Archives for March 2004

I told my wife a joke my Sanskrit professor was very fond of and she just about fell out of her chair laughing, so I thought I’d pass it along to you, since it has aspects of clear linguistic interest. After all, my posts have been on the serious side lately, and we all deserve a break. But I have to warn you, although this joke contains no dirty words, it is likely to offend the easily offended. If you are among that group, I beg you not to click on the “Continue reading…” link. If not, continue reading!

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A tantalizing entry at Renee’s Glosses.net recounts in summary fashion the sad tale of Maksim Grek (Maximus the Greek), brought to Russia in the early 16th century to translate religious manuscripts and then imprisoned for years for allegedly corrupting the text; Renee says, “When one reads these translations, the most visible evidence of Maksim’s non-Slavic origin is prepositions: from time to time Maxim uses a calque translation from Greek rather than the correct Russian preposition.” (Incidentally, the preface to Meletii Smotryts’kyi’s Hrammatika slavianskaia [Slavonic Grammar] (Moscow, 1648) “includes passages attributed to Maximus the Greek.” Thus I shoehorn in a mention of the excellent website of the Ucrainica at Harvard exhibition, with reproductions of all sorts of old books.)

Renee’s post inspired Margaret Marks of Transblawg to post her own prepositional entry, including a set of test sentences calling for you to fill in the correct preposition. (As an American, I don’t want any preposition at all in “4. to make money from dealing ….. heroin.”)

Through a comment on an earlier entry I’ve discovered a blog called Romanika, started in January by “a college student with a passion for the Romance Languages/Linguistics.” He not only has a passion for the languages, he has the kind of eye and ear for detail that is impossible to learn and makes him an invaluable source for all sorts of fascinating stuff that had escaped my notice. In his “first true entry,” he discusses the social implications of the voseo (use of vos as a general second-person singular pronoun) in Central America, contrasting it at the end of the entry with the Argentine use I’m familiar with (where it is used freely at all levels of society as a proud mark of Argentineness). In his next entry he describes the difference between attitudes toward the short forms of the verb estar ‘to be’ in Portuguese and Spanish:

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A Wordorigins thread asked about the origin of the phrase “Latin America,” and both a rant by a Peruvian diplomat turned up by the indefatigable aldiboronti and a geography message-board post by Yaïves Ferland (“professional researcher” at the Land Law Lab of the Center for research in Geomatics, Université Laval) that I googled up give similar explanations; I will quote the Peruvian, Dr. Pedro de Mesones:

[“Latin America”, “Latin American” and “Latin” (“Latino”) were] created by the French when Napoleon III made Maximilian Emperor of Mexico (1863-1867). The terms were a product of France’s ambitious, imperialistic desire to establish its power in the American Hemisphere, while taking advantage of the revolutionary cries for independence then echoing throughout the Spanish colonies of Central and South America. The French wished to erase the idea of “Hispanic America” and replace the term with a name which would epitomize France’s ubiquity. After considering the political implications of the times, the French decided against the name “Francoamerica” out of fear that it might boomerang. So they chose the name “Latin America” under the pretext that Spaniards, also, came from the Roman world and, therefore, were included in the Latin Concept, which had given origin to France’s culture as well. And the French dreamed of Paris as the capital of their “Latin America.”

Does anybody know if any of this is true?

An idiotic list of alleged mispronunciations compiled by someone going by the alias “Dr. Language” has been making the rounds of the internet, and now that it’s turned up on MetaFilter as well, I guess I’ll bite the bullet and blog the thing. I may as well simplify my life by just reproducing the heart of my MeFi comment:

Even for those who believe in the concept of “mispronunciation” (by native speakers), this list is useless, because its few worthwhile nuggets (words whose “wrong” pronunciations will actually make many people think less of you: Calvary, escape, et cetera, &c) are easily found elsewhere and are drowned in a sea of natural variants whose subtle difference easily escapes notice (acrosst, barbituate, cannidate), perfectly normal dialectal forms (aks, bob wire, bidness), bullshit forms reminiscent of those “Kids say the darndest things!” pseudo-mistakes some people e-mail lists of (Old-timer’s disease, a blessing in the skies, Carpool tunnel syndrome—this is the title of a book, and it’s a deliberate pun, for Chrissake!, Heineken remover—which they as good as admit is bullshit, &c &c), and (most annoying of all) perfectly good pronunciations that “Dr. Language” (if he has a doctorate in linguistics, I’m a neurosurgeon! [actually, he does — see Mark’s comment below]) doesn’t happen to like: “close” for clothes, “diptheria,” duck tape (not only is it almost impossible to pronounce both t’s audibly in “duct tape,” but as kozad points out, duck tape is the original form!), herb with silent h– (this is completely insane), long-lived with short i, “mawv” for mauve, often with the –t-, “parlament” (this one leaves me speechless—the word comes from Anglo-French parlament, the –i– is purely graphic, and as far as I know nobody on either side of the Atlantic pronounces it; does Dr. Language also recommend pronouncing the -c- in Connecticut?), persnickety (not only do they admit they’re being ridiculous, they make a laughably erroneous comment, “It is a Scottish nonce word to which U.S. speakers have added a spurious [s]”—a nonce word, which they seem to think means ‘dialect word’ or something, is actually a word invented for a single occasion—remember, kids, you can’t spell “nonce” without “once”!)… Well, you get my drift. Oh, and they’re wrong about card shark too; see the American Heritage Dictionary definition of shark: “2. A person regarded as ruthless, greedy, or dishonest; A vicious usurer. 3. Slang A person unusually skilled in a particular activity: a card shark.”

Please, I beg you: do not go to quacks like this for information about language! If you want to know how a word is pronounced or what it means, go to a dictionary—that’s what they’re for, and they’re compiled by people who spend their lives studying this stuff for real, not passionate amateurs with websites.

Addendum. See the interesting thread at Crooked Timber.

The Japanese Writing Tutor “is meant to help students of Japanese practice their writing skills. By following along with the motion of several animated GIF files, you can hone your writing skills, making your katakana, hiragana, and kanji more legible.”

When I first began learning Japanese, I found that among all of the other difficulties, writing posed special challenges. Not the least of these challenges was the fact that when writing Japanese characters, you must follow a specific order and direction of the strokes in order to be understood by a native reader of Japanese. Several times when trying to communicate through writing, I was met with blank looks of incomprehension, because what to me looked like the character for “water” looked to the average Japanese person like a scribbled mess.
Any book that deals with Japanese writing (two I have found immensely useful are Reading Japanese by Jorden and Chaplin, and Essential Kanji by P. G. O’Neill) will indicate stroke order, but I feel that a static representation doesn’t really create much of an impression. Anything that I learned was quickly forgotten, and I was back to drawing kuchi as a circle.

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I fear my infatuation with David Brewer has thoroughly cooled. I’m well over halfway through The Greek War of Independence, and what was at first a trickle of annoyance has become a torrent of bile. I’ll begin with an apparently innocuous factor: accents.

One of the things that attracted me to the book when I first saw it in a store was the fact that all Greek names were provided with accents. I don’t understand why this is so rarely done; word accents are as important in Greek as in, say, Spanish, for which they’re routinely reproduced in English text; they’re written in Greek itself (unlike in Russian, which is some excuse for the fact that the stress is so rarely marked in transliterated Russian words); and in this computer age it should be no problem to put acute accents over vowels. Nevertheless, they are almost always ignored for Greek, and I considered it a high recommendation that Brewer took the trouble to add them.

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I just learned a new and very useful word: pareidolia. In the words of the Skeptic’s Dictionary:

Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. For example, in the discolorations of a burnt tortilla one sees the face of Jesus Christ. Or one sees the image of Mother Theresa or Ronald Reagan in a cinnamon bun or the face of a man in the moon.

Those are, I believe, the most common contexts in which the phenomenon crops up: religion and astronomy. I learned the word from astronomer Philip Plait, who’s sick of this sort of thing, especially as put forward by Richard Hoagland:

He’s had enough of Hoagland’s assertions that NASA is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life, that the infamous Face on Mars was built by sentient aliens and, of late, that otherworldly machine parts are embedded in the red planet’s dirt.

Read the article if you enjoy a good debunking; you will also enjoy Plait’s account of a vision of Lenin in his shower. (Via xvarenah.)

Margaret Marks has a fascinating entry explaining that the translation of the “Suntory scene” in Lost in Translation has a crucial error in the director’s first speech to Bill Murray: “As if you are Bogie in Casablanca, saying, ‘Cheers to you guys,'” should read “…saying, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid!'” After discussing the “brilliant translation” of the Casablanca line into Japanese, she moves on to the much-praised, exceedingly famous translation into German, “Schau mir in die Augen, Kleines,” which she considers “condescending, self-centred, jokey, and completely lacking in romance.” I have to agree with her.

It’s particularly amusing, by the way, that the director’s line immediately before turning to Bill Murray is:

DIRECTOR (in Japanese to the interpreter): The translation is very important, O.K.? The translation.

And it’s interesting that the film’s title is apparently not translated into German (“Schlechtes Dolmetschen in Lost in Translation”). Is it common practice not to translate English-language titles? Or was this one considered peculiarly untranslatable?

Reading about Yanase Naoki’s translation of Finnegans Wake into Japanese makes me wish I knew the language:

To get an idea of how Yanase has added his wordplay to Joyce’s, look at the first word, “riverrun.” Yanase has emulated Joyce here by creating a new Japanese word composed of the kanji for “river” and “run.” However, the pronunciation of this kanji compound (indicated as sensou by the furigana above it) is also a homonym of the word for “war.” Yanase explains that war and conflict are recurring themes throughout Finnegans Wake—from the Fall of Adam and Eve to the present. But sensou can also mean “ship window,” an image linked to the river…

Via No-sword:

The legendary Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake was released in cheap paperback format and nobody told me. I had to find out via a bookstore display in honour of St Patrick’s day. That hurts, Japan.
Anyway, I found it. After I came to, I bolted to the cashier and bought all three volumes instantly, partly because I want to reward YANASE Naoki (or his estate. I don’t know.) for his complete freaking insanity, God bless him, and partly because, damn, it’s Finnegans Wake in Japanese, yo.

He goes on to give a brief description of the first thunder word (which he helpfully transliterates).

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