Archives for June 2005

BIBLE TRANSLATION BLOG.

Wayne Leman’s Better Bibles Blog is dedicated to “improving English Bible translations” not so much in terms of accurately rendering the sense of the original (though of course that’s important to him) but in terms of rendering it into good, effective English, a goal he finds many current translations fall short of. When I ran across his blog, I was afraid Wayne was concerned about the sort of thing people often mean when they say “good English” (sentences ending with prepositions, split infinitives, that sort of nonsense), but I’m happy to report that’s not the case:

I am not a prescriptive linguist (that is, someone who tells people how they should speak and write). Rather, I am a descriptive linguist, someone who observes how people actually speak and write. I observe, as do many others, that the majority of English speakers continue to use subject-verb agreement, so in a published book, especially one as important as the Bible, I feel it is important to point out when there is lack of subject-verb agreement. Similarly, there are a number of other language “rules” (or “principles”) that fluent English speakers and writers follow that I believe should be followed in a book intended to be in quality literary English—at least they should be followed until there is a sufficient consensus (a large majority) among English speakers that those rules need to be changed…
I believe people have and should have linguistic choices. I do not think that “language police” should tell us how to speak, regardless of how well intentioned they are. I do think it is appropriate for English teachers to explain to their students what the current consensus is for usage of various linguistic forms. A teacher can explain that “If you want to be hired for some jobs, you need to be able to speak and write in a dialect that is approved of by the administrators of that company.” But no one should ever tell people that they are “dumb” or “social rejects” if they speak a certain way.

Amen to that! (I’m a King James man myself, but that’s because I read the Bible as a literary masterpiece, not as the urgent communication it must be to a believing Christian.)

BBC WORDHUNT.

Your language needs you!

Did you eat a balti before 1984 or have a mullet before 1994? And do you know how they got their names?
In conjunction with a major forthcoming BBC2 series, the OED invites you to hunt for words and help rewrite ‘the greatest book in the English language’.
250 years after Dr Johnson wrote his celebrated dictionary with the aid of just six helpers, the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary have teamed up to appeal to the nation to help solve some of the most intriguing recent word mysteries in the language.
The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language—currently 600,000 in the OED and counting—and of every separate meaning of every word. Quite a task! The fifty words on the OED’s BBC Wordhunt appeal list all have a date next to them—corresponding to the earliest evidence the dictionary currently has for that word or phrase. Can you trump that? If so the BBC wants to hear from you.

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PIE VERBS AND STRESS.

Piotr Gąsiorowski, who studied electronics and computer science at Warsaw Polytechnic from 1978 till 1984 and then, disappointed with “what computer science was like in Poland in those ancient times,” became a historical linguist instead, has put online some essays about Proto-Indo-European, notably one on stress and one on the verb system. While full of good meaty information, they’re written in such a way that readers without specialized training should be able to follow along, and with a sense of humor, always welcome in what can be a dry field: “I don’t know if any speaker of PIE ever said ‘O yoke’ to a yoke. I suppose the potential vocative would have received initial stress if it had occurred to anyone to use it.” (Via ilani ilani.)

Update (Sept. 2023). Piotr Gąsiorowski now at Google Scholar (he used to blog here, and occasionally makes an appearance at LH); Bridget D. Samuels of the ex-blog ilani ilani has a homepage.

THE BACKSTROKE OF THE WEST.

I haven’t seen Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith yet, and I’m not sure I need to now that I’ve seen these screenshots of a bootleg DVD with English subtitles retranslating the Chinese translation used in the version copied. As jeremy (who bought the DVD and posted the screenshots) says, “amazingly enough, the beginning scroll is mistranslated even though the words are right there on the screen.” And the title Revenge of the Sith becomes “The backstroke of the west” (I can only assume that Sith got rendered as xi ‘west’). I’ll let you discover the rest yourself, but I can’t resist noting that “Jedi Council” becomes “Presbyterian Church.” (Via MetaFilter.)

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ABECEDARIUM.

Abecedarium is the Guild of Book Workers‘ biennial exhibit for 1998/99; it shows a collection of modern books on the theme of the alphabet. Some of them are beautiful, some linguistically pleasing, some you wish you could touch. (Via wood s lot.)

FRANKGUM.

A correspondent writes:

…here’s an interesting word, not found in the OED, which I came across in the lyrics of the old sea song “Rant and Roar,” specifically one of the Newfoundland versions.

“I went to a dance one night at Fox Harbour;
there were plenty of girls, so nice as you’d wish;
There was one pretty maiden a-chawin’ of frankgum
just like a young kitten a-gnawing fresh fish.”

The OED doesn’t have “frankgum” but the meaning is clearly “spruce gum,” since “frankincense” can also refer to spruce gum or other related resins, and if “frank-incense” then why not “frank-gum?” Still, I wonder if your distinguished readership has ever encountered this usage.

(You can find the full lyrics here; the word also turns up here under “Cuts”: “probably cuttin’ frankgum off a junk or something like that.”) So, distinguished readers: anybody know this word?

THE MOST COMMON CHARACTERS.

Patrick Hassel Zein has a pageful of links on the Chinese language, many of which look useful and/or interesting, but the one I want to highlight here is The most common Chinese characters in order of frequency. Boy, I wish I’d had this available when I was trying to learn Chinese; he explains:

The list was created using statistic list of Chinese characters and a number of thick dictionaries. All characters are presented in falling statistical order. Pronunciations are specified according to Pinyin and for some characters a number of different possible pronunciations are given. Examples of common words are given for most characters, however with no guarantee that all the most common words are listed or that the given examples are particularly common words. Some of the listed pronunciations for some characters are less used than other pronunciations for the same character, and in those cases translations and examples may lack. Some additional comments are given.

The first character is 的, of which he says:

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OKH BLYA!

The excellent Russian-Israeli blogger Avva has a great story about a taxi ride with a driver he’d used several times before: “Judging by his face and Hebrew, a typical sabra (native Israeli), an Ashkenazi, about 45… He tells me he lived in America a long time; sometimes he switches to quite good English.” They had just exited from a tunnel and were behind a car that refused to move; the driver was turning into the next lane to pass when a bus shot out of the tunnel and sped past in that very lane. “The driver leans on the brake with all his strength and hollers” a stream of Russian obscenity, “without any accent whatsoever.” (I won’t bother reproducing the mat because anyone who could read it might as well read Avva’s whole entry—it’s short and funny.) As one commenter said, “It’s always like that—we speak in one language, switch to another, and curse in Russian.” I have to say that Russian is the best language for cursing I know, bar none.

KAMUSI PROJECT.

In the process of researching my post on the multilingual ad (and let’s not slack off, people—there are words yet to be identified—kawi, bukola, yemashala…) I ran across the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary (aka the Kamusi Project, kamusi being Swahili for ‘dictionary’).

The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is a collaborative work by people all over the world. Together we are working to establish new dictionaries of the Swahili language – Kiswahili – both within Swahili and between Swahili and English. We are preparing print-based dictionaries and multi-media Swahili learning applications, all accessible to you through this home page. We invite you to become a contributing editor – help refine our lexicon by using our unique Edit Engine. Swahili is the most widely spoken African language, with more than 50 million speakers in East Africa and Central Africa, particularly in Tanzania (including Zanzibar) and Kenya. We suggest that first-time visitors to the Kamusi Project take a few minutes to read through our page of Frequently Asked Questions.

I once got my Swahili to the point that I could read a simple newspaper story; this resource tempts me to renew my acquaintance.

Update (Sept. 2020). I’ve replaced the dead links with archived ones, but the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is now online here (assuming it’s the same project).

NAME THAT LANGUAGE!

Frequent correspondent Laurent sent me a most interesting advertisement, in which the letters of the word “Chevron” are made up of the words for ‘energy’ in a bunch of languages. I can identify most of them by using dictionaries and/or Google, but there are some I can’t. Here’s the image (click for large version):
Chevron-thumb
And here’s what I’ve got so far, starting with the words making up the letter C; if anyone can fill in any blanks, I will be much obliged:

ŋsī – ?
ஆற்றல் [aatral] – Tamil
energy – English
ngolo – Kikongo? (according to this site, “NGOLO means energy, force, power. Moyo means life/spirit in the Kikongo language.”)
শক্তি [shokti] – Bengali
nukiorneq – Greenlandic
amaanda – a South African language
orka – Icelandic (I believe this is related to English work)
エネルギー [enérugii] – Japanese (obviously borrowed from German, because if it were from English it would be enaaji)
ພະລັງ? [pa:la:ng] – Lao
brændstof – Danish [actually means ‘fuel’ — tsk]
kawi – Swahili?
enerhiya – Hiligaynon (a language of the Philippines; a commenter adds that it could also be Tagalog or any other Philippine language)
енергия [energiya] – Bulgarian
enerģija – Latvian
pūngao – Maori
energji – Albanian
energie – Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Romanian
emandla – Swazi (Swati, siSwati)
fuinneamh – Irish (pronounced something like FWINN-ya, if you were wondering)
enerji – Turkish (j is as in French, like the s of leisure, and the word is borrowed from French, unless of course it’s from Sumerian)
bukola – ?
ऊर्जा [ūrjā] – Hindi
энергетика [energetika] – Russian
matla – Sotho (from googling I find it used in Southern Sotho and Tswana)
ენერგია [energia] – Georgian
توانائی [tavāna’i] – Persian (Many thanks to Tim May for providing the Unicode for me to copy; he adds: “Online dictionaries return “توانايي”, though, which gets a lot more hits, and so does “توانائي” and “توانايى”. The first one looks like it’s what it says in the advert, though.”)
قوت [quvat] – Pushtu? (also could represent Dari quvvat)
ឋាមពល [tha:ma’pɔl] – Khmer/Cambodian
Energie – German
能源 [néngyuán] – Chinese
күч [küch] – Kyrgyz (common Turkic word; cf Turkish güç)
energía – Spanish
شکتی [shakti] – Urdu
makasi – Lingala?
umfutho – ? (Obviously a language related to Zulu, but doesn’t mean ‘energy’ in Zulu as far as I can tell)
බලය [balaya] – Sinhala
эрчим хүч [erchim khüch] – Mongolian
에너지 [eneoji] – Korean
energia – Portuguese, Catalan, Polish, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Basque
maatla – a South African language (Pedi?)
énergie – French
nishati – Swahili?
hinya – Kikuyu??
енергія [energiya] – Ukrainian
พลังงาน [phalaŋŋaan] – Thai
ingufu – Kinyarwanda
אנרגיה [energyah] – Hebrew
simba – ? (Unfortunately, the very well known Swahili word simba ‘lion’ pretty much makes Google useless here)
amandla – Zulu (It’s under -andla if you ever have to look it up in a Zulu dictionary)
energija – Lithuanian, Slovene, Croatian (or, if you’re old-fashioned, Serbo-Croatian)
ενέργεια [enéryia] – Greek
енергетски извор – Macedonian
inirjia – Aymara?
pachamamaq – Quechua
yana qori unun – ?? (I don’t even know if this is one, two, or three entries, but none of the words occurs separately)
energi – Norwegian, Swedish (also Danish, which is represented by brændstof)
pissens – Kreyol (Haitian Creole, from French puissance)
buka – ?
tenaga kerja – Indonesian
năng lượng – Vietnamese (a loan from Chinese 能量[nengliang])
daya – Malay
hery – Malagasy (Curiously, final i is always written y in Malagasy)
Ենէրգիա [energia] – Armenian
طاقه [Taaqa] – Arabic
enegiýa – Turkmen (?)
mbaretekue – Guarani
mphamvu – Chichewa
yemashala – ?
enerġija – Maltese
agbara – Yoruba

Update (May 2023). Alas, the image is no longer accessible, and the Internet Archive didn’t capture a snapshot of this post until a decade later, by which time it was already gone. Sic transit.