languagehat

2003-04-09T18:48:00.000-04:00

LANGUAGEHAT HAS MOVED!

Languagehat has made its long-promised peregrination to Movable Type (thanks, Songdog!); it is now to be found at http://www.languagehat.com/, complete with comments that work, snazzy graphics (thanks, taz!), and the possibility of RSS feeds. Please update your links and bookmarks accordingly, and make yourselves at home! The existing entries and archives will remain here (as well as being replicated at the new address), but will not be updated. Thank you for your patronage, and I hope you will continue to provide stimulating comments and e-mails whenever you feel talkative.

Over and out...

2003-04-09T16:36:00.000-04:00

ATTENTION PASSENGERS... We are experiencing delays due to system maintenance. By ~~the spring of 2005~~ tomorrow Languagehat should be up and running at its new site, with improved graphics and functioning comments, not to mention an RSS feed. In the meantime garble mumble grackle...

We appreciate your patience!

2003-04-06T11:18:00.000-04:00

IDENTIFONT. If you're a lover of typography, you'll want to bookmark this site; find a capital Q in the text whose type you want to identify, answer a question about it, and you're started on a journey that will end in satisfaction. (If it doesn't, let them know—they're always adding new fonts.) Thanks, Chris!

2003-04-05T10:32:00.000-05:00

A POEM FOR MOIRA. This is from Dark World, a 1974 book by one of my favorite American poets, Hayden Carruth (also editor of my favorite American anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us); Dark World has an epigraph from Rabbi Baruch of Mezbizh: "What a good and bright world this is if we do not lose our hearts to it, but what a dark world if we do!"

STEPPING BACKWARD

I waken and
   lean and look out
      to see the darkness
flee,
   sunken westward
      over curving earth,
departed
   like the long ocean
      running in tide
so fast and far
   it can never return
      or darken
this wide shore.

The last green star
   dies
      and the trees
lean in their green leaves
   westward
      as if in yearning
and then they straighten.

I rise
   from my window
      thinking now
the new words I must say
   as I step backward
      into day.

2003-04-04T21:19:00.000-05:00

OLIVIER. 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 ("It's not French!"), though he learned to accept it. (The same is true of the jazz drummer Paul Motian, who used to insist on pronouncing his Armenian name "MOW-tee-an" but finally gave in to the ubiquitous "MOW-shun.") Since I can't find any mention of this on the internet, and all my reference books give the French-style version, I thought I'd better post it here so there will be some record of the fact.

2003-04-04T16:29:00.000-05:00

SHE'S THE GREATEST. Some of you may have noticed Languagehat was looking distinctly green about the gills lately. I tried my usual amateur haruspication of the template and gave up in despair; Caterina stepped into the breach, waved her magic wand over it, and hey presto!—the poor little blog was good as new, wagging its tail and begging for new entries. All praise and honor go to Caterina the Great, who may be a Fake but is the real thing.

(Comments and archives seem to be missing at the moment, but that's just Blogger being Blogger, I presume. Which reminds me: this little episode has finally gotten me off my lazy butt; I have bought languagehat.com and will be moving to MT soonest. Prepare to update your links!)

2003-04-03T10:28:00.000-05:00

THE MYTH OF THE SMALL VOCABULARY. It is sometimes said that "primitive peoples" (or welfare mothers, in a particularly obnoxious use of the trope) have a pathetically small vocabulary—a thousand words, perhaps. I've just found an excellent essay by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg (the language maven of Fresh Air, among other things) debunking this nonsense. By the way, although Nunberg doesn't give a figure, the average adult vocabulary appears to be somewhere around 40,000-50,000 words (or, if you believe Steven Pinker, not one of my heroes, something closer to 60,000). (Thanks to Jonathan Mayhew for pointing me in this direction.)

Addendum. Check out the other essays at Nunberg's homepage; there are eminently sensible ones on American attempts to pronounce "Iraq" and "Qatar" (and foreign names in general) and on the use of "Gallic" and other symptoms of our conflicted Francophobia, inter alia.

2003-04-02T15:31:00.000-05:00

LINGUISTIC X-FILES. You thought Yiddish was descended from German? Wrong. It's from Basque. The truth is out there...

Note: Since it is no longer April 1, I'd better add, to clear things up for the overly literal, that the above should be read with eyebrows raised to the maximum level. The linked site is completely loony, despite its neat, professional appearance. As a matter of fact, I wondered if I myself was being taken in by an elaborate joke. I mean, "diaspora (exile, dispersion), .di-as.-.po-ora: adibide (advice) asagotu (to go far away) apokeria (filthy deed) oraintxe (right now): 'The advice is to go right now, far from the filthy deeds'"? "Diaspora" isn't even Yiddish! But naah, it's way too much trouble for a practical joke. It has to be in earnest.

Mea culpa. My deepest apologies. I failed to investigate the linked site further; I was satisfied with the first morsel of yummy lunacy. Moss was not so lazy, and he has directed my attention (see Comments) to the deep well from which the Yiddish stuff is drawn. It turns out that "Basque" is actually ancient Saharan, the base from which linguists invented all other languages. Yes, linguists. Why wasn't I in on this? It would have been so much more fun than digging around in dusty nineteenth-century German journals. Anyway, here is the inspiring conclusion, and I thank Moss for bringing this treasure our way:

From my work in with the following languages it appears that all highly developed languages, without exception, were invented by linguists; some languages turned out more elegant and useful than others. If this is indeed the case, then we should be entitled to start facing out some of the unnecessary and dying ones, such as Celtic, Friesian, Wallonian, Flemish, Catalan etc. Danish and Norwegian are almost the same so why not combine them, as the Basques did with their seven languages, which are now together called Euskera Batua or Unified Basque. Ukrainian and Russian, Galician and Portugese, Finnish and Estonian, Polish and Kashubian, Czech and Slovak, Macedonian and Bulgarian etc. all can be combined with a bit of good will. Why treasure something as artificial and unauthentic as the many unnecessary and people-dividing Benedictine language creations we we are now stuck with?

The European nations are making tremendous strides to unify under one government, one monetary system, one army, no boundaries, and now it is time to simplify the church-caused language bewilderment and start working toward a Unified European language, which we could call Euro Batua, which could be English or Spanish, but not German. The coming of the third millennium B.C. could be celebrated by starting to work toward the Universal language, it is long overdue. It is a pity that this Universal language cannot again be the Saharan of our ancestors, because it is just too complicated and too difficult to learn, but the oldest highly developed language in all the world shall not be allowed to die. Let Latin and Greek and Sanskrit only be remembered in books, we can well do without them, but the Basque language must survive and be spoken by a vibrant population, if necessary through the creation of a United Nations Heritage Region called Euskadi. It would be a worthy "Year 2000" project for the U.N.

2003-04-02T14:29:00.000-05:00

MEDITERRANEAN. From a beautiful little book by Predrag Matvejevic (translated from the Croatian by Michael Henry Heim) featuring lots of centuries-old maps and drawings of cities and the kind of rambling but painstakingly precise commentary I love:

The name of a sea depends on its location and its links to the lands along its shores and to their peoples. Ancient peoples like the Egyptians and Sumerians called the Mediterranean the Upper Sea because of its position with respect to them. It had many names in the Bible: the great sea (yam ha-gadol, Joshua 1:4), the uttermost or utmost sea (yam ha-aharon, Deuteronomy 11:24, 34:2), the sea of the Philistines (yam pelishtim, Exodus 23:31). At times it was called simply The Sea, everyone assuming the sea in question was the Mediterranean....

Both Hecataeus and Herodotus call the Mediterranean the Great Sea, as do the Phoenecians, who appear to have been the first to navigate it. In The Peloponnesian War Thucydides calls it the Hellenic Sea (1:4) because it belongs to Greece. The Greeks called it, accordingly, "our sea," which nomenclature the Romans borrowed (mare nostrum) as did many after them. Plato is a bit more circumspect when he says, "the sea beside us" (par' hêmin thalassa, from Phaedo 113a). In a text known under the title "De mundo" and perhaps wrongly attributed to Aristotle we find the fateful designation of "inner sea" (hê esô thalassa, 3.8) as opposed to the outer sea or ocean: it is this designation that will later give rise, in Latin translation, to the term Mediterranean.

Philology will help us to trace our sea's history. The adjective mediterraneus was not a particularly refined word. Festus, a grammarian of the golden age, recommended that it be replaced by mediterreus, but recommendations of the sort are rarely heeded once a word has come into common use, and this was a time when Rome was on its way to becoming a major sea power. (By then the adjective meditullius—from tellus [earth] and possibly related to the Greek mesogaios [inland, in the heart of a country]—was archaic.) The word mediterraneus designated a landlocked space on the continent as opposed to maritimus. Cicero calls inland inhabitants "the most mediterranean of people" (homines maximi mediterranei, from In Verrem 2.5). Similarly, the noun mediterraneum designated the heart of the country (for example, and in the plural, mediterranea Galliae [the continental parts of Gaul]). The epithet mediterraneus came to be linked with the "inner sea" because the "inner sea" was itself landlocked.... But it was Isidorus Hispalensis, or Isidore of Seville, who turned the adjective into a proper noun: "The Great Sea [Mare Magnum] flows from the ocean in the west; it faces south and reaches north. It is called 'great' because other seas pale in comparison; it is called the Mediterranean because it washes against the surrounding land [mediam terram] all the way to the east, dividing Europe, Africa, and Asia" ("De Mediterraneo Mari," Origines 12.16).

Isn't that interesting? And the next time some Safiresque pedant criticizes current usage, ask him or her "So as a person of refined understanding, do you think the Mediterranean should properly be called the Mediterrean or the Meditullian Sea?" and watch the latter-day Festus flounder.

2003-04-02T12:52:00.000-05:00

DO CHIMPS SPEAK? Ask Cecil for the Straight Dope on the subject. I pretty much agree with his conclusion ("I've seen nothing to persuade me that animals can use language as we do, that is, as a primary tool with which to acquire and transmit knowledge"), but then I'm a linguist, so I would. (Via Linguistiblog.)

2003-04-01T18:02:00.000-05:00

PROPOSAL FOR NEW UNICODE SYMBOLS. My heart leaps up when I behold new typography being created. I especially like the Arabic/Persian samples. (Via Avva; pdf file.)

2003-04-01T14:03:00.000-05:00

THE FLONG OF SAN SERRIFFE. I have tried the bitter-sweet swarfega and celebrated the Sonorous Enigma, but I have not been able (despite much effort) to find any information about the language of the Flong. If anyone out there can help, it will be much appreciated.

2003-03-31T18:47:00.000-05:00

KLALLAM REVIVE LANGUAGE. The 950 members of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe of a reservation outside Port Angeles, Wash. (and nearby areas) have taken steps to stop the apparently inevitable decline of their language, according to this Washington Post article by Robert E. Pierre.

After a century of open hostility toward these languages, the federal government is helping to foot the bill. But the task is daunting: Of about 175 indigenous languages still spoken in the United States, about 20 are being passed on to another generation. The pressure to converse in English, the worldwide language of commerce, also isn't abating....

In this northwest corner of Washington, the Lummi have just one remaining speaker. The last fluent speaker of Makah died in August at age 100. As far as anyone can tell, there are only three or four remaining speakers of Klallam, which is one of the large family of Salish languages that were once prevalent in the upper Northwest and British Columbia.

Even in California, which has speakers or semi-speakers of about 50 indigenous languages, the future seems grim.

"The trouble is that there is not an indigenous language where children are learning, and all the fluent speakers are over 60," said Leanne Hinton, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who has written books and essays about California languages. "All of them are in their last stages of existence unless something is done. Documenting the language is absolutely vital because . . . even when trying to revitalize them, you're not able to produce speakers as fast as speakers are dying."

So linguist Timothy Montler (see his web page for links to information on Klallam and other languages) "has devoted much of the past decade to preserving the language of the Klallam," having been asked by the tribe to help in 1992. He has created an alphabet, a dictionary, other reference works, even computer games, and trained "cultural specialists" are going into the schools and helping the young people learn. I can't think of a better way for linguists to spend their time. (Thanks to Andrew Krug for the link.)

2003-03-31T15:17:00.000-05:00

IRISH CURSE ENGINE. We've had Iraqi ire; here's Irish ire. Choose your terms and it will give you an Irish curse, with pronunciation. Example:

English: May the hounds of hell destroy your underwear.
Irish: Go scriosa cúnna ifrinn do chuid fo-éadaigh.
Phonetic: guh SHKRIH-suh KOO-nuh IHF-rin duh khwihj FO-AY-dee.

Via Out Of Ambit.

2003-03-31T10:18:00.000-05:00

LEXICON OF IRAQI IRE. Through the kind offices of David Quidnunc I have discovered this list of words used by Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Said Al-Sahhaf at his morning press conferences. Some samples:

Isabat al-Awghad al-Dawliyeen: The Gang of International Villains
a reference to the American administration
Akrout (pl. akarit): loathsome, pimp
a reference to British Prime Minister Tony Blair
Ahmaq: stupid
usually a reference to President Bush
al-Tabe: The subordinate
a reference to PM Blair
al-Tabe al-Jadid: The New Subordinate
a reference to Spanish Prime Minister Aznar

The information was provided by the Middle East Media Research Center, who are to be commended for their diligence.

2003-03-30T17:08:00.000-05:00

ENGLISH IN JAPANESE. That's the title of a book by Akira Miura that I picked up on my last visit to the Strand. It contains a selection of the many English loanwords in Japanese, and it has that combination of scrupulous accuracy (in this case, even giving pitch contours, which I have replaced with an acute accent on the last high-pitched vowel) and wide-ranging, even eccentric, commentary that I find almost impossible to resist. Some sample entries:

baipuréeyaa (lit. byplayer)
A supporting actor or actress is called wither wakiyaku, a non-loan, or baipureeyaa, a pseudo-loan. Baipureeyaa is such a cleverly made pseudo-loan that most scholars don't seem to realize that there is no such word as *byplayer in English. Of all the dictionaries and other publications I consulted, Bunkacho (p. 69) was the only one that pointed this out. In fact, most loanword dictionaries list the nonexistent English *byplayer as the origin of baipureeyaa!

beniya-íta (< veneer + Japanese ita 'board')
Veneer was introduced into Japanese in the Taisho era (1912-26) and became beniya (Arakawa, p. 1207). Later, however, the non–loan word íta 'board' was added to form beniya-ita (lit. veneer board). *Veneer board would, of course, be redundant in English, but since beniya alone would have sounded a little too unfamiliar to most Japanese, it is quite understandable why ita was added to make the meaning clear. Concerning this point, Umegaki (1975b, p. 208) proposes an extremely interesting hypothesis. He suggests that beniya must have been misinterpreted by some Japanese as the name of a lumber dealer since, as everyone knows, the names of many Japanese stores, dealers, and manufacturers have the suffix -ya at the end, as in the case of Matsu-ya and Fuji-ya. According to Umegaki, people who thus analyzed the word as Beni plus -ya must haave added ita to indicate 'boards manufactured by Beni-ya'! Be that as it may, beniya-ita has since come to mean not only 'veneer' but also 'plywood.' In other words, although veneer and plywood mean two different things in English, beniya-ita covers the meanings of both in Japanese.

cháko (< chalk)
Chako, from English chalk, refers to a special kind of chalk used for marking in sewing. The regular kind of chalk used for writing on a blackboard is chóoku, also from chalk. The fact that chako does not reflect the spelling of chalk indicates that the word was learned through the ear.
Chalk is one of the limited number of English words that have yielded more than one corresponding loanword in Japanese. Other examples of this type are iron (which has become both aian 'an iron-headed golf club' and airon 'an iron for pressing clothes') and ruby (which has produced both rúbi 'small kana printed alongside Chinese characters' and rúbii 'a kind of jewel').

Some other interesting loans: fákku 'fuck' (he warns Japanese readers that the English word is "far more strident"), feminísuto (which means 'man who is indulgent with women,' giving his seat to them or buying presents for them, rather than 'feminist'), hóchikisu 'stapler' (from the name of its inventor, Hotchkiss), and múudii (which is from "moody" but is associated by Japanese with "mood music" and thus has the implication 'creating a pleasant, langorous mood,' which can cause problems when Japanese try using the word in English).

2003-03-30T11:01:00.000-05:00

ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES OF AUSTRALIA. A comprehensive collection of links. Via Plep.

2003-03-29T19:57:00.000-05:00

LOGOLEPT'S DELIGHT. Avva describes how he hit upon the word "uglyography" (an invention of Southey's) in the OED, looked for it online, and found exactly one Google hit: on a page of Forthright's Phrontistery. I thought I'd share this remarkable site with you; its primary feature is a "14000-word dictionary of obscure and rare words, the International House of Logorrhea," and anyone who enjoys the dustier corners of the English vocabulary will want to explore it.

2003-03-29T09:57:00.000-05:00

ROMANIZED RUSSIAN? Via Ilya Vinarsky comes this 1975 article (pdf format) by Eugene Garfield urging Russians to give up their ugly Cyrillic ("Cyrillic has nothing but capitals") for the flexible, international Roman alphabet. Before you join the lynch mob ("I have been accused of scientific and linguistic imperialism and chauvinism..."), let me remind you that none other than Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov thought the same thing! (Edmund Wilson, naturally, disagreed: "This alphabet, since five useless characters were got rid of at the time of the Revolution, is one of the only features of Russian that are really convenient and logical—far more practical than the English alphabet.")

2003-03-28T22:30:00.000-05:00

KARL KRAUS. A couple of quotes from one of my favorite cynics and masters of language ("I master only the language of others; mine does with me what it will"), Karl Kraus:

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print. (Wie wird die Welt regiert und in den Krieg geführt? Diplomaten belügen Journalisten und glauben es wenn sie`s lesen.)

War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off. (Krieg ist zuerst die Hoffnung, dass es einem besser gehen wird, hierauf die Erwartung, dass es dem anderen schlechter gehen wird, dann die Genugtuung, dass es dem anderen auch nicht besser geht, und schließlich die Überraschung, dass es beiden schlechter geht.)

2003-03-28T16:56:00.000-05:00

EDENIC LANGUAGE. The very first Languagehat post was about the language spoken by Adam and Eve, or rather theories thereof, so my eye was lured by a book by Maurice Olender called The Languages of Paradise on that very subject. I managed not to buy it (I'm trying to cut back, honest), but I found an article (pdf file) by Olender from a post on crank linguistics by Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who seems to know a lot about language, so you can find the story (or his version of it) there. If scholarly wackiness amuses you, you'll enjoy it.

2003-03-26T13:11:00.000-05:00

NEW LINGUABLOG. A big hello to Meredith, whose Linguistiblog looks very promising; she doesn't give an e-mail address, so I can't drop her a line, but I assume she'll see this eventually. Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!

2003-03-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

ELVIS IN SUMERIAN. I got excited when Juliet posted this link, but when I went there I discovered there was no Sumerian text, just an interview with Dr. Simo Parpola, the Assyriologist who did the translation; I guess you have to buy the CD if you want the goods. Still, it's worth posting if only for the remarkable picture of Doctor Ammondt (who did an earlier CD Rocking in Latin) as a Sumerian deity—as is the extensive page of Sumerian links where Juliet found the Elvis. Furthermore, it led me to this article by Parpola on the survival of Assyrians and their culture after the fall of the Assyrian Empire, which should fascinate anyone who, like me, is interested in ancient Mesopotamia:

Yet it is clear that no such thing as a wholesale massacre of all Assyrians ever happened. It is true that some of the great cities of Assyria were utterly destroyed and looted—archaeology confirms this—, some deportations were certainly carried out, and a good part of the Assyrian aristocracy was probably massacred by the conquerors. However, Assyria was a vast and densely populated country, and outside the few destroyed urban centers life went on as usual....

Distinctively Assyrians names are also found in later Aramaic and Greek texts from Assur, Hatra, Dura-Europus and Palmyra, and continue to be attested until the beginning of the Sasanian period. These names are recognizable from the Assyrian divine names invoked in them; but whereas earlier the other name elements were predominantly Akkadian, they now are exclusively Aramaic. This coupled with the Aramaic script and language of the texts shows that the Assyrians of these later times no longer spoke Akkadian as their mother [tongue]. In all other respects, however, they continued the traditions of the imperial period.

Contemporaries and later Greek historians did not make a big distinction between the Assyrian Empire and its successors: in their eyes, the "monarchy" or "universal hegemony" first held by the Assyrians had simply passed to or been usurped by other nations. For example, Ctesias of Cnidus writes: "It was under [Sardanapallos] that the empire (hegemonia) of the Assyrians fell to the Medes, after it had lasted more than thirteen hundred years."....

The Babylonian, Median and Persian empires should thus be seen (as they were seen in antiquity) as successive versions of the same multinational power structure, each resulting from an internal power struggle within this structure. In other words, the Empire was each time reborn under a new leadership, with political power shifting from one nation to another.

He concludes by saying that he takes seriously the assertion of Assyrian identity by Syrians in Greco-Roman times (like Iamblichus, whose name "is a Greek version of the Aramaic name Ia-milik, which is already attested in Assyrian imperial sources") and its continuation in "the oppressed and persecuted, Aramaic-speaking Christian Assyrians of today." This resonates with similar ideas in the controversial (and irresistibly snotty) Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (see description here). I don't know whether it will hold up under scholarly assault, but it makes you rethink history, and that's always a good thing.

2003-03-25T22:49:00.000-05:00

ARABIC FOR INVADERS. A few useful phrases if you happen to find yourself in a situation where they are called for:

HANDS UP -- IRFAA IDAK ("EAR-FAH EE-DAHK")
HALT -- QIFF ("KIF")
I AM AN AMERICAN SOLDIER -- ANA JUNDI AMRIKI ("AHNA JOOM-DEE AHM-REE-KEE")
LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS -- ILQI SLAAHAK ("ILL-KEE SLAH-HAHK")
STAY THERE -- QIFF HINAK ("KIF HEE-NAHK")
YOU ARE A PRISONER -- INTA SAJEEN ("IN-TAH SAH-JEAN")

(Courtesy of the amazingly multilingual Bob "zaelic" Cohen.)

2003-03-25T16:23:00.000-05:00

MIXED LANGUAGES. 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 memory, but it includes brief sections on three "mixed languages" that I had been unaware of and that sound fascinating.

The first is Michif, described in this online article as follows:

The Michif language is spoken by Metis, the descendants of European fur traders (often French Canadians) and Cree-speaking Amerindian women. It is spoken in scattered Metis communities in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada and in North Dakota and Montana in the United States.... It is spoken outside the French-speaking part of Canada and the Cree-speaking areas of North America.... Michif is a rather peculiar language. It is half Cree (an Amerindian language) and half French. It is a mixed language, drawing its nouns from a European language and its verbs [and grammatical structure—LH] from an Amerindian language.

The second is Medny Aleut (also called Copper Island Aleut), probably now extinct or close to it, which has Aleut lexical items embedded in Russian grammar; the third, and best known, is Mbugu (also called Ma'a), which has Cushitic vocabulary and Bantu grammar. More such languages are dealt with in this 1994 collection of papers.

These languages pose a problem for historical linguists, who tend to like neat "family trees" (as in this amazing page, which also has beautiful maps) showing languages splitting neatly into daughter languages in such a way that each language is traceable (in theory) back through a single lineage; fortunately, these mixtures are rare enough not to disturb the general picture too much, and they don't destroy the usefulness of the traditional model any more than the existence of people who cannot be clearly defined as "male" or "female" nullifies the concept of gender. (If you think it does, you may have wandered into this blog by mistake; I suggest you flee back here.)

2003-03-24T16:18:00.000-05:00

SAWAYAKA! A comprehensive listing of the phonetic renderings used in Japanese comics (manga) to represent not only sounds but various other... states of being, shall we say? For instance, 'sticky, gummy' (beto beto), 'tongue hanging out' (biron), 'a head being shaken violently in the negative' (buru). More recondite is bon 'sound of magical transformation or appearance, often seen with a puff of smoke'; I think my favorite is uttori 'enraptured by beauty.' (Via No-sword.)

2003-03-21T22:31:00.000-05:00

DOLLY PALARE. The Queen Bee called my attention to a language I had never heard of, called Polari. It's actually more of an argot, being standard English with replacements (mostly Italian, but also Romanes, Yiddish, and Cockney slang) for many words; it has passed from theatrical usage into the (English) gay community, and some words have entered more general speech (ponce, a pimp; savvy, to know, understand; scarper, to run away). Fortunately, I didn't have to go far to learn more about it, since the always interesting Desbladet recently did a post on the subject, linking to a detailed World Wide Words article, the scripts from the "Julian and Sandy" skits on Kenneth Horne's Round The Horne show from the '60s, and (this is truly remarkable) a Polari version of the King James Bible:

1 In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the nanti lucoddy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.
3 And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.
4 And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria divided the sparkle from the munge.
5 And Gloria screeched the sparkle Day, and the munge he screeched nochy. And the bijou nochy and the morning were the una day.

Amazing stuff. So thanks, qB, it's fantabulosa!

2003-03-20T14:20:00.000-05:00

HYAPADOS/ABSOLUTLIFABULOS. Translating Astérix, with pictures (and mouseovers). Via Open Brackets.

2003-03-20T11:36:00.000-05:00

CRUMBLY OLD BOOKS ONLINE. The library of Case Western Reserve University has put online "full-text, complete page images of books from the regular circulating collection that have become too fragile or brittle to allow normal circulation." The wood s lot entry on this wonderful find leads off with a link to A Concise Dictionary of Middle English by Mayhew and Skeat (1888), which is an excellent thing to have available. My eye was drawn to Street Names of Cleveland by Walter August Peters, with a copy of Spafford's "Original plan of the town and village of Cleveland, Ohio, October 1, 1796," and Syrian Home Life by "Rev. Henry Harris Jessup, D.D. of Beirut, Syria," published in 1874, with chapters on The House, The Dress, The Food, The Priests (headings "Ignorance.—Vice.—The Ordained Cameleer..."), The Druzes, The Nusairiyeh, The Christians, The Civil War (Lebanon had been through a particularly vicious religious war in 1860), etc. (The term "Syria" then encompassed what is now Lebanon.) But your taste may run to Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! (1886) or Umbrellas and Their History (c. 1871). There should be something here for everyone.

2003-03-20T11:01:00.000-05:00

ECLOGUES. Juliet's back. She promises poetry and art. We need them.

2003-03-19T23:11:00.000-05:00

TACITUS, AGRICOLA 30. Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere terrae, mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauper, ambitiosi, quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

2003-03-18T13:12:00.000-05:00

POLYGLOT PLANETS. The names of the planets in dozens of languages, including Maltese, Old Czech, and Uzbek (which gets the prize for Most Bizarre-Looking Planetary Names in a Modern Language: Quyosh, Utorid, Zuhra, Yer, Oy, Mirrikh, Mushtarij, Zuhal; Oy is the moon, in case you were wondering). Deep thanks to ~~Where Threads Come Loose~~ Incoming Signals!

2003-03-18T10:06:00.000-05:00

TSK, TSK. The NY Times has a very silly article today suggesting that the click languages of southern Africa "still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans." Let me establish right off the bat why this is silly. Languages change at a rate that, while not constant, is in a broad sense predictable; over the course of centuries sounds inexorably alter, so that without written records we can peer back only a few millennia by comparing modern languages and seeing what the common ancestor must have been like. Written records, of course, go back only five thousand years or so. Beyond that, all is conjecture; people who claim to reconstruct "Nostratic" and similar alleged ancestors of all languages are snake-oil salesmen. The very idea that we can find remnants of a language spoken 50,000 years ago (or "112,000 years, plus or minus 42,000 years," depending on who you listen to) is ludicrous.

So why are they saying otherwise? Well, click consonants sound funny to speakers of languages that don't have them, so they appear to demand explanation (unlike our "normal" consonants), and it happens that they're found almost exclusively in the languages of southern Africa (they also occur in Damin, an Australian language, but nobody speaks it anymore, so we can ignore it), and Africa is the earliest home of mankind (and of course frequently thought of as strange and primitive), so... it all fits together. The specific hook the article is based on is the discovery that the speakers of two of these languages are genetically divergent: "The Stanford team compared them with other extremely ancient groups like the Mbuti of Zaire and the Biaka pygmies of Central African Republic and found the divergence between the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi might be the oldest known split in the human family tree.... ("Ju|'hoansi" is pronounced like "ju-twansi" except that the "tw" is a click sound like the "tsk, tsk" of disapproval.)" Why then it follows as the night the day that the clicks are inherited from our earliest ancestors, if you ignore inconvenient facts like the inevitability of language change, the irrelevance of genetics to linguistics, and the propensity of language communities to borrow sounds from each other (the Bantu languages of the region, for instance, have borrowed clicks from the languages that were there when they arrived). In the whole article, only one sensible person is quoted, well after the point when most readers will have turned the page:

Dr. Bonnie Sands [sic; her name is spelled Bonny], a linguist at Northern Arizona University, said click sounds were not particularly hard to make. All children can make them. Dr. Sands saw no reason why clicks could not have been invented independently many times and, perhaps, lost in all areas of the world except Africa.

"There is nothing to be gained by assuming that clicks must have been invented only once," she said, "or in presuming that certain types of phonological systems are more primordial than others."

I don't want to suggest that the localized occurrence of clicks isn't an interesting question. Olle Engstrand of Stockholm University suggests that "the reason for the areal skewness of clicks lies in the African phonetic-typological environment rather than in production or perception constraints"; in other words, the languages of the region happened to develop phonetic structures that made the production of clicks likely. I have no idea whether this is correct, but it's a scientific argument. Genetic mumbo-jumbo is not.
[Thanks for calling my attention to this article go to a Bonnie who does spell her name that way.]

2003-03-17T16:35:00.000-05:00

CITYSPEAK A L'ANGLAISE. Desbladet reminisces about a comedy sketch program called The Fast Show, on which one of the running gags was Channel Nine, presented "in a made-up language based mostly on the sound of Italian, with bits of Spanish" ("Republicca presente... totalla bien cantesta... C-h-a-n-e-l N-i-n-e!"). He quotes a very funny weather report and links to a complete script. Don't miss it.

2003-03-15T20:21:00.000-05:00

DRAVIDIAN ETYMOLOGY ONLINE. In the course of perusing the glorious Guide to World Language Dictionaries recently posted, I have discovered that the magisterial (and expensive—I was once tempted to spend $40 for it at a used-book store) Dravidian Etymological Dictionary of Burrow and Emeneau is online—for free! What a wonderful world!

2003-03-15T20:14:00.000-05:00

BARF DETERGENT. And other multilingual experiences of a traveler to Tashkent: Buyer Bedazzled, by Ronald Cluett. Via Kip, who links to it in the course of a long reminiscence of being an American kid in '70s Iran (in a town confusingly called Arak) that is well worth reading for its own sake.

2003-03-15T13:31:00.000-05:00

CITYSPEAK. 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. Sample:

Gaff: Monsieur, azonnal kövessen engem bitte. [French-Hungarian-German: "Sir, follow me immediately please!" (Thanks to eMU for translating the Hungarian part:- "azonnal" - means immediately; "kövessen" - means follow imperative; "engem" - means me. And of course "Monsieur" is French for Sir and "bitte" is German for please.)]

2003-03-14T23:02:00.000-05:00

FISH STORY. So this fish is about to become gefilte when suddenly it begins talking. In Hebrew. Read all about it! The scene is Zalmen Rosen's fish market in New Square, NY...

Mr. Nivelo, who is not Jewish, lifted a live carp out of a box of iced-down fish and was about to club it in the head with a rubber hammer.

But the fish began speaking in Hebrew, according to the two men. Mr. Nivelo does not understand Hebrew, but the shock of a fish speaking any language, he said, forced him against the wall and down to the slimy wooden packing crates that cover the floor.

He looked around to see if the voice had come from the slop sink, the other room or the shop's cat. Then he ran into the front of the store screaming, "The fish is talking!" and pulled Mr. Rosen away from the phone.

"I screamed, 'It's the devil! The devil is here!' " he recalled. "But Zalmen said to me, 'You crazy, you a meshugeneh.' "

But Mr. Rosen said that when he approached the fish he heard it uttering warnings and commands in Hebrew.

"It said 'Tzaruch shemirah' and 'Hasof bah,' " he said, "which essentially means that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is near."

The fish commanded Mr. Rosen to pray and to study the Torah and identified itself as the soul of a local Hasidic man who died last year, childless. The man often bought carp at the shop for the Sabbath meals of poorer village residents.

Mr. Rosen panicked and tried to kill the fish with a machete-size knife. But the fish bucked so wildly that Mr. Rosen wound up cutting his own thumb and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. The fish flopped off the counter and back into the carp box and was butchered by Mr. Nivelo and sold.

I know the end seems abrupt, but to me that gives it the ring of authenticity. The carp was not long among us, but it spoke its piece.

Addendum. Since this appears to be an amazingly popular story (I've already had a day's worth of hits this Sunday morning, mostly people seeking talking-carp information), and since (I am proud to say) I am the sole Google hit for "Hasof bah," I feel it incumbent upon me to add some linguistic explanation for those in quest of it. Unfortunately, my Hebrew is rusty, but ha-sof ba is extremely simple: 'the end (sof) is coming.' Shemirah is a noun meaning 'guard(ing), watch(ing), observance'; unfortunately tzaruch is beyond me. Can someone with more knowledge of Hebrew help out? Avva? Naomi?

Followup. Avva says (in the comments) that "tzarich shmira" would mean 'protection (guardianship, vigilance) is needed' in colloquial Modern Hebrew. The official Languagehat interpretation of the carp's oracular utterance, therefore, is "Vigilance is needed; the end is coming." Thanks, Avva! Furthermore, Jonathan Edelstein at The Head Heeb (March 16, 2003 entry; I can't make the permalink work) deals with the Hasidic aspect and makes the point that "the choice of a fish also seems strange given the association of fish with the Christian religion. In at least some countries, including many of the Central and Eastern European countries that formed the cradle of Hasidism, the Christian symbolism of fish is specifically associated with carp, which are traditionally served at Christmas dinner."

2003-03-14T12:32:00.000-05:00

FRENCH TOAST. A "legally certified if somewhat lapsed lexicologist" investigates the history of the phrase and the foodstuff. With recipe.

2003-03-13T15:29:00.000-05:00

TUR, KARGYSH MENEN TAMGALANGAN! The "Internationale" in dozens of languages, courtesy of Where Threads Come Loose. (The post title is in Kirghiz.)

2003-03-13T12:00:00.000-05:00

WUTHERING TRANSLATORS. 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 of French court cases involving translations of Wuthering Heights and of Kafka, and her own experience translating Roger Grenier, along the way describing the writer/translator relationships of Marguerite Yourcenar and her lover Grace Frick and of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and his drinking buddy John Marks. At the start she provides the following amazing Nabokov anecdote:

Vladimir Nabokov was famous for his vigilance concerning every word of his translations — and when this polyglot spotted an error, he could be unreasonable. His wife Véra, as vigilant as he, pored over the Swedish translations of his Pnin with the help of a dictionary and determined that entire passages were missing, and that the anti-communist slant of the original had been muted. She ordered the entire Swedish stock of both Pnin and Lolita destroyed. In July 1959, the Nabokovs' lawyer served as witness to an enormous book burning on the outskirts of Stockholm. It's a rare event in literary history when a writer burns his own books!

If you're interested in translation, it's well worth your time—as is the entire issue, which I have barely begun investigating; its theme is "translated lives," and it includes essays (in French and English) on all manner of cross-cultural experiences (read the editors' introduction). Many thanks to wood s lot for the link (and I urge everyone also to scroll down his page to yesterday's excellent collection of links on the great filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who died Sunday).

Addendum. Also from the invaluable wood s lot comes a lively conversation between Jonathon Mays and Marek (of Gonzo Engaged), on Jonathon's blog Stretching Thought, about translation (of Ferdydurke in particular) and how to deal with metaphors that don't make sense in the target language. I particularly liked the following bit (which makes a fortuitous tie-in with the recent duct/duck-tape discussion here at Languagehat):

There are things in other languages that can't be said in english... circumlocution becomes a duck tape of language.

Whenever I read some literature translated from Polish (or even original english books) I can't help but to see miles and miles of duck tape applied to hold the structure of language together. Without circumlocution the whole thing falls apart. (most business books are like visiting garbage dumps for used duck tapes strips. No wonder most people who read a business book have no fucking clue what it was about. Cause it's all duck tape and plastic sheeting)

2003-03-13T10:14:00.000-05:00

ALOHA, HTML EXPERTS! Songdog, newly returned from Hawai'i, is "having a hard time deciding what to do about representing some Hawaiian words in HTML." It seems the glottal stop is correctly represented by the 'okina (a reversed apostrophe) rather than the straight quote/foot mark I'm using here, and long vowels should have a macron (kahakô) over them rather than the rounded mark I just used over the ô, and Songdog finds "the use of alternate fonts and plug-ins" a royal pain. (You may think this stuff is trivial, but a bill has been introduced in the Hawaiian legislature to "require the use of the kahako and the 'okina diacritical marks when Hawaiian words are included in county and state documents." So it's not just proper diacritics, it's the law!) If anyone has any suggestions, drop by his comment section. Me, I'm just happy I've learned how to do italics and links.

Addendum. I have acquired a new version of my moniker, thanks to Songdog; in Hawaiian, I'm 'ôlelo pâpale!

2003-03-11T16:29:00.000-05:00

THE POLYGLOT'S DREAM BOOK. Thank god for you language-loving readers, because otherwise, who would appreciate the wild joy I felt today on finding Andrew Dalby's A Guide to World Language Dictionaries? This book has been out for five years now, and I never knew about it; why don't publishers notify me immediately when they publish things so central to my concerns? This lists the best dictionaries available for around 300 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, and like Dalby's equally wonderful Dictionary of Languages, it combines attention to detail with discursive descriptions in an irresistible way. The Introduction says:

For about half the world's known languages there is probably some kind of published word-list or dictionary. For many of the better-known languages there is a large number of dictionaries to choose from, some of them simply in competition with one another, some dealing with a language variety, some offering different approaches to the same material. The catalogue of a large research library will include many thousands of language dictionaries.

This book is therefore very selective. The aim is to pick out those dictionaries that offer something more than a simple list of words placed along brief equivalents ('glosses') in another language.... [M]ost of the dictionaries listed here are likely to retain some value whatever else is published in their field. Typically, they not only list the vocabulary but also document it. They cite sources of information, oral or printed, and often quote them at length to show how a word is or was used. They suggest word origins, or discuss them at length with references to earlier scholarly work. They identify the special registers in which a word is used; they date its first or last recorded occurrence, and they supply the evidence to back up the dating.

This makes them among the most compelling of reference books. In many of the dictionaries listed here, every single article reports the results of original research, and each successive letter of the alphabet has taken years of labour to complete. Some, including the Oxford English Dictionary, can fairly be described as the greatest single literary enterprises in their language.

All right, that last sentence may be an overstatement, but if you can't imagine thinking it in the rapture of poring through those closely printed Victorian pages, this book may not be for you. But if you have an unquenchable love for dictionaries and greedily collect them, I hope you can manage to at least find a copy in the library, because it will give you the same sort of vicarious thrill as travel guides that provide maps and lists of noteworthy sights in Samarkand, Isfahan, Timbuktu...

An example at random, from the SAMOYEDIC LANGUAGES section:

Nordische Reisen und Forschungen von M.A. Castrén. 1853-62. 12 vols.
[Northern travels and researches of M.A. Castrén.] The result of two epic journeys in Arctic Russia and Siberia in 1842-4 and 1845-9. 'We can follow his activities in his "Reiseberichte" and "Reiseerinnerungen", which not only make very interesting reading, but at the same time are very valuable from ethnographical, geographical, historical and linguistic points of view. From these works we can see what superhuman will power and what self-sacrificing, heroic devotion to learning went into the preparation of the Samoyed grammar and dictionary. A Samoyed from Kanin, who happened to be in Finland, was a great help to him in this work. In 1851 he won the newly constituted chair of the Finnish language at Helsinki University. At this point Castrén was again stricken by his long ailment in 1852, and ended his earthly career after a few weeks of suffering. He was unable to complete the major fruit of his journey of several years, the Samoyed grammar. Castrén's family sent the manuscripts he left behind to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which entrusted his good friend Anton Schiefner with their publication' (Péter Hajdú, The Samoyed peoples and languages, Bloomington: Indiana University, 1963, pp. 84-5, abridged). The collection includes:
Grammatik der samojedischen Sprachen [Grammar of the Samoyed languages], 1854, in which the phonology of Nganasan, Enets, Selkup and Kamassian were completed by Schiefner. Verb morphology and syntax were never completed.
Wörterverzeichnisse aus den samojedischen Sprachen [Word-lists from the Samoyed languages], 1855.

Oh, and I should add that for languages that don't use the standard Roman alphabet, an alphabet is provided (so the researcher will know proper alphabetical order), and all titles are given in the native alphabet as well as in transcription. Maybe you can resist; I couldn't.

2003-03-10T16:59:00.000-05:00

LANGUAGE TEACHING. There's some good discussion of the "communicative approach" going on at Renee's and Dorothea's. Check it out.

2003-03-09T12:57:00.000-05:00

MORE COINCIDENCE. Back in the green youth of Languagehat (the blog, not the blogmeister) I wrote a post on coincidence. That precedent established, I follow up with an account of my televisionary experiences of last night in the hope that they will astonish you as they did me. If not, I apologize and advise awaiting better posts.

We here at the Languagehattery, having surveyed the evening's offerings, decided to watch The River (He liu), a 1997 movie by the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. It didn't sound very cheerful, but the Time Out Film Guide review mentioned a scene at the Tanshui (Tamsui) River, near which I used to teach college, and concluded "Looks like a future classic," so we decided to give it a try. When we turned to the WE channel, however, they were showing a movie with Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson; it quickly developed that this was an entirely different 1984 movie also called The River. It didn't sound that interesting ("Farming family battles severe storms, a bank threatening to reposses their farm, and other hard times in a battle to save and hold on to their farm"), so we went with our second choice, a 1991 British movie called Under Suspicion that featured Liam Neeson and was described as "tautly entertaining, with cunning plot." We switched to Bravo and were nonplussed to find ourselves not in Brighton but in Puerto Rico, with no Liam Neeson in sight. It turned out that this was an entirely different 2000 movie, also called Under Suspicion, starring Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman! (In both cases, it was not the Times television listing that was at fault, because the Guide button on our remote control provided the same erroneous information.) I've never had that happen even once; to have it happen on two different channels at the same time on the same evening is surely extraordinary. (Oh, if you're curious, the Freeman/Hackman movie is fairly well done and has, needless to say, great acting, but the ending is so stupid and pointless it makes one want to throw the tv across the room.)

Incidentally, in trying to Google various items for this post, I kept getting the following response:
"Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in a minute or so."
I've never seen that before on Google. Coincidence? I think not.

2003-03-08T11:16:00.000-05:00

RUSSIANS IN LONDON. An interesting account by Zinovy Zinik (via Chris) of expatriate culture; I'll have to look for this magazine:

It is called The Bell, after Herzen's journal, but in appearance it is a cross between the New Yorker and one of those thick brochures that sit in the pocket of the seat in front of you on an aeroplane. It's a glossy magazine with a purpose—to represent the diverse ideas of the Russian intelligentsia all over the world, unhindered by the power struggle going on inside Russia. Interestingly, it has appeared at a time when censorship has practically been abandoned in Russia as a means of coercing public opinion, except in those cases where the reputation of those in power is concerned. These instances are eliminated either by physical intimidation or self-imposed silence. So the necessity of a Bell abroad is more or less unquestionable.

2003-03-07T10:28:00.000-05:00

NOT IN OUR GENES. I don't spend much time on Chomsky, Pinker, and the legions of evolutionary psychologists who claim language is innate ("nativists"), but Scott Martens over at Pedantry does, and today he provides a nice long assault on their line of thinking; I'll reproduce here the heart of the portion about language:

However, the adaptationist/nativist program has offered no insight into the neurobiology of language. It has not managed to identify genes or biochemical mechanisms that underlie language. It has not offered any useful knowledge to translators, lexicographers, language educators or people interested in natural language processing. All the progress made in those fields have come from people whose work either has no bearing on the central theses of language nativists or denies at least some nativist claims outright.

And, people outside the nativist community largely believe language is a lot like walking. Given the physiology of our senses, the structure of our mouths, throats and lungs, the properties of the human nervous system in general, and the structure of the environment in which children are immersed, language is simply the optimal solution to the problem of communication, and virtually every infant discovers it unless they are prevented from doing so by some serious physical condition. If this is the case, then there is nothing in the genome at all that specifies linguistic behaviour, or even has any sort of direct influence on it except in the trivial case where it interferes with the form of our bodies. It makes no sense to talk about innate linguistic knowledge or a language "instinct."

This programme has—over the last decade especially—shed a lot of light on language. Every meaningful advance in natural language processing since 1980 has come from some kind of interactionist or empirical theoretical base, not from attempts to uncover innate knowledge about language. All meaningful work in lexicography, translation studies and language education has been predicated on the idea that language is firmly grounded in time and place and that it is part of the social structure of the culture in which language is spoken. No linguistic universal has ever been found other than those trivially associated with the physical restrictions of bodies and limited working memory.

Bravo, sir—I doff my headgear in your general direction.

2003-03-06T23:14:00.000-05:00

SINTI. I have just discovered that there is a group of Gypsies called Sinti (or Sinto) that is apparently distinct from the Roma, but I am unable to find detailed information other than that they mostly hail from northern and western Europe (Germany, France, the Netherlands, &c.). It seems to be politically correct in Germany to speak of "Sinti and Roma" rather than "Zigeuner" (Gypsies). If anyone out there knows more (for example, whether there are linguistic differences), I would be much obliged if you'd pass it on. It's very hard on me when both the internet and my excessively laden bookshelves fail me.

Addendum. And that goes for the Jenisch (or Yenish or Yeniche) too.

Answer. The learned Bob Cohen has provided the following information in the comments section, which pretty much clears the matter up; thanks, Bob!

Speaking of "Roma and Sinti" is like saying "Jews and Sephardim". The Sinti dialect is definately Rromanes, but not intelligible to speakers of Kalderash or Balkan Rromanes. They mix in a lot of German influence and lack the heavily Romanian influences of Kalderash/Vlashiko.... As for Jenische, it isn't very much spoken any more—there is a Jenische web page for Swiss Jenische, they seem to have been a non-Rroma group who adapted and intermarried with Rroma.

2003-03-05T18:44:00.000-05:00

THE JASMINE. I'm reading Mark Mazower's thorough and well-written book Inside Hitler's Greece and was struck by his remark: "During the Second World War Greek poets would produce a body of work comparable in quality to the British war poetry of 1914-18. Two Nobel laureates, Seferis and Elytis, and other major poets... wrote some of their finest poems in those years." Much as I love modern Greek poetry, I've been neglecting it lately, and this sent me back to my Collected Poems of Seferis. I thought about reproducing his wartime poem "The Figure of Fate" (Oct. 1, 1941), but it's a bit long and depressing ("How did we fall, my friend, into the pit of fear./ It wasn't your fate, nor was it decreed for me,/ we never sold or bought this kind of merchandise;/ who is he who commands and murders behind our backs?"). So instead I offer this gem from his last prewar collection, uncharacteristically tiny, a pure burst of lyricism.

The Jasmin

Whether it's dusk
or dawn's first light
the jasmin stays
always white.

The translation (and the spelling) are by Keeley and Sherrard. Here's the original (in transcription; dh = voiced th, as in "then"):

Ite vradhyázi
ite féngi
méni lefkó
to yasemí.

2003-03-04T16:34:00.000-05:00

THE HORROR, THE HORROR. Well, that's my take on graduate school (and by extension academia as a profession), but Naomi is more sanguine (though she acknowledges the need to solve some pressing problems). If any of you have been through it and have thoughtful things to say about it, I suggest you drop by her place and join the discussion; if you hated it as much as I did and simply want to spew vitriol, please do so in my comments section, where it will be appreciated.

2003-03-02T18:01:00.000-05:00

WHY A DUCK? That's the title of William Safire's language column in today's Times Magazine, and it's the first one in a long time that not only eludes my carping but gladdens my heart. I can finally come clean and confess that not until I was an adult did I realize that the phrase was "duct tape" and not "duck tape." I was very embarrassed when I realized my mistake, but it turns out that the reason I had that impression was that it was "duck tape" when I was a child:

The original name of the cloth-backed, waterproof adhesive product was duck tape, developed for the United States Army by the Permacel division of Johnson & Johnson to keep moisture out of ammunition cases. The earliest civilian use I can find is in an advertisement by Gimbels department store in June 1942 (antedating the O.E.D. entry by three decades—nobody but nobody beats this column), which substitutes our product for the ''ladder tape'' that usually holds together Venetian blinds. For $2.99, Gimbels—now defunct—would provide blinds ''in cream with cream tape or in white with duck tape.''...

The first citation I can find for the alternative spelling is in 1970, when the Larry Plotnik Company of Chelsea, Mass., went bust and had to unload 14,000 rolls of what it advertised as duct tape. Three years later, The Times reported that to combat the infiltration of cold air, a contractor placed ''duct tape—a fiber tape used to seal the joints in heating ducts—over the openings.''

As the t spelling stuck, the Henkel Consumer Adhesives Company registered the name ''Duck brand duct tape,'' now the No. 1 brand in the United States. Even prom outfits are made from it.

The duckiness in the nomenclature persists because the essence of the product is its impermeability. A duck is a waterfowl, its feathers designed by nature to repel water. The simile using this quality was first cited by the novelist Charles Kingsley in 1871 to deride fallacious reasoning: ''All else is a 'paralogism' and runs off them like water off a duck's back.'' The expression means ''without apparent effect.'' And that, Chico, is why a duck.

So the logical-looking "duct tape" is actually a folk etymology, and my youthful wordhoard is vindicated. Thank you, Mr. Safire.

Addendum. I have just discovered this entry at The Vocabula Review:

duck tape Solecistic for duct tape. • In view of the possibility of a chemical, biological or nuclear dirty bomb attack, they were also told to have duck tape and plastic sheeting ready to seal doors and windows. USE duct tape. [Edinburgh Evening News] • [A couple more examples of this "misuse" are quoted—LH]

The term is duct tape, not duck tape though there is, from a company apparently trying to capitalize on people's ignorance, Duck (brand) tape. Duct tape has fewer uses than we have perhaps been led to believe; duck tape, fewer still. More ...

Now, that "More..." is a link, and when you click on it you discover that you have to log in as a paid subscriber to read the rest of the article. In other words, they charge money for this supercilious misinformation. Maybe they should get a subscription to the Times and read Safire.

2003-03-02T15:11:00.000-05:00

THE INTERPRETER. Suki Kim describes in today's NY Times her experiences working as an interpreter as part of her research for a novel. She describes the cases, mostly dull, for which she translated depositions in "gloomy offices known as reporting services," focusing on one in which she learned more than she wanted to know about a Korean storeowner from her block in the East Village. She concludes:

English, in some ways, struck me as a weapon, and not speaking it was the greatest economic handicap. And my role, as an interpreter, was not only to translate a witness's testimony but also to relieve this pain somehow.

With each case, I kept forgetting my mission as a novelist, my responsibility to my heroine, Suzy. After Sept. 11, I ran to the family assistance center at the armory to volunteer as an interpreter. It became increasingly difficult to pass by a Korean market or a nail salon and watch some customers berate the workers, or condescend to them as though their lack of English suggested lower intelligence. I was often tempted to interrupt and act on behalf of the non-English-speaker. I was driven by a professional instinct. But it also signaled my shortcomings as an interpreter. An interpreter, of course, should never take sides.

I stopped interpreting soon after. And I did finish the novel. But the city has changed for me. I keep noticing lines. Between a customer and a worker. Between a prosecutor and a witness. Between Manhattan and the other boroughs. Between one who speaks English, and one who doesn't.

2003-03-01T17:19:00.000-05:00

FOREST WITHOUT TREES. An article from World Wide Words discusses the history of the word "forest," which is more complicated than you might think:

The origin of the word forest is usually explained as coming from the late Latin phrase forestis silva, which was apparently applied to areas of land used by the Emperor Charlemagne for hunting. Here, silva meant "woodland" (as in "sylvan" and "silviculture") and forestis meant "outdoor, outside" (apparently related to the Latin fores, "door"), so that forestis silva meant something like "beyond the main or central area of administration; outside the common law". In time, the phrase became shortened to forest, but retained a sense of separateness and exclusion. It was this sense that the Normans brought with them when they invaded England in 1066. A forest for them and their successors was an area of unenclosed countryside, consisting of a highly variable mixture of woodland, heathland, scrub and agricultural land. Its purpose was to raise deer, which needed a variety of land—woodland to rest and hide in during the day, and more open land in which to feed at night....

By a process of transference, the meaning of the word forest gradually shifted, as the force of the old forest law declined after about 1500, from the legal area to the woodland within the forest, so giving us our modern sense of the word.

In between the two sections quoted above comes a discussion of forest law and what it entailed, and this should be read by anyone with a love for arcane and obsolete words: "The forests had an army of staff to look after them: seneschals, justiciars, regarders and verderers administered the forest laws.... The courts that heard offences were either courts of eyre (travelling courts to hear serious offences, from the Latin iterare, 'to travel', which also gives us words like 'iteration'), or of swainmote (a court held three times a year principally to control the pasturage of pigs in the forest...)" And we get puture, assarts, agisters, fewmets, and "the ceremonial gralloching or evisceration of the deer after the kill." Fun for one and all!

2003-03-01T10:32:00.000-05:00

CHINESE POETRY. I have discovered a truly marvelous site that "presents Chinese, pinyin and English texts of poems by some of the greatest Chinese poets." What I would have given for such a resource back when I was struggling with texts and translations and Mathews! They have dozens of poems by Du Fu (Tu Fu), as well as many poems by Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i), Du Mu, Han Yu, Li Bai (Li Po), Li Shangyin (one of my personal favorites), Li Yu, Meng Haoran, Su Shi, Tao Qian, Wang Wei, and others. I went to the Li Bai page and the first thing my eye lit on was "Changgan Memories," which is the poem Pound rendered as "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (one of the most beautiful poems in the English language). They have the poem in characters, in pinyin transcription ("Qie fa chu fu e/ Zhe hua man qian ju/ Lang qi zhu ma lai..."), in character-by-character literal translation ("My hair first cover forehead/ Break flower gate before play/ You ride bamboo horse come..."), and in a poetic translation:

When first my hair began to cover my forehead,
I picked and played with flowers before the gate.
You came riding on a bamboo horse...

And they have notes ("bamboo horse: a bamboo cane used as a toy horse"). Dayenu! But that's not all, folks; they continue:

This poem also exists in a famous translation by Ezra Pound. Analysis of this translation and comparisons of different versions can be found here. Pound's source material and other translations are here.
Other Chinese poems about Separation and Autumn.

I won't say it's impossible to imagine a better Chinese poetry site, because the human imagination is limitless, but this is a damn good one and deserves bookmarking by anyone with the slightest interest in the subject.

Addendum. Avva, having come across Chris's comment (quoting si shi si, shi shi shi...), found an entire page of Chinese and English tonguetwisters. And he provided me with a Russian moniker; after trying out the adjectives yazycheskii 'pagan' and yazykatyi 'sharp-tongued,' he settled on yazykovoy 'pertaining to language, linguistic,' and I became Yazykovaya Shlyapa. Size 7¼.

2003-02-28T18:54:00.000-05:00

OULIPO. 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 and English and I'm looking forward to tackling it. So let's add Oulipo to the word burst. If it's good enough for Caterina, it's good enough for me. Besides, isn't it fun to say? Oulipo!

Addendum. Kip has joined the Oulipo word-burst pump-primers and has linked to several more sites, including Matt Madden's wonderful comic-strip avatar of Exercices de style; from this template come all manner of good things.

2003-02-28T16:47:00.000-05:00

HUH. The Queen Bee points out that the ad above Languagehat features two language-related products and wonders if blogs are now being specifically targeted as a result of Google's purchase of Blogger. Could be. It obviously makes sense from an advertiser's point of view, and I guess it makes no never-mind to me. Spooky, though.

2003-02-28T11:46:00.000-05:00

BILINGUAL THESAURUS/DICTIONARY. 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 get a further set. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, when you enter an English word on the right. Thanks go to La grande rousse for this boon to translators.

2003-02-26T10:46:00.000-05:00

KIM ADDONIZIO. Just discovered a new poet, thanks to wood s lot, where the following moving meditation is featured:

The Numbers

How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans,
with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish
a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted
in not sleeping, how many in sleep—I don’t know
how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how many times
the world breaks apart, disintegrates to nothing and starts up again
in the course of an ordinary hour. I don’t know how God can bear
seeing everything at once: the falling bodies, the monuments and burnings,
the lovers pacing the floors of how many locked hearts. I want to close
my eyes and find a quiet field in fog, a few sheep moving toward a fence.
I want to count them, I want them to end. I don’t want to wonder
how many people are sitting in restaurants about to close down,
which of them will wander the sidewalks all night
while the pies revolve in the refrigerated dark. How many days
are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say
one true thing about it—how often have I tried, how often
failed and fallen into depression? The field is wet, each grassblade
gleaming with its own particularity, even here, so that I can’t help
asking again, the white sky filling with footprints, bricks,
with mutterings over rosaries, with hands that pass over flames
before covering the eyes. I’m tired, I want to rest now.
I want to kiss the body of my lover, the one mouth, the simple name
without a shadow. Let me go. How many prayers
are there tonight, how many of us must stay awake and listen?

–Kim Addonizio

Here's your source for all things Addonizio, including a page where you can hear her reading her poems; she even has a blog (well, there are no links, so I guess it's actually a journal, but who's counting?).

2003-02-25T14:26:00.000-05:00

VLACHS. 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 succeeds, but little things like her use of the pseudo-Greek* form comitadjidhes for the Slavic partisan groups known in English as comitadjis or komitadjis,** her use of Phanariotes ("the Phanariotes Greek elite under the Ottomans") for English Phanariote, and her italicizing of English words like "eparch" and "nomarch" as if they were foreign give her away. But what really incensed me was the following piece of idiocy (fortunately hidden away in a footnote at the back, where it won't mislead too many people): "Although the ethnic origins of the Vlahs [sic] has been widely disputed, some scholars claim their language is derived from Roman Latin roots." Some scholars! That's like saying some scholars claim English is a Germanic language. So let's talk about the Vlachs.

Nobody knows the origin of the Vlachs*** or how they got where they are today, but an indisputable fact is that they speak a language (known as Aromanian or Vlach) that is closely related to Romanian (and thus is a Romance language, "derived from Roman Latin roots"). The Vlachs (who call themselves Aromanians) are spread throughout the Balkans, and have traditionally practiced a form of nomadic pastoralism that has become increasingly difficult in this era of hard-and-fast borders and governmental insistence on everyone's having an address. Encouraged to settle and assimilate, they were having a hard time maintaining their culture and language, but there has been something of a Vlach revival in recent years, and the wide-ranging newsletter of the Society Farsarotul (the main Vlach organization in the U.S.; the name is from a northern Vlach clan, and the s is pronounced sh) is a good place to find out about it. I commend to your attention an article on a proposed writing system, one on Vlachs in Greece, and particularly "Instant Modernization" in America, a fascinating account by a scholar, Nicholas S. Balamaci, who grew up in the old culture and reports on its rapid disappearance:

A basic belief of Vlach culture is that one should live elsewhere in summer than in winter, and that the summer home should have three qualities: it should be away from civilization, it should be cool, and it should be a place where you can simply enjoy festivities and fun. It takes a lot of money to be able to do this in America, more than the first generation to arrive here could manage. But children were not tied down to jobs in the campu (lowland—a derogatory term), so I was sent every summer to live with my aunt in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a factory town with such a large Vlach community that I thought it was a Vlach village named "Oonsocka," as my aunt Sia used to call it....

We are losing the language, which is not surprising considering that there has not been even so much as a school here to preserve it (what is surprising is that it has lasted even this long). This has had the further ramification of putting us almost completely out of touch with the old country, because we no longer share a common language (and even those of the first American-born generation, who know the language, never had the benefit of learning how to write it). As far as church goes, where once the older generation half-understood the literary Romanian used in the service, very few of us now do, and we are making the transition to an English liturgy....

Will a work of literature someday be written about the Arumanian experience?

And for a less scholarly and more paranoid approach, here is an account of "Vlachs in Greece and beyond" (the page looks blank; you have to scroll way down).

*An actual transcription of the Greek would be komitatzidhes.

**From Turkish komitaji 'member of a committee.'

***The word "Vlach" is a Slavic term for 'Romance-speaking foreigner, Romanian' (hence "Wallachia") that was borrowed from a Germanic term for 'non-Germanic foreigners' (hence "Welsh," "Walloon," and Old Norse Valir 'Gauls, Frenchmen' > Danish vælsk 'Italian, French, southern'); this in turn is from a Celtic name represented by Latin Volcæ.

2003-02-24T11:10:00.000-05:00

ROBERT K. MERTON. Today's NY Times carries the obituary (by Michael T. Kaufman) of Robert K. Merton, "one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, whose coinage of terms like 'self-fulfilling prophecy' and 'role models' filtered from his academic pursuits into everyday language." I know nothing about sociology, so I'll take their word for his eminence in that field; what I know and love him for is his book On the Shoulders of Giants. The obit says:

Referred to by Mr. Merton as his "prodigal brainchild," it reveals the depth of his curiosity, the breadth of his prodigious research and the extraordinary patience that also characterize his academic writing. The effort began in 1942, when, in an essay called "A Note on Science and Democracy," Mr. Merton referred to a remark by Isaac Newton: "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He added a footnote pointing out that "Newton's aphorism is a standardized phrase which has found repeated expression from at least the 12th century."

But Mr. Merton did not stop there. Intermittently during the next 23 years he tracked the aphorism back in time, following blind alleys as well as fruitful avenues and finally finished the book in 1965, writing in a discursive style that the author attributed to his early reading and subsequent rereadings of Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy." Denis Donoghue, the critic and literary scholar, wrote of the book admiringly as "an eccentric and yet concentric work of art, a work sufficiently flexible to allow a digression every 10 pages or so." He admitted, "I wish I had written 'On the Shoulders of Giants.'"

This doesn't begin to do justice to the loony thoroughness and anfractuosity of the book, and anyone who enjoys such investigations should run out and read it posthaste.

2003-02-23T17:42:00.000-05:00

HMONG/MIAO. Allow me to introduce you to one of the most intractable problems of nomenclature I've run across.

You have probably seen references to the Hmong people; many of them fled Southeast Asia after working with the American military and finding themselves on the wrong side of the Communist takeover, and a sizable community has settled in the U.S. They have established themselves enough to have begun to find a voice; the NY Times yesterday published a long article by Felicia R. Lee about the birth of a literature out of an oral tradition, in particular the literary journal Paj Ntaub Voice, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an anthology, Bamboo Among the Oaks. A quote from the article:

As for the Hmong, they are gradually coming into their own in America. They have elected their first state senator, from Minnesota, and the St. Paul police have learned to speak Hmong. The anthology is being bought particularly by educators and those interested in Asian culture, said John van Vliet, a spokesman for the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Since October, about 3,200 of the 4,500 books in print have been sold, said Kevin Morrissey, a marketing manager for the press.

Note that in none of those links does the word "Miao" occur.

Now let us turn our attention to the minority languages of China. One of the most prominent (spoken by 5,000,000 people, behind only Zhuang, Uighur, and Yi) is Miao, part of the Miao-Yao group. A striking feature of Miao is that it has a large number of consonants (49 in one representative dialect) but few vowels, and syllables can end only in a vowel or in the consonant -ng (in some dialects, this becomes nasalization of the preceding vowel). The usual romanization system takes advantage of the fact that no syllable ends in a consonant: the tone (except for the mid tone) is indicated by a consonant letter written at the end of each syllable. Thus pob 'ball' has high tone, poj 'female' has high falling tone, and so on, with po 'spleen' representing the mid tone. This is a clever and economical system, with the disadvantage that foreigners not used to the conventions find it virtually impossible not to "hear" the final consonant they see written. Thus the name of the journal I cited above, Paj Ntaub, is pronounced something like "pa ndau" (with tones as in my examples). Note that in neither the above paragraph nor in the links does the word "Hmong" appear.

The attentive reader will already have anticipated the surprise ending: Miao and Hmong are one and the same. It took me some time to figure this out, and once I did I was quite annoyed. There are many languages that are known by more than one name (Gypsy/Romanes, Galla/Oromo, Araucanian/Mapuche, Votyak/Udmurt, etc., the latter of each pair being the "correct" name), but when these are referred to acknowledgment is usually made of the duality. Only in the case of Hmong (written Hmoob in the standard romanization) and Miao do the two terms lead such separate lives. The explanation is simple enough. The group that migrated from southern China to Laos and Vietnam within the last couple of centuries (many of whom have now emigrated to the U.S.) call themselves Hmong and quite naturally passed the term on, first to the soldiers they worked with and now to Americans at large; meanwhile, the much larger group that remained in China has always been known to the Chinese as Miao, and since there is no common self-designation (only a minority using "Hmong"), Miao has quite naturally been used by linguists and others who deal with the minorities of China. So what are we who want to refer to the whole population to do? Joakim Enwall has written a short article on the subject, and I am willing to accept his conclusion:

I propose that the term Hmong be used only for designating the Miao groups speaking the Hmong dialect in China and for the Miao outside China. This usage is by now well established in Western literature. However, I think that it is best to use Miao as a general term, especially as this is in accord with tradition and is also practical for making the situation clear to persons not specialising in Miaology. Many persons have already been confused by the present terminological state and see no connection between the Hmong and the Miao. There is perhaps not much that can be done about this now, but I hope that some people will understand the relation between the words Miao and Hmong better, if they are used in a more logical way.

2003-02-22T16:58:00.000-05:00

NOISE. The NY Times review of Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built (by James Shapiro, Feb. 2) is no longer online, but here's a nice quote from it; it follows a description of Spufford's learning to read by tackling The Hobbit as a six-year-old in bed with the mumps:

Spufford wonders in retrospect how he could have gotten the gist of Tolkien's novel while unfamiliar with so many of the words. He finds an explanation in the research of Claude Shannon, a mathematician who worked for Bell Telephone and discovered that even if a third of its words were garbled, the message gets through: "There is no difference between a phone call one-third obscured by static on the line, a manuscript one-third eaten by mice and a printed page one-third of whose words you don't know. Ignorance is just a kind of noise."

2003-02-22T09:51:00.000-05:00

POLYGLOT TYPEWRITING. A few years ago the Atlantic ran this piece by Ian Frazier on Martin Tytell, king of the typewriter repairmen (now retired, I'm afraid, if anybody reading this has a beloved machine that needs looking after, but here's a list of typewriter repair shops worldwide). It's wonderfully written, but I'm citing it here for the material on foreign languages, something of a specialty of Tytell's.

We sidled through right angles into a dark and cramped part of the shop where we had to proceed by flashlight. "In these cabinets reposes the largest collection of foreign type in the world—a hundred and forty-five languages, over two million separate pieces of type," he said, sweeping the beam over banks of minutely labeled metal drawers. Sixty years of converting typewriters to different alphabets has amassed this inventory; Mr. Tytell can list man's written languages better perhaps than any nontenured person in the world. "Over there are some languages of India—Hindi, Sindhi, Marathi, Punjabi, and Sanskrit—and next to that is Coptic, a church language of the Middle East; it's a beautiful-looking thing. Then there's Hausa, a language nobody here has ever heard of, spoken by twenty million people in northern Nigeria. Over there's Korean, and the Siamese I took off those Remingtons during the war, which I've relabeled Thai, and Aramaic script, and Hebrew, and Yiddish ..." He pointed out with the flashlight drawers of Malay and Armenian and Amharic, and boxes of special symbols for pharmacists and mathematicians. One drawer seemed to be mostly umlauts. He opened it and took out a small orange cardboard box and shone the light on the dozens of mint-bright rectangles of steel inside, each with its two tiny raised dots. "Nobody else in the world would even bother with this stuff," he said.

My favorite bit is this anecdote from his World War II years (his machines were a vital part of the war effort; armies "took typewriters with them into battle and typed with them in the field on little tripod stands"):

He spent much of his time assigned to the Army's Morale Services Division, at 165 Broadway, which dealt in information and propaganda. There he received his hardest job of the war—a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. Many of the languages he had never heard of before.... Morale Services found native speakers and scholars to help with the languages. Martin obtained the type and did the soldering and the keyboards. The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor's Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin's original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.

(Link courtesy of the ogre.)

2003-02-21T16:10:00.000-05:00

ELECTIVE ETHNICITY. I have resumed reading Anastasia Karakasidou's book Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990, which is described in this earlier post, and what is fascinating me at the moment is the concept of ethnicity not as an immutable aspect of identity (as we tend to think of it) but as a garment chosen to suit an occasion or a preferred lifestyle. Here is the quote that struck me (I remind the reader that she is writing about a village in Greek Macedonia, part of the Ottoman Empire until the Balkan War of 1912):

Nearly everyone in the Guvezna area spoke Turkish during the late Ottoman era. Yet by the mid-eighteenth-century Greek had become the language of the marketplace throughout the Balkans. As Stoianovich* puts it, "Balkan merchants, regardless of their ethnic origin, generally spoke Greek and assumed Greek names."

*Trajan Stoianovich, "The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant," The Journal of Economic History, vol. XX, No. 2, June 1960, p. 291

She later adds: "The bakal (Turkish: 'grocer'), on the other hand, was generally known as a Greek, regardless of what language he spoke." This reminded me of the situation in Central Asia before the Bolshevik occupation, where urban merchants of any ethnic background spoke Persian (the variety now known as "Tajik") in the course of their professional activities and were known as "Sarts"; the term disappeared once the inhabitants of the region were forced to choose a "nationality" for their Soviet identity cards. The same thing happened to the term "Macedonian" in the old sense once the Greeks and Bulgarians began violently competing for the territory and enforcing their new ideas of nationality once it had been divided up; as Karakasidou says, "The imposition of new national categories meand that Slavic-speakers were now either Greeks or Bulgarians. In Guvezna, being a 'Macedonian' was simply not an option." Thus the triumph of the nation state means the end of older, more complex identities (and the greater tolerance for difference that accompanied them).

A very different form of chosen ethnicity is exhibited by the Abayudaya (a clearer orthography would be abaYudaya, the aba- being a prefix meaning 'people') of Uganda, who in the years immediately following World War I chose to become Jews; despite their devoted adherence to ritual laws and courageous resistence to government pressure, the state of Israel has refused to recognize them; the New York Times ran a story on the situation this week.

Addendum. A striking illustration of the elective nature of ethnicity is given in this sentence from Karakasidou (quoting Duncan Perry's The Politics of Terror): "Cases of families divided are extant in which, because one brother was educated in a Bulgarian school, another in a Greek school, and a third in a Serbian school, each adopted a different nationality." Such divisions of families were not uncommon in Central Asia at the time of forced division into "Tajik," "Uzbek," and other Soviet-created nationalities, and presumably in similar situations elsewhere (e.g., Rwanda and Burundi). Note also the discussion of "Ted Yannas" in the Addendum to the earlier post linked at the start of this one.

2003-02-20T16:05:00.000-05:00

KUPAIANAHA! A list of Hawaiian "Idioms, Catch Phrases, Expletives and Interjections," both lively and (to all appearances) accurate. (Thanks, Songdog!)

Addendum. And here are a linguists' site for Hawaiian Creole ("pidgin") and a review of a pidgin translation of the New Testament (Da Jesus Book), courtesy of the same canine.

2003-02-20T14:33:00.000-05:00

EPISTEMOLOGY IN STRINE. From Desbladet, these thoughtful lyrics from Down Under:

Maybe I'm knotty veneer
Hagger nigh telephime reely reel?
Hadder Y. Noah Fimere?
... Wunker nawlwye stell; yegger nawlwye snow
If you're reelor yerony dreaming;
Yellopoff the topoff your nirra stow
A new wafer the sander the screaming.

–Afferbeck Lauder

Alistair Morrison coined the term "Strine" for the idiosyncratic form of English spoken in Australia; his 1965 book Let Stalk Strine, written under the pseudonym Afferbeck Lauder ("alphabetical order"), popularized the term. If anyone can't figure out the text of the ditty, say so in the comments and I'll translate.

2003-02-20T11:53:00.000-05:00

HET IEITHYDDOL. That's "Languagehat" in Welsh, courtesy of Pat. Just thought you'd want to know.

2003-02-19T20:20:00.000-05:00

LANGUAGE OF POWER, LANGUAGE OF RELIGION. In making my way through the Nov. 21 NYRB, I've reached the Brent D. Shaw review (only the first paragraph available without paying, alas) of Peter Brown's book Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, which collects three essays on the transition from the ancient idea of poverty (the poor to be helped are those like you, in your community) to the more inclusive Christian one, which, however, by and large omitted two large classes: people outside urban areas—as Brown says, historians "must remember that mass poverty in both ancient and modern preindustrial societies was (and still is) overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon"—and slaves.

What struck me most, however, and impelled me to write about it here, is the section discussing the "extended argument about the place the new images of the poor and poverty had in the mainstream ideologies of Late Antiquity."

Brown's claim is that the Mediterranean-wide discourse on the poor that emerged in this period was strongly related to the new needs of the new imperial state to assert its presence. A hugely powerful and distant emperor and imperial court were simultaneously more present and more invasive at a local level than was the Roman state of the Augustan Age. Its officials and administrators were everywhere, regulating and reporting down to minute levels. What was needed was a discourse in which these extremes of power could be linked. The pervasive tyranny of the new imperial court needed a human face; its subjects needed to believe in the efficacy of its local presence.

The new Christian language of poverty was the most widespread Mediterranean discourse of entitlement, affecting all persons down to the most indigent; and so it was the most suitable, the most powerful, and the most effective rhetoric in which the weak and the suppliant could converse with the more powerful. The presence of God in all human beings, but especially in the most humble of them, was the touchstone of the dialogue's authenticity. The ideological consequence of all of this, Brown argues, is that the intense debates over the nature of the Christian God that raged among bishops and their councils between the fourth and sixth centuries—the murderous in-fighting that created mortal enemies in Arian and Monophysite heretics (and others)—were not just arid theological disputes over the essence of the supreme deity. They were part of a reformation of the language in which this new society could speak about itself.

This gives me an insight into something I had always wondered about, the tremendous importance given by the wielders of worldly power to those church councils and the persecution of "heretics"; it also reminds me uncomfortably of the discourses promoted in this new age of "extremes of power."

2003-02-18T21:10:00.000-05:00

SOVIET ANNIVERSARIES. On this day in 1964 began the trial of Iosif Brodsky for parasitism (tuneyadstvo); famous exchanges with the judge include:

"Why haven't you been working?"
"I have been working. I've written poetry."
"That doesn't interest us."

and

"Who included you among the ranks of the poets?"
"Who included me among the ranks of the human race?"

Five years later, on this day in 1969, was the premiere of Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev at the Dom Kino in Moscow, one of the great moments of world cinema.

2003-02-18T20:44:00.000-05:00

MANY WORDS FOR MUD. I am watching the Nova special on Tibetan art in Mustang, and I had to share the following sentence with you: "There are many words for 'mud' in Lo Monthang, but none of them are as important as gyang." I don't think I've ever heard the English word "mud" mentioned so many times in an hour. Mustang is truly the Land of Mud. (The language, Lopa, is a Tibetan dialect; Ethnologue says: "The inhabitants of Lo are called 'Lopa'. Their capital is Manthang, called Mustang by outsiders.")

2003-02-17T23:00:00.000-05:00

COMUNISM SAVES! This strange page, part of a strange Australian site that advocates sustainability, limited liability, and "7 prinsipls to improve present spelling NOW," purports to recount the history of Russian spelling reform. After a quick dash through tsarist times they arrive at the Bolshevik revolution and get down to business: the 1919 Decree on Illiteracy, the postrevolutionary reform of orthography that "simplified spelling and eliminated surplus letters," and Stalin's literacy campaign of the '30s. Then things take a turn for the bizarre: "After 1945, spelling reform was predictably again on the agenda of reconstruction of a war-ravaged society. By the 1960s doubled letters without functions had been dropped. It was claimed that 90 tons of paper were saved annually by now spelling Kommunist as Komunist." Leaving aside the question of whether "predictably" is heavy irony or simple insanity, there was no such reform. The word kommunist is, was, and probably always will be spelled kommunist. This makes me a bit suspicious of whatever other information and nostrums they purvey (as it does Avva, who suggests that it may be a voice from an alternate universe, and from whom I swiped this link).

2003-02-14T08:28:00.000-05:00

PHONOLOGICAL PHUN. I just ran across this protein-filled piece on phonology written by Professor Edward Vajda (editor of Word) for his Linguistics 201 class at Western Washington University. It contains all sorts of gems (including, for those of you who took part in the discussion of "nucular" a few days ago, this: "Metathesis rule reorders the segments that are present: ask/aks; nuclear, 'nucular'... These are examples of a rule randomly applied"); I was particularly struck by this:

A more striking example of a morphological constraint on phonetic distribution is to be found in Cherokee. Cherokee has a sound [m] that contrasts with other sounds to create changes in meaning: ama 'salt'; ada 'baby bird'; ana 'strawberry'; ata 'young girl'. However, the sound [m] appears in only about 10 morphemes: ugama 'soup'; kamama 'butterfly'; gugama 'cucumber.' Although most of these words seem to be foreign borrowings, no new words using [m] seem to be entering the language. Nor do new words containing [m] seem be made in Cherokee on any regular basis. Thus, the sound [m], which definitely would be considered a phoneme in the phoneme theory of phonology, is highly restricted in its distribution, at least as far as concerns the present state of Cherokee. The restriction is random: the sound [m] only appears in a small collection of words with no specific meaning in common. Yet the restriction on the distribution of [m] is morphological rather than phonological: [m] is restricted to a specific and limited set of words.

An even more extreme example is to be found in Quileute, a Native American language from the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. The sound [g] appears in only one word in the entire language: hága'y 'frog.' Thus, this sound, which is in contrastive distribution with other phonemes, is entirely restricted in function to being able to contribute to the makeup of a single phoneme, the word for 'frog.' It is even possible to say that [g] in Quileute has a specific function: to contribute to the morpheme meaning 'frog.'

2003-02-13T17:41:00.000-05:00

TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE. 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, into French:

If such language is proving a headache for the diplomats, then spare a thought for the French translators, who have struggled for words to convey the full force of the venom. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys"—a phrase coined by Bart Simpson but made acceptable in official diplomatic channels around the globe by Jonah Goldberg, a columnist for the rightwing weekly National Review (according to Goldberg)—was finally rendered: "Primates capitulards et toujours en quête de fromages". And the New York Post's "axis of weasel" lost much of its venom when translated as a limp "axe de faux jetons" (literally, "axis of devious characters" [actually, I believe, 'axis of hypocrites'—LH]).

(From a Guardian article by Gary Younge and Jon Henley, February 11, 2003; at the end of the article appears the following delightful correction: "The description of the French as 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys' was not coined by Bart Simpson. It comes from the Simpsons character Groundskeeper Willie, the Scottish immigrant who takes care of custodial matters at the elementary school.")

Fair balance. I will hereby provide equal time in the arena of memorable insults; wood s lot directed me to a Ben Tripp article from Counterpunch that contains this remarkable sentence: "You see, if there's a clear loser in the pending savagery, it's George W. Bush and his administration of barking scrotum monsters." Barking scrotum monsters! Now, that deserves a niche right up there beside the primates capitulards.

Addendum. Jumping Jehoshaphat, in just a few days those damn monkeys have overtaken the Romanian gymnasts in my referrer logs and at the present rate will soon threaten the all-time champ, Charlie Ravioli! I guess the secret to getting hits is to mention as many catchphrases of the day as humanly possible. This may seem obvious to you, but my brain was formed during the ENIAC era, so it takes me a while to catch on. Excuse me while I run out to buy some popular periodicals to find out what people are talking about. I trust the Saturday Evening Post is still the cynosure of the common man...

2003-02-13T13:12:00.000-05:00

LANGUAGE IDENTIFIER. Only 47 languages, but they include Albanian, Basque, Breton, and Maltese, so it's fun; it may even be useful. (Via La Grande Rousse.)

2003-02-12T22:24:00.000-05:00

NAXI. The Naxi (or Nakhi; the x/kh is palatal, as in German Chemie or Russian khitryi) are a people of western Yunnan in China. A thousand years ago they were a power in the area, the dominant people of the bend of the Yangtze, but since the Mongol conquest of the fourteenth century they have been politically subject to China (though culturally under the influence of Tibet), and they have lost their former prosperity. But they have retained a rich literary tradition that is expressed in a unique pictographic script that is almost, but not quite, a real writing system; you can read about it here and here and see a beautifully reproduced specimen here. And they made an impact on Ezra Pound, who began Canto CIV:

Na Khi talk made out of wind noise,
And North Khi, not to be heard amid sounds of the forest
but to fit in with them unperceived by the game...

and quoted a Naxi love story in Canto CX ("The nine fates and the seven,/ and the black tree was born dumb...").

2003-02-12T11:13:00.000-05:00

LANGUAGES GALORE. Two links from Open Brackets: the numbers from 1 to 10 in 4,500 languages, and the Language Museum with samples of 2,000 languages.

2003-02-11T16:22:00.000-05:00

A DRAG PARADIDDLE AND A PATAFLAFLA. I knew the term "paradiddle" (though I had only a vague notion of what it was), but I had no idea there was such a variety of striking* terms for what drummers call "rudiments." I found this list at The Discouraging Word; unsatisfied with the mere terms, I wanted to know what they meant, and found this site, where you can see and hear musical examples.
*When people say "no pun intended," of course they mean "pun intended."

Addendum. The Discouraging Word welcomes letters (Feb. 7 entry); in their (encouraging) words, "You should also send us examples of especially good or bad language use or, as faithful reader languagehat did with evident relish last week, point out our errors or other infelicities." With relish, yes, but also respect and affection!

2003-02-10T12:36:00.000-05:00

SZAJKÓHUKKY. 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.)

2003-02-09T18:30:00.000-05:00

THELONIOUS AND TIFFANY. Two interesting name derivations:

I've loved the music of Thelonious Monk for many years, but I just discovered that his given name is a Latinized form of the Low German name Till (best known from Till Eulenspiegel), which in turn is a medieval nickname for Dietrich and other names beginning with Diet- (meaning 'people, race'; deutsch 'German' is from the same root); there was an 8th-century St. Tillo who evangelized in Belgium and France. According to Thomas Fitterling in his biography of Monk, "German missionaries could have brought the name to the Carolinas in the Bible Belt." Other derivatives of Dietrich are Terry (brought to England, as Thierri, by the Normans) and Derek (brought by Flemish settlers engaged in the cloth trade).

And while I was investigating that (in Hanks & Hodges' wonderful Dictionary of First Names), I discovered that Tiffany is "the usual medieval English form of Greek Theophania 'Epiphany'... This was once a relatively common name, given particularly to girls born on the feast of the Epiphany (6 January), and it gave rise to an English surname. As a given name, it fell into disuse until revived in the 20th century under the influence of the famous New York jewellers, Tiffany's, and the film, starring Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)."

2003-02-09T12:23:00.000-05:00

WHITMAN ON LANGUAGE AND HATS. From the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass:

...take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men...

The English language befriends the grand American expression—it is brawny enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who through all change of circumstance was never without the idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful language of resistance—it is the dialect of common sense.

2003-02-08T23:02:00.000-05:00

DEFINITION. WAR consisteth not in Battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of War, as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of War consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is Peace.
–Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan XIII

2003-02-07T17:06:00.000-05:00

SLOVENES IN AUSTRIA. Considering how few people outside the Balkans know anything about Slovenia (or enough to distinguish it from Slovakia), I doubt many people are aware of the problems faced by Slovenes living as minorities in neighboring countries. (I'm using "Slovene" to mean someone who speaks Slovenian or is otherwise identified as culturally Slovenian; a "Slovenian" is a citizen of Slovenia.) Renee has alerted me to a news item about four employees of Radio Dva, the Slovenian-language radio station in Carinthia (the southernmost state of Austria, bordering Slovenia), who have gone on a one-week hunger strike to protest the end of government financing for the station. This surprised me; I knew about the Slovene minority in Austria, but didn't realize they were facing discrimination serious enough to provoke a hunger strike. Here is an account of their grievances; for more information, there is an article by Brigitta Busch, "Slovenian in Carinthia—a sociolinguistic survey," in The Other Languages of Europe. And this report on Slovenes in Italy includes some comparative discussion:

[I]t is not the only Slovene minority outside the independent state of Slovenia, nor the worst served. In some ways the 50,000 Slovenes living in Austria are even more crushed, not to mention the almost entirely neglected community of Slovenes living just across the border from Slovenia in Hungary [and that in Croatia as well—LH].... [On the situation in Italy:] Italian supremacist graffiti are rife, and a crew-cut group with Nazi-like banners parades unhindered regularly in one of Trieste's city squares. It is not a good idea to speak Slovene until you are clear of the city centre.

2003-02-07T15:26:00.000-05:00

TEST YOUR VOCABULARY! From Teresa's Making Light comes this arcane and daedal test consisting of 200 pairs of words that must be marked as either (approximately) the same in meaning or (approximately) opposite. (They don't mark off for wrong answers, they just tell you the number you got right and list the ones you got wrong, so you can go back and review them; I urge you to take advantage of their "wild guess" column to mark the ones you're not sure of, so that you can find out which of your guesses were lucky ones.) It takes a while and is humbling—I have a damn good vocabulary, but I had to guess more often than I was at all comfortable with—but it will increase your word power (if you follow it up with the use of a good dictionary to remedy your blank spots). One caveat: I strongly disagree with item 159, based on the fact that I know perfectly well what each term means but got it wrong anyway; it's simply too ambiguous to be a useful item. (Also, if you have the same problem I did reading one of the words in 169, use View Source.) But never mind that; for anyone who loves vocabulary, it's a blast!

2003-02-06T21:33:00.000-05:00

WHEN TELEPHONE NUMBERS MEANT SOMETHING. Roger Angell, in this week's New Yorker, discusses the old-time telephone exchanges, with their evocative names:

Growing up, I began to apprehend that Manhattan telephone exchanges, which were geographically assigned, were a guide map and social register to my delightful city. West Side school friends of mine could be reached at the MOnument or CAthedral or RIverside exchange. My father worked at the WHitehall exchange, down near Wall Street, and my mother at the mid-West Forties' BRyant 9. BUtterfield 8 was just south of us on the Upper East Side, with TRafalgar, REgent, and RHinelander not far away. When my parents were divorced and my mother moved to East Eighth Street, she became a SPring 7, and neighbors and stores and movie theatres in that neighborhood had lively ALgonquin, CHelsea, and WAtkins handles. If you called up one of the Times Square movie theatres, to find the next showtime for "Cimarron" or "Rasputin and the Empress," the exchange was probably LOngacre.

(In explanation of that last name, I should point out that Longacre Square was the original name for Times Square, before the Times moved there.) There is a site that collects such exchange names; here is their New York list.

2003-02-06T16:49:00.000-05:00

MARKUP FOR FOREIGN WORDS. This stuff is way beyond me, but there's a two-step discussion going on over at Jonathon Delacour's the heart of things (with its lovely rendition of the 'heart' character) about the proper way to mark up transliterated/foreign words (his example is Japanese nejimakidori): lang attributes? span tags? cite? (this last apparently a no-no)... me, I just use itals, but if this sort of thing is your idea of a good time, for heaven's sake go on over there and help out the gang, so that by the time it all means something to me I'll know how to do it.

2003-02-05T18:31:00.000-05:00

THE WRITTEN WORD. "The visual and tactile aspects of the written word are explored in this exhibition. Although the subject is words, we have avoided textual content in favor of physical context. In presenting written texts that differ from the familiar, we intend to show that, far from being a uniform box of rows and columns, the written word has been recorded historically in a variety of shapes, sizes, and materials." Gorgeous, amazing stuff (via the always amazing Plep).

2003-02-05T15:23:00.000-05:00

NUCULAR. I would like to thank Don Blaheta, a linguistics grad student at Brown, for posting an explanation of why "people who persist in going on and on about how dumb the President is for being unable to say the word 'nuclear'" are wrong. As he says,

There are excellent linguistic reasons why people (and it's a whole lot more people than just the President) do this. The process is called metathesis, and it is one that happens in many languages. It tends to happen where the reversed syllable ends up making the word easier to pronounce—in the case of "nuclear", the standard pronunciation has a front vowel between two back vowels, but the metathesised version has all back vowels. Another commonly-cited example in English is the word "comfortable", where the T and R are switched, allowing the following schwa vowel to drop out entirely and reducing the word to three syllables. Crucially, this is a regular phonological process affecting speakers of many languages, and not something that is indicative of intelligence.

Well said, and the next time I get into a discussion of the matter I'll just point to your crystal-clear statement.

2003-02-05T13:38:00.000-05:00

ECRIVAINS. Via La grande rousse, excellent sites for Flaubert and Perec (the latter including a lexique perecquien; by the way, the name Perec is originally Polish/Jewish, and is the equivalent of the Anglicized Peretz).

2003-02-05T12:43:00.000-05:00

THE LYRIC IMPULSE. It's funny 'cause it's true:

All lyric poems are narcissistic. They are the earliest form of the personal ad. They've been saying for more than a thousand years, "I'm a sensitive, vulnerable, misunderstood, barely solvent, lovable little fellow who would like to meet a person of exquisite taste who is not averse to an occasional roll in the hay." –Charles Simic

(Via Giornale Nuovo, which I found through Caterina; it's written by misteraitch, who lives "in an apartment in an hotel in a town on the Baltic coast of southern Sweden" and posts all manner of good and beautiful things.)

2003-02-04T18:39:00.000-05:00

CUNNOS HABERE DUOS. Avva posts the first attested use of one of the less frequent but more amusing four-letter words; the entry is in Russian, but even those without the use of that remarkably obscenity-rich language will enjoy the Fletcher translation of Martial whose last line provides the historic reference—it is given both in transcription and in an image of the original book. (It should be noted that this word was, as the OED puts it, "Erroneously used... by Browning Pippa Passes iv. ii. 96 under the impression that it denoted some part of a nun's attire"; let this be a lesson to all of us to always look up words we don't understand.)

2003-02-04T16:43:00.000-05:00

ON TRANSLATING NAMES. Baldur asks a good question: what should a translator do about personal names that bear a meaning in the original language? I reached his entry via Dorothea, who says:

It’s a wicked translation problem. Translate the names by meaning, and you make the original sound like a bigoted nineteenth-century impression of Native Americans. Worse, you give the names’ meaning too much prominence in the reader’s mind; as Baldur says, these names are names first and meanings second....

The opposite danger, though, is considering meanings—well, meaningless. If you don’t translate the name, how do you get across its echoes?

One possibility is the name-pair, the name in the original language paired with a translation.... The downside is that this is slightly misleading; it’s easy for the reader to believe that the translation is part of the name in the original.... (In an electronic edition, I would be tempted to include the translated name as a pop-up note or in a lighter text color. The latter might be possible in print also; depends on the publisher.)...

If all else fails, there’s always the footnote. In this specific case, though, I myself would prefer an annotated name glossary; it’s a darned shame to have to hunt through the entire book for the first instance of a name just to find out what it means.

Obviously, each case is different and has to be addressed on its own merits, but I wonder if readers have general thoughts on the subject? For me, this is a case where the internet has obvious benefits: a scrollover note on the name's meaning would be unobtrusive in a way that can't be matched in print. (Personally, there are few things I love better than an annotated glossary, but I recognize that it's a love not shared by the majority.)

2003-02-03T08:33:00.000-05:00

MAKIT WI MACINTOSH. This pleasing page renders the phrase "Made with Macintosh" into various languages; I probably wouldn't link it just for that, but its creator, Carl Edlund Anderson, takes the trouble to explain the translations linguistically; sample: "This [Proto-Germanic "Tawidu mith Macintosh"] is a guess but there are very few native speakers around to complain! This expression is suitable if the word for the "made" object is feminine—as the proto-Germanic *síðó would be were it used to mean "page" (in the sense of "home page"). The verb *tawjan was used in a runic inscription from South Jutland c. AD 400 to describe the crafting of a pair of golden horns, so it seemed fair to use it to describe making web pages as well." I like your style, Carlaz!

2003-02-02T16:18:00.000-05:00

GREAT AND DEAR LEADERS. William Safire's column in today's NY Times Magazine has a useful discussion of the well-known bynames of the late Kim Il Song and his son and heir Kim Jong Il:

In 1994, Kim Il Sung (Great Kim) died and was succeeded by his son, whom Western writers continued to refer to, tongue-in-cheekily, as Dear Leader. But the son, Kim Jong Il (Dear Kim, in Kempton's simplifying formulation), soon changed his sobriquet to fit his new position.

He stopped having himself called Dear Leader (in Korean, ch'inaehanum chidoja) and assumed his father's informal title, Great Leader (widaehan, ''great,'' yongdoja, ''leader''). But that was confusing whenever the two men were spoken of in the same sentence. To which one—the late Great Kim or the former Dear Kim, now elevated to titular greatness—did the compound proper noun Great Leader refer?

Solution: subtly demote the dead Old Man. The deceased Kim Il Sung, formerly widaehan yongdoja, is now remembered in North Korea as widaehan suryong, ''major chieftain, big boss,'' important, but a linguistic cut below Great Leader. It is the son, whose leadership title is no longer encumbered with childlike endearment, who has taken his father's widaehan yongdoja, the top of the Communist Korean pecking order.

For more, I direct the reader to Andrei Lankov's article (originally published in Russian in 1995, thus now somewhat outdated) on North Korean official propaganda; this paragraph has further linguistic information:

When Kim Chong Il's ascent to supreme power had just begun, he was given a title which might at first seem a little strange—the "Centre of the Party" (Kor.: Tang chungang), although finally the title "Dear Ruler" (Kor. ch'in'ae'ha'nun chidoja) has prevailed. Even if the names of Kim Il Song or Kim Chong Il are not mentioned specifically, every North Korean knows what titles go with whom and would never mix the "Great Leader" (Kim Il Song) with the "Dear Ruler" (Kim Chong Il). Special words and even grammar forms have been established which may only be used in relation to these two personages. Their names along with any quotation from their writings are always printed in a special bold font. Starting from the primary school, North Koreans are taught how to make correct sentences in which the leader and his son are mentioned. According to this "court grammar", these two sacred names must not be put in the middle or, God forbid, at the end of a phrase, but always at the beginning.

Safire, by the way, goes on to provide further Korea-related details (on the origins of the word "Korea" and the descriptive "Land of the Morning Calm"; I was especially proud of him for sticking with "etymology unknown" with regard to gook—I know how he loves dubious etymologies). But it wouldn't be a Safire column without at least one mistake, and although this one is minor, it's interesting fodder for discussion. He refers to "the naming of Japan, or Nippon, from ni-pon, 'sun-rise,' which we recognize as 'the Land of the Rising Sun.'" The attempted clarity of the hyphenated ni-pon betrays an understandable, but false, assumption; in fact, the first part of the compound is not ni but nichi, which represents the Japanese reading of the Chinese character for 'day, sun'; the character was pronounced *nyit in Old Chinese, which was borrowed into Japanese as nichi and later (when the pronunciation in Chinese had changed) as jitsu (it is also read as hi as a native Japanese word, and the Chinese word itself is now pronounced r in Mandarin... but that's another story). It happens that when syllables ending in -chi are combined with a syllable beginning with a voiceless consonant, the -chi drops out and the consonant is doubled, hence {nichi + pon} = Nippon. It's all too complicated for a newspaper column... but that's what Languagehat is for.

2003-02-02T15:31:00.000-05:00

WHY SO DAMN MANY LANGUAGES? In a comment thread at Oh, For a Muse of Fire!, I ran across a paragraph that so delighted me I had to share it here, with the permission of its author (who is also the prize-winning author of a number of sf/fantasy novels), Jo Walton:

I can also remember—when I was too young for school—trying to read a book of sermons in Latin, and discovering that there were more languages in the world than just Welsh and English. I can remember thinking that surely, two would be enough for all sensible purposes?

2003-01-31T16:01:00.000-05:00

SIX MONTHS OF LANGUAGEHAT. It feels a little silly celebrating a semianniversary, but everybody knows blog years are like dog years. (However, a book cannot be blog-eared. But I digress.) I worked hard on my first post (wanting to avoid the "Testing... testing... hey, this thing works!" syndrome), and I've tried to keep up an interesting mix of material somehow related to language (or, on occasion, hats). I'd like to take this occasion to thank everyone who's sent e-mails or left comments—and may I remind you all that my comment boxes, unlike some others, do not require an e-mail address, so even the shyest of you can freely indulge in commentary, silliness (hi quonsar!), or a combination of the two (I'm thinking of the mysterious aa's contributions to my Bad Etymology thread)—and I'll direct specific thanks to Songdog for helping me get started and saving me repeatedly from template disaster, to Renee and Pat for early encouragement, to Avva for collegiality and postcards, to the Mermaid for kind words and many stolen links (how do you find all those great links?), to Moira for inspiring me to add poetry to the mix, and to all those who cannot be mentioned because the revelation of their names would upset the balance of the space-time continuum: you know who you are.

When I began, my readership could be counted on the fingers of both hands—and the fact that the second hand was needed was due entirely to Pat's and Merm's brilliant mutual-backscratching invention, Linguablogs. It rose steadily to an average of several dozen a day, then shot upward this month because of a combination of the excellent Pepys' Diary site, to which I quickly became addicted, and the Jan. 28 MSNBC recommendation ("One of the most exciting blogspotting finds I’ve made while judging Bloggies is the large and active community of linguabloggers..."). I hope to keep everyone entertained for at least another half-year, if only with the spectacle of language names more bizarre (hi aa!) than you ever thought existed (Guugu Yimidhirr, anyone?). Y'all come back now, y'hear?

2003-01-30T22:19:00.000-05:00

HOW NOT TO SUPPORT A LANGUAGE. An article (via MetaFilter) on the Irish government's plans to finally do something about the country's notoriously poor signage ends thus:

"Never mind the countryside. I still get lost in Dublin," said Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers, a road-sign crusader who argues that the Irish have never understood the functional point of signs.

"You've got extraordinarily misleading signs and signs that tell outright lies, and most of these are new," he said. "Dublin Corporation is putting up signs at the moment that are designed to baffle anyone from outside Ireland."

"They refer to Dublin as 'an Lar,' which is Gaelic for the city centre — and it's a term that nobody uses because we all speak English here," Mr. Myers said. "Everybody in Europe would understand the word 'centre,' so naturally we can't use that. The powers that be are intent on putting up signs in a dead language for pseudo-cultural purposes and doing nothing to help visitors."

Incidentally, if anyone is as curious about the word lár 'center' as I was (I would have expected *cédar if they had borrowed Latin centrum), it originally meant 'floor,' and is in fact cognate with the English word; the transitional meaning is 'middle (of a hall).'

2003-01-30T16:54:00.000-05:00

GUUGU YIMIDHIRR AND OTHER DELIGHTS. I really shouldn't go to the Strand; every time I do, I spend money. But if I didn't, I wouldn't find things like the first two volumes of Dixon and Blake's Handbook of Australian Languages at a ridiculously low price. The first volume includes descriptions of Guugu Yimidhirr (also called "Koko Yimidir" and other variants; the name means 'this way of talking, this kind of language,' guugu being the word for 'talk, language'), Pitta Pitta, Gumbaynggir, and Yaygir; the second includes Wargamay, Anguthimri (Mpakwithi dialect), Watjarri, Margany and Gunya (closely related Mari dialects), and a final, sad chapter describing the exiguous information available about the long-extinct languages of Tasmania. Most chapters include detailed descriptions of phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as the all-important texts and vocabularies. I've always been fascinated by Australian languages, but all I've had to go on so far is the Lonely Planet Australian Phrasebook; excellent as that little volume is, this opens up a whole new realm.

First sentence of first Guugu Yimidhirr text: Yii milbi dhana gunbu dumbi 'This is a story (milbi) about how they had a great dance': "The expression gunbu dumbil, literally 'dance break', is the normal idiom for 'have a dance, have a corroborree.'" I can't wait to dive in.

2003-01-30T10:27:00.000-05:00

ODORATIVE VERBS IN NENETS. From a recondite Yahoo search ("stress in evenki language") that showed up in my referrer log, I arrived at a grammatical sketch of Tundra Nenets (part of Tapani Salmanen's homepage, which includes links to other Nenets-related websites). This is a pretty detailed look at Tundra Nenets; if you want to know more, you'll probably have to either study with Prof. Salmanen or take a trip to the tundra. But what led me to tell you about it here is the fact that, along with more common types of denominatives (verbs based on nouns, e.g. søwa 'cap' => søbyiq- 'to have a cap, to use as a cap'; cf. English "to cap"), Tundra Nenets has a series of odorative verbs, e.g. xalya 'fish' => xalyayø- : 3sg xalyayi 'to smell of fish'. A pungent language!

2003-01-29T11:52:00.000-05:00

NO PURITY HERE. I recently ran across the following highly expressive quote:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
—James D. Nicoll

I am delighted to report that LINGUIST List has solved the question of exactly when (1990) and how it originated. A tip of the Languagehat hat to all concerned.

2003-01-29T10:58:00.000-05:00

WAGGISH. Another blog with meaty discussions of literature (recent entries on Kobo Abe, Olaf Stapledon, and Ismail Kadare) and music (Bill Dixon, Pierre Boulez) (and I'll bet not many of you faithful readers out there are familiar with all five names!) is Waggish.org. I have no idea who's behind this cultural smorgasbord, but I offer them my deepest esteem for bringing to my attention the gorgeous and intricate graphic scores of Barry Guy; I had known him as a wonderful bassist and composer (of avant-jazz among other things), but had no idea he did this sort of thing. I've already added it to the "Visual pleasures" section of my blogroll. (I found Waggish via the delightful Geegaw.com.)