce it. For...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 12, 2004 02:05 PM
The ArtLex Art Dictionary has "definitions for more than 3,600 terms used in discussing visual culture, along with thousands of supporting images, pronunciation notes, great quotations and cross-references." A sample entry:Rayonism - A type of abstract or semi-abstract painting characterized...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 3, 2004 09:03 PM
I'm continuing the translation I began in a recent entry of Kornei Chukovsky's comments on changes in Russian and generational reaction to them.If the youth of those days [the 1840s] happened to use in conversation words unknown to earlier generations...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 31, 2004 07:01 PM
Will Baude at Crescat Sententia introduces a post on Bolling v Sharpe, "a school segregation case that—like Brown—turns 50 today," with a wonderful quote from a Stoppard play, Professional Foul. The scene "takes place during a presentation at a conference...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 17, 2004 07:57 PM
According to a Telegraph story by Kim Willsher, "a French author has produced what he claims is the first book with no verbs."Perhaps inevitably, critics have commented unfavourably on the lack of action in Michel Thaler's work, The Train from...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 10, 2004 04:43 PM
Eurodicautom is the European Commission's "multilingual term bank."When it was first set up in 1973 the development team drew upon the know-how and lexicographic material of two other tools available to Commission translators: Dicautom, a phrasal automatic dictionary launched in...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 4, 2004 03:52 PM
"Stepgrandfather" doesn't appear to be an official word (at least it's not in any of my dictionaries), but it's what I am as of yesterday afternoon, and a very proud one too. You can see the little fellow here; it...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 2, 2004 11:30 AM
The Glossarist is "a compendium of glossaries on various subjects":Looking for the definition of a term in a particular subject can be difficult and time consuming. That's where the Glossarist can help you look. Just choose a subject or search...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 30, 2004 10:23 AM
The sword of reason is being wielded with a mighty wielding over at Language Log. First Bill Poser whacks Steven Pinker for including an alleged family tree entitled "The Ancestry of Modern English" in his book Words and Rules; in...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 19, 2004 02:43 PM
Rethabile Masilo, a Lesotho national living in Paris, has blogs On English and On Sesotho, the latter dedicated to the Southern Sotho language of Lesotho and South Africa; from a recent post I learned the etymology and pronunciation of the...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 17, 2004 01:00 PM
I've resumed reading Robert St. John's gripping war memoir From The Land of Silent People, and I've been noticing usages that take me aback and remind me the book is from a different era. Not the outdated slang or the...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 16, 2004 03:50 PM
The site Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics provides just that, going into great detail where necessary about the history of the words used for concepts:SUBTRACT. When Fibonacci (1201) wishes to say "I subtract," he uses...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 12, 2004 09:39 PM
The Corpus of Electronic Texts "brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet, for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide. It has a searchable online database consisting of contemporary and historical texts from many areas,...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 12, 2004 02:43 PM
As of May 1, there will be twenty official languages at the EU—and all of them will need to be translated into each other. Angus Roxburgh of BBC News explains the situation:Twenty languages gives a total of 190 possible combinations...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 11, 2004 10:47 AM
I've just discovered a new (since February) blog called freemorpheme: The mad ramblings of a Graduate Student in Linguistics. Jason is taking a course in Second Language Acquisition and keeping a journal ("We are to relate the course material with...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 10, 2004 02:12 PM
A strange word, or rather two strange words. The first is encountered only in the phrase court of cassation, referring to a French supreme court of appeal, and it's pretty straightforward: it's from Latin cassa¯re 'to bring to nought, annul'...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 5, 2004 10:18 PM
Geoff Nunberg has an interesting take on why, despite the proliferation of books explaining to the public at large how language works (I was happy to see that he name-checks my man Robert A. Hall), people persist in believing all...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 3, 2004 01:06 PM
According to this post at Desbladet (and if you can't trust Desbladet, what Angloscandiwegian prinsessor-obsessed scandal sheet can you trust?), Stanislaw Lem's novels have been translated into English pretty much exclusively via French versions. Furthermore, Faber & Faber likes it...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 31, 2004 11:01 AM
A nice summary of the history of the letter Q:During the Old English period, we didn't use Q in English: we wrote, for example, CWICU for 'quick' and CWEN for 'queen' (Old English, like Latin, preferred C for the /k/-sound...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 30, 2004 04:12 PM
I'm not surprised that a newspaper partly in Chinook Jargon was published in British Columbia a century ago, but I'm astonished it lasted for over thirty years; the University of Saskatchewan Library has acquired a run of it and is...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 29, 2004 08:25 PM
Gail Armstrong recounts a variety of interactions between authors and translators, ranging from open hostility to endless love. (The former, of course, makes for better reading.) She opens with this classic quote: "When told by a reader that his stories...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 27, 2004 02:23 PM
My reading life is one of disappointments these days. Having been badly let down by The Greek War of Independence, I'm now grinding my teeth over Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, which...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 24, 2004 01:03 PM
A Wordorigins thread asked about the origin of the phrase "Latin America," and both a rant by a Peruvian diplomat turned up by the indefatigable aldiboronti and a geography message-board post by Yaïves Ferland ("professional researcher" at the Land Law...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 21, 2004 12:39 AM
An idiotic list of alleged mispronunciations compiled by someone going by the alias "Dr. Language" has been making the rounds of the internet, and now that it's turned up on MetaFilter as well, I guess I'll bite the bullet and...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 20, 2004 10:31 PM
Ernest Miller (a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale), responding to the post Klingon is Copyrighted at BoingBoing, asks:However, can you really copyright a language? You can copyright a dictionary, certainly, but can you copyright grammar? I'm not...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 9, 2004 02:46 PM
When I was recently at the NYPL's Russia Engages the World exhibit, I noticed a book by Dimitrie Cantemir (Kantemir), Voivode of Moldavia (1673–1723), identified on the label (and in the catalog) as Kniga sistema, ili Sostoianie mukhammedanskiia religii [A...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 7, 2004 01:26 PM
Yes, of course I'm going to talk about Jack Hitt's article in Sunday's NY Times Magazine. But long-time readers who remember my frequent railing at the idiocies perpetrated by the Times may be surprised at my response: I basically liked...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 1, 2004 04:50 PM
So I'm reading the first chapter of From The Land of Silent People, a 1942 book by the American journalist Robert St John, a remarkable man who spent fifty years as a war correspondent while remaining a lifelong pacifist and...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 25, 2004 04:28 PM
An excerpt from "Threshing the Word: Sappho and a Particle Physics of Language," by Meredith Stricker (in the Spring 2003 issue of Ploughshares):Delving into the fibers and roots of the word fragment [Sappho’s emblem, her surviving] first unbinds the alliterative...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 17, 2004 02:02 PM
Anyone interested in food, Paris, or just plain good writing should acquire a copy of A.J. Liebling's Between Meals, a splendidly written reminiscence (first published in 1959) of his apprenticeship as a gourmand in the Paris of 1926-27, when he...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 15, 2004 10:42 AM
Valerie Bloom's poem "Language Barrier" begins:Jamaica language sweet yuh know bwoy, An yuh know mi nebba notice i', Till tarra day one foreign frien' Come spen some time wid mi. An dem im call mi attention to Some tings im...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 9, 2004 02:58 PM
My friend Nick Jainschigg has sent me a link to a Finnish site, coloria.net, that appears to contain investigations of all sorts of color-related phenomena. I say "appears" because my Finnish is, sadly, nil; of course I have dictionaries (though...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 5, 2004 03:25 PM
This week's "On Language" column by the jovial and often clueless William Safire focuses mainly on the word bogeyman, alias boogeyman. Safire claims there's a transition from the latter to the former in progress; I think the latter is a...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 3, 2004 04:36 PM
The NY Times tried to get a little too sophisticated in the headline of today's story by Elaine Sciolino about a government-sponsored attempt to promote doggie bags for unfinished wine in French restaurants. The headline reads "Garçon! The Check, Please,...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 26, 2004 12:36 PM
Maria Benet of alembic has a wonderful post describing her experiences growing up in communist Romania in a Hungarian-speaking family, where "we dreamt of travel the way Odysseus dreamt of going home. Though our borders were closed and we were...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 24, 2004 09:07 AM
Harry Mathews is the only American member of Oulipo; you can read about his life and work in a lengthy LRB review by Mark Ford. He wrote an essay called "Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese,"...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 22, 2004 06:58 PM
I feel I've been selfish in enjoying pf's amazingly vivid reports on his wanderings in Siberia, most recently from Aginsk to Mirny to Suntar to Yakutsk, all by myself, and I've decided to let you all in on the pleasure....
Posted in languagehat.com on January 21, 2004 04:49 PM
I have a friend who used to visit West Africa regularly and spoke a fluent version of French which served him excellently in Dakar and points east but got him looked at oddly by persons familiar only with the French...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 20, 2004 02:28 PM
Having received a complaint about the style of my last entry, I herewith provide various alternatives in the hope that one or more may be found suitable. Telegraphic: REPORT OF DEBATE WHETHER NECESSARY LEARN LANGUAGES AND WHETHER NONINDOEUROPEAN HARDER STOP...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 14, 2004 03:10 PM
The funky-literate blog Resplendant Reflections/Roving Revistas has returned from a season in the land of Hiatus freed of its dependency on Blogger and as full of pizzazz as ever—but now with added pictures! Check it out:Like a dog out looking...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 3, 2004 11:49 PM
Or, for my non-Russophone readers, Happy New Year! For those of you who have been wondering how the saga of the move has been developing, I am happy to say that we are beginning to see the house hidden behind...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 1, 2004 12:00 AM
There's a nice story by Patricia Leigh Brown in today's NY Times about Michael Cox, a Santa who talks to kids in their own languages:This evening, amid frilly tulle snow and Muzak carols, Santa alighted at the Hilltop Mall with...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 21, 2003 06:10 PM
A new blog that focuses on the history of French-speaking (en français, bien entendu). So far, very promising, with an entry (with a nice map) on Nouvelle-France in the 18th century preceded by a Le Figaro article on the Cajuns...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 19, 2003 03:04 PM
OK, all you prescriptivists, here's something for you to obsess about: the word daguerreotype should have an acute accent on the second e and be pronounced "dagairraioteep"; don't take my word for it, take Edgar Allan Poe's:This word is properly...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 17, 2003 04:55 PM
T. Carter, in a comment to an earlier post, has pointed me to Languagegeek, a site "dedicated to the promotion of Native North American languages, especially in providing a means by which these languages can be used on the internet."I...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 17, 2003 02:37 PM
The EmLit Project (European Minority Literatures in Translation) is a book (online as a series of pdf and mp3 files) of original European writings in Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Sinhala, Picard, Walloon, Lingala, Sorbian, Greek, Turkish, Sicilian, Albanian,...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 10, 2003 03:59 PM
Nothing racy here; that's the name of a new translation blog owned and operated by Céline Graciet:I am French (born in Bayonne, in the South-West) and live in Brighton, in the UK... Living and working in the UK for nine...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 8, 2003 05:10 PM
The University of Virginia Library has put online a page of links to Ovid's Metamorphoses:The first link directs users to a U.Va.-hosted version of the Latin text (apparently from Ehwald's edition, ca. 1904), while the second points users to five...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 30, 2003 06:20 PM
The trilingual blog Buscaraons (entries in English, French, and Catalan—separately, not as translations of each other) has a series of entries (in English) on onomatopoeia in Catalan (scroll down to 24.11.03 Onomatopedic sounds in Catalan, then up to 25.11.03 To...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 30, 2003 09:24 AM
I was looking at the book Caviar by the delightfully named Inga Saffron when I was stopped cold by an excursus on the etymology of the word caviar. She found the OED's etymology boring and confusing:Of uncertain origin, found in...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 29, 2003 12:58 PM
Hugh Kenner has died at 80. I'm not fond of literary criticism in general, but he was a master of the art, and his book The Pound Era should be read by anyone interested in American modernism. The NY Times...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 25, 2003 10:28 AM
The Breton poet Anjela Duval has a nifty trilingual site dedicated to her, including over 500 poems in Breton and almost a hundred translated into English as well as articles in English, French, and Breton. Via cannylinguist, a brand-new linguablog:...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 20, 2003 08:38 PM
John O’Brien has an essay in Context 14 asking the question "Why are there so few literary translations published each year in the United States,and what can be done about this cultural travesty?" His answer (and as always I welcome...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 18, 2003 03:33 PM
wood s lot features a couple of interesting multilingual journals: Tambou/Tambour, Revue trilingue haïtienne d’études politiques et littéraires / Revi ayisyen an twa lang sou keksyon politik e literè / Trilingual Haitian Journal of political and literary studies. Transference, an...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 14, 2003 11:13 AM
Peter Forster and Alfred Toth, two geneticists who know nothing about linguistics, have written a paper, "Toward a phylogenetic chronology of ancient Gaulish, Celtic, and Indo-European," that purports to redraw the family tree of Indo-European, regroup the Celtic languages, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 9, 2003 12:42 PM
Emeth at Canticlysm has a marvelous description [2005: now at her new blog] of how she learned Japanese in an unbalanced but thoroughly enjoyable way:When I was twelve, my mother bought me a mystery novel, Kiganjo, about a French gentleman...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 6, 2003 06:54 PM
From an interview with Vendela Vida, author of a first novel called And Now You Can Go:I do like the idea of there not being any design on the book jacket and just reading every book in the same font.Via...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 6, 2003 03:04 PM
You might think that ie and eg, being abbreviations for the Latin phrases id est and exempli gratia respectively, would be acceptable in French, which is simply Very Late Latin. You would be wrong. The French style site Points de...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 4, 2003 12:02 PM
The latest NY Times Sunday Magazine has a lively article by Jonathan Reynolds about a Scottish food historian named Alan Davidson, author of the Oxford Companion to Food. The story of how he became a food expert is intriguing (his...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 3, 2003 09:37 PM
According to a NY Times story by Norimitsu Onishi, the age-old patterns of hierarchy in Japanese society and language are beginning to weaken:Many Japanese companies, traditionally divided rigidly by age and seniority, have dropped the use of titles to create...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 30, 2003 12:09 PM
In a recent NYRB review by P.N. Furbank of the Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne occurs the following sentence: "Her edition forms a physically very pretty book, with a charming and inventive use of civilité type." Of course I...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 28, 2003 03:48 PM
A paper (pdf; cached version here) by Roger Billerey analyzes some of the difficulties involved in trying to render Wodehouse's stylistic idiosyncrasies into French. Skip the first couple of pages if, like me (and like Gail Armstrong, from whom I...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 28, 2003 12:19 PM
C'est une langue belle... is a new blog dedicated to the distinctive features of québécois. If you read French, it's well worth your while. (Thanks for the tip, saeedik!) And while we're on the subject of blogs: Laputan Logic has...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 24, 2003 03:21 PM
I am happy to report that Vladimir Vladimirovich agreed with me on the transcendent merits of Exercices de style:Queneau's Exercices de style is a thrilling masterpiece and, in fact, one of the greatest stories in French literature. I am also...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 21, 2003 04:42 PM
According to a National Post story by Paul Brent:General Motor's plans to rechristen the Canadian-built Buick Regal passenger car as the Buick LaCrosse have hit a snag: In Québécois youth culture, the word is slang for masturbation, among other things....
Posted in languagehat.com on October 17, 2003 04:28 PM
The knowledgeable commentator who goes by the sobriquet Baloney has linked to an excellent essay On Translation by James Atlas, originally published in 1973 in the first issue of Poetry Nation (the entire run of which is online, along with...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 16, 2003 03:01 PM
The NY Times Sunday Book Review includes a William F. Buckley review of Simon Winchester's new book about the OED, The Meaning of Everything. It's worth reading both for the tidbits (Cambridge turned the dictionary down—"the largest wrong decision in...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 13, 2003 03:24 PM
The Discouraging Word, sunk deep in the perusal of Thomas Rymer (known today mainly for his dismissal of Othello as a "bloody farce"), has posted an entry about grammaticaster, a word used by Rymer to dismiss French purveyors of "eternal...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 25, 2003 12:49 PM
I'm reading Frances Yates's book The Art of Memory, in which she investigates the history of the classical art of memorization by imagining images in a building; she came to it by way of her earlier studies of Giordano Bruno,...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 18, 2003 09:59 AM
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 13, 2003 09:15 PM
Scott Martens discusses (scroll down to Friday, September 05, 2003, Stupid things people say about language) a news story that claims "Brand names have become so abundant that in France they account for two out of every five words an...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 7, 2003 03:31 PM
Ron Silliman has a post about the odd phenomenon of "homophonic translation"—rendering a poem into English not (primarily) by dictionary meaning but by phonetic similarity. As far as I know (and Silliman agrees), the first practitioner of the art was...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 5, 2003 10:08 AM
Nancy Gandhi has sent me a link to this map of Europe using local names, a brilliant idea; I wish it were a little larger so the smaller countries were more visible, and it would be nice if they used...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 4, 2003 01:58 PM
My friend C. writes:...it would be very satisfying to grow a collection of herbs just for their names, to wit: balm of Gilead (not used as a balm, and not native to Gilead); Texas mudbaby; pellitory-of-the-wall; brown radiant knapweed; gill-go-over-the-ground;...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 2, 2003 03:03 PM
An article by Nora Boustany in today's Washington Post tells the story of the remarkable man, Michael Chyet, who's compiled the first serious Kurdish-English dictionary:Michael L. Chyet, 46, has studied more than 30 languages, delving into the marvels of cultural...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 29, 2003 11:29 AM
Anthony's comment on the Whale Cloth Press thread led me back to the Dada Manifesto, written by Hugo Ball in 1916. I hadn't read it in years, and it struck me how fresh it still is, so I thought I'd...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 28, 2003 03:15 PM
Theresa Nielsen Hayden has a post about a blog called Copy editing, damnit that purports to be the source of all wisdom concerning style: "Listen to me, I know style and how to use it." The annoyingly smug tone of...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 27, 2003 04:11 PM
Via the newly returned Grande Rousse (was she in the same province of Hiatus as Renee, I wonder?), a wide-ranging but spotty site on French language resources. Checking their book section under Etymology, I found several items that did not...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 27, 2003 11:16 AM
Back in January I bought (and posted about) The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature; now I've found a companion volume, American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, also edited by Marc Shell (whose take on the...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 24, 2003 09:41 PM
Jim at UJG has an entry on the charming Renaissance genre of mixed-language poetry (vernacular words mixed into Latin verse) known as "macaronic" (after the Macaroneae by Tifi Odasi of Padua, c 1490). But the style, if not the name,...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 22, 2003 12:54 PM
That's how we should be pronouncing apostrophe, according to the OED: "It ought to be of three syllables in Eng. as in French, but has been ignorantly confused with the prec. word"—the prec. word being apostrophe 'A figure of speech,...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 21, 2003 09:13 PM
I'm reading Pushkin's Povesti pokoinogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin), and towards the end of the first story, Vystrel (The Shot), an aristocrat is recounting an episode from his past and says, "Pyat' let tomu...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 20, 2003 05:04 PM
There's a tempest in a verre d'eau going on in a corner of the Francophone sector of Blogovia over the issue of whether it is Franco-patriotic for a native speaker of French to blog in English; specifically, François Nonnenmacher of...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 11, 2003 06:33 PM
Des, who is "far too busy with prinsessor for such trivia," has tossed me a link to a Guardian story by Stephen Oppenheimer about, yes, the Origin of Language. I'm too enervated by the muggy weather even to do the...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 7, 2003 03:02 PM
Monty Python in French? Say no more, say no more! Of producer Rémy Renoux's staged version, Michael Palin says "Sometimes they hit the mark exactly, sometimes they miss the mark, and sometimes they miss it so completely that it is...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 5, 2003 11:24 AM
I just heard an Italian say (in a news clip) "Questo documento rappresenta un escalation..." (the last word pronounced as in English). I would have thought that if the word were to be borrowed, it would be Italianized as escalazione....
Posted in languagehat.com on July 31, 2003 06:16 PM
It seems to be slang week here at Languagehat; today, via the eternally prinsessor-smitten Des, the BBC's Le Français Cool. From the La bouffe/Nosh section:La barbaque: Bad meat. Old slang word, the origins of which are uncertain. It may come...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 31, 2003 03:29 PM
Via Desbladet, an extremely interesting LINGUIST List discussion of the popular idea that various phonological changes in languages (notably the Castilian ceceo /thetheo/ and the French uvular r) were the result of a royal speech impediment that spread throughout the...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 28, 2003 12:18 PM
Again via Avva, an online corpus of transcribed French conversations:The French corpus is currently comprised of 51 hours of spoken French recorded in Paris, Grenoble, Monpellier and Avignon. We are in the process of transcribing this data and so far...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 26, 2003 02:59 PM
I mean, sure there's a lot of Pushkin online, but I just discovered (via a comment in Avva) the mother lode: the entire 10-volume edition, with bad language supplied in angle brackets (it's never printed in Russian editions, thanks to...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 26, 2003 02:47 PM
Via Taccuino di traduzione, a multilingual online course for translators; here's the English version. From Translation studies - part one:...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 24, 2003 11:55 AM
Via Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufry comes this glossary of blogging terms in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Galician, and German; Jez solicits your suggestions for additions and improvements. On the French front, La grande rousse not only links to Lexicoblogue, she has her...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 17, 2003 03:12 PM
Avva has posted a complete transcription of Jonathan Ree's essay "Being foreign is different" (Times Literary Supplement, 6/9/96), one of the most interesting things I've read lately on translation. The text is without italics or accents, but it's generally easy...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 5, 2003 09:04 AM
Via Avva comes this Guardian piece by John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, who picks his favourite words with unusual origins. I myself particularly like #8:to curry favour is a common idiom which embraces two linguistic 'fossils' as well...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 3, 2003 12:46 PM
As it happens, yesterday was a day of, shall we say, personal chronological significance, and my lovely wife gave me several presents, mainly books. (As she put it, "You don't need more books, of course, but... you need more books.")...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 2, 2003 09:52 AM
I somehow missed wood s lot yesterday, and now I find that he consecrated the day in large measure to one of my favorite modernist poets, Blaise Cendrars (self-chosen name; he was born Frédéric-Louis Sauser). He wrote quite a bit,...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 28, 2003 10:31 PM
I had known that the complicated etymology of the word "ginger" took it back to the Indian subcontinent; it's from Middle English gingivere, borrowed (like Old English gingifer, which may itself be a source of the Middle English word) from...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 28, 2003 09:22 PM
A trilingual journal called Trans went in search of some triple romance... No, no, no, this isn't Limerickhat. Let's start over. Trans is an "Internet journal for cultural sciences" that's published simultaneously in German, English, and French. A lot of...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 17, 2003 04:42 PM
Sometimes I am (not to put too fine a point upon it) an idiot. I recently expressed wild enthusiasm for the online version of Platts without ever noticing that at the top of the Platts page was the rubric Digital...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 14, 2003 10:45 AM
A useful site that allows you to look up words in the (excellent) Collins bilingual dictionaries for Spanish, German, Italian, and French. Thanks to Songdog for the link!...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 11, 2003 10:53 PM
One of the many forgotten figures featured in Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs is Yehuda al-Harizi, whose Tahkemoni, a translation of al-Hariri's Maqamat (The Assemblies), became (according to Alcalay) "the first object of al-Harizi's often boundless pride," a pride fully...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 11, 2003 04:22 PM
Gather round, children; it's time once again to hurl insults at that bastion of smug insularity, the New York Times. In today's Metro section there's a touching story by Corey Kilgannon about a NYC doctor, Ian Zlotolow (a gold star,...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 31, 2003 06:58 PM
A wide-ranging 1996 interview in which Kai Kresse, editor of polylog, talks with Kwasi Wiredu, a Ghanaian philosopher, contains a section in which issues relevant to both the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the possibility of translation are discussed in terms of...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 27, 2003 11:57 AM
I'm slowly working my way through Ammiel Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs, and I've run across a couple of quotations that not only rhyme with each other but enter into a useful dialog with the recent controversy over translation, in...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 21, 2003 04:39 PM
That is a French anagram, and what I like to think of as a main purpose (it means 'high gleaning'), of Languagehat. Construct your own Gallic anagrams here (courtesy of La grande rousse)....
Posted in languagehat.com on May 20, 2003 01:28 PM
A war, or at least a brushfire, has broken out in a corner of Blogovia over the issue of translation. It was started by the naughty folks at the complete review, who vented some spleen about the whole idea of...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 19, 2003 04:11 PM
Des, over at Desbladet, takes time off from his princessor to deliver the following killing blow:Monsieur Soutet has published work on languages as diverse as Old French, medieval French, Renaissance French and contemporary French, and it certainly shows. He's responding...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 14, 2003 04:58 PM
That title works in both English and French, which is good, because this link (via La grande rousse) is about French—specifically, the character œ. (If you can't see it correctly, it's an o and e jammed together.) The title of...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 8, 2003 09:15 PM
I've just started what promises to be a slow and fascinating read, Ammiel Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. I have long been interested in the "Levant" as an archaic term (for the eastern Mediterranean lands) that still...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 7, 2003 05:05 PM
I usually resist these fads that sweep Blogovia at regular intervals, but I can't resist Rob's Amazing Poem Generator. Put in your URL, getcher poem. Here's mine; I may adopt "herewith a clue about these matters" as the official LH...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 5, 2003 11:15 AM
Today's Doonesbury is a brilliant example of language as politics. I found it at Pedantry, but his permalinks are bloggered, so you can either go there and look for the top entry on Sunday, May 04 or visit the Doonesbury...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 4, 2003 08:23 PM
Diane Ravitch's new book, The Language Police, describes the disaster that has overtaken education with the triumph of know-nothing pressure groups on both left and right. Some results, from the summary in today's New York Times review:...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 29, 2003 10:37 AM
Jonathon Delacour has an entry today featuring an extended quote (with a still) from one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema, the cafe scene from Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle. If the idea of...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 28, 2003 04:01 PM
La grande rousse emphasizes for the benefit of lazy pluralizers that there is no such word as "chevals"; in so doing, she links to an interesting brief entry at the Banque de dépannage linguistique of the Office québécois de la...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 26, 2003 12:01 PM
wood s lot celebrates the 45th anniversary of Ezra Pound's release from confinement ("A US Federal Court decides since Ezra Pound is incurably, permanently insane, he can no longer be held for treason & can be set free") by posting...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 18, 2003 08:39 PM
Everything you wanted to know about Chinook Jargon in one remarkable website. Via taz. A bit of history within:...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 13, 2003 08:17 PM
I don't even know how to start telling you about Carl Masthay and his obsessively compiled and self-published Kaskaskia Illinois-to-French Dictionary. Just go read the Riverfront Times article (by Matthew Everett); you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder how he finds...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 12, 2003 10:46 PM
Here's a little quiz. What language was spoken three centuries ago by the Jewish community of Istanbul? Of Bordeaux? Of Hamburg? (Hint: three different answers.) Answers (and much more) within.......
Posted in languagehat.com on April 10, 2003 04:57 PM
Colin Brayton has started a new collective blog to remedy the status quo, which is (as he says) that "The global blog village remains ghettoized and anglocentric."What I envision is a game of linguistic six degrees of separation in which...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 10, 2003 03:37 PM
I just saw Linda Winer interview Rosemary Harris, who knew Laurence Olivier and insisted that he pronounced his name in the traditional anglicized fashion ("oh-LIHV-ee-er," with the ending as in "heavier") and disliked the "oh-LIHV-ee-ay" pronunciation that has become universal...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 4, 2003 09:19 PM
In the Strand today I saw a book by Carol Myers-Scotton called Contact Linguistics. The book is written in a rebarbative theoretical jargon that (for instance) replaces "clause" with CP, which stands for some gobbledygook phrase that thankfully eludes my...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 25, 2003 04:23 PM
Translating Astérix, with pictures (and mouseovers). Via Open Brackets. Update. The link does not work as of April 4, 2005, but the main website carries the following message: "The site is currently under reconstruction and will be relaunched with a...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 20, 2003 02:20 PM
This page from the FAQ of a site devoted to the movie Blade Runner has a detailed analysis of the multilingual "Cityspeak" ("a mixture of words and expressions from Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Hungarian and Japanese") used in the movie....
Posted in languagehat.com on March 15, 2003 01:31 PM
A "legally certified if somewhat lapsed lexicologist" investigates the history of the phrase and the foodstuff. With recipe....
Posted in languagehat.com on March 14, 2003 12:32 PM
Alice Kaplan has a fascinating article in the latest issue of Mots Pluriels about the problems of translating and being translated; she discusses in detail the horrors of the failed French translation of her "autobiographical essay" French Lessons, a couple...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 13, 2003 12:00 PM
Why not? I love Raymond Queneau (Exercices de style makes me happy every time I open it, or even think about it), and although I haven't actually read Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, I have it in both French...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 28, 2003 06:54 PM
This amazing site allows you to enter a French word on the left side and get both a set of translations into English and a set of French synonyms simultaneously; you can then click on any of the words and...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 28, 2003 11:46 AM
In reading the Karakasidou book (discussed here and here), I have noticed (with the sadness you might expect) that her linguistic understanding is, shall we say, less than sophisticated. She wants to be accurate and evenhanded, and in larger matters...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 25, 2003 02:26 PM
Some things just don't translate well. Regardless of how you feel about France's position in the current international crisis, you have to admit Groundskeeper Willie's line about "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is pretty funny. But not when dragged, kicking and screaming,...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 13, 2003 05:41 PM
That's Jabberwocky in Hungarian; here are several dozen translations of Lewis Carroll's immortal poem, including one into Jerriais, the French dialect of Jersey. (Via Where Threads Come Loose.)...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 10, 2003 12:36 PM
I'm used to seeing dubious or just plain wrong etymologies, both online and off-, and usually I just ignore them. This site, however, is so bad that I feel the need to give it a public thrashing. It purports to...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 23, 2003 10:50 AM
One of my favorite modern poets is Anthony Hecht, an unprolific formalist with a bleak outlook on life whose verse goes down like good strong black coffee. The NY Times has a piece on him today that explains something of...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 21, 2003 10:04 AM
English in Montreal is becoming a unique dialect, according to Charles Boberg in this article from the CBC site (via Pat).It's so special because it's the only major city in North America where English is a minority language," says Boberg....
Posted in languagehat.com on January 20, 2003 02:42 PM
In reading Isabel de Madariaga's Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (heavy going at times, but much more informative than the many lurid biographies of Catherine) I discovered to my delight that the two main parties in mid-eighteenth-century...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 19, 2003 07:03 PM
1. Alphabets. You won't believe the wonderful stuff on this site. A couple of examples: evolution from Phoenecian to Latin, and language families (useful for checking on French language names: of the Dravidian languages, "Telougou" is obvious, but "Tamoul" and...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 15, 2003 12:24 PM
I just saw (and immediately bought) a book that could have been published expressly for me... and, I suspect, for certain other frequenters of Languagehat, which is why I'm mentioning it here. NYU Press has published an amazing book called...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 14, 2003 04:39 PM
I imagine that those of my readers who are, like me, inveterate buyers of foreign-language dictionaries have run across the products of Hippocrene Books. First off, I would like to inform you that the good people at Hippocrene pronounce the...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 5, 2003 09:24 PM
From Saint-John Perse's Exil (Neiges IV):...voici que j'ai dessein d'errer parmi les plus vieilles couches du langage, parmi les plus hautes tranches phonétiques : jusqu'à des langues très lointaines, jusqu'à des langues très entières et très parcimonieuses, comme ces langues...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 4, 2003 10:08 AM
I was given a DVD of one of my favorite movies, Godard's Contempt, for Christmas, and I watched it this evening. Among the many striking features of the movie (such as the opening credits being given in voiceover, in Godard's...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 1, 2003 10:28 PM
Jacek Krankowski, a professional translator, has a very interesting discussion of problems involved in translating between languages with grammatical gender marking and those without. Some samples: The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 20, 2002 03:14 PM
Mark, in the comments to an earlier entry, brought up an interesting point: why did the "thou/thee" form disappear from English (except for a few dialects)? There is a fascinating discussion of this on LINGUIST List, from which I quote...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 4, 2002 11:04 AM
I have learned from Avva that Swedish, which used to have a formal/informal pronoun distinction Ni/du comparable to French vous/tu or German Sie/du, has virtually lost it, and the change occurred in a remarkably short time. The origins of the...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 3, 2002 10:54 AM
It seems to me a very simple and unexceptionable idea that each language has its own names for things and that there is nothing wrong with that. In English we say "mountain" for what the Chinese call "shan," and I...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 14, 2002 04:31 PM
There is an article in today's NY Times about verlan, the French backwards slang (verlan is verlan for l'envers 'the reverse'). Well and good; it's an interesting subject. But after a lead-in defining the term, the article goes on: Within...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 17, 2002 03:06 PM
All right, that's a bit misleading—no linguists were harmed in the making of this article—but no more so than the Times' headline, "How to Say Lemur and Quiddich in 11 Languages" (which led me to expect a quirky new dictionary)....
Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2002 01:45 PM
I was attacking DFW's long Harper's essay on usage in a comment on MeFi today, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got, and I finally couldn't resist letting him have it at length. Wallace's long, long...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 12, 2002 11:57 PM
In today's New York Times there is a profile (registration required) by Clifford Krauss of a Canadian writer named Neil Bissoondath. (I apologize to him and to all of Canada for the fact that I had been unaware of his...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 3, 2002 08:56 PM
