Archives for September 2005

A story by Peter J. Boyer about the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the latest New Yorker says “the seafood industry attracted an ethnic mix that was sharply distinct from the Mississippi norm” and gives as an example “Slavonian immigrants, dislocated by the First World War.” When I read this, I thought “I’m probably one of the few readers not of Yugoslav background who knows where Slavonia is without looking it up,” and then “I wonder if it’s a misprint?”—my thought being that they surely wouldn’t casually mention “Slavonian” without identifying it for the 99.99% of their readers who would confuse it with Slovenian and Slovakian if it registered at all. But I googled and discovered that that’s exactly what they did, because articles like Aimee Schmidt’s “Down Around Biloxi: Culture and Identity in the Biloxi Seafood Industry” make it clear that the Slavs in question were indeed Slavonian. So, since Slavonian is in neither Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate nor even the Encyclopedia of the Peoples of the World, let me remedy the laziness of the magazine’s editors and tell you that Slavonians are from Slavonia, a region of eastern Croatia well known in Zagreb and Belgrade but not, I fear, among the readership of the New Yorker. And I will add that Slavonia/Slovenia/Slovakia is at least as confusing a set of terms as Galatia/Galicia/Galicia (Halicz).

A long article by Natalie Angier in the science section of the NY Times discusses the ubiquity and primordial nature of cussing; apparently even chimps do it:

Indeed, chimpanzees engage in what appears to be a kind of cursing match as a means of venting aggression and avoiding a potentially dangerous physical clash.
Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, said that when chimpanzees were angry “they will grunt or spit or make an abrupt, upsweeping gesture that, if a human were to do it, you’d recognize it as aggressive.”

Guy Deutscher is quoted to the effect that “the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions,” reminding me that it’s high time I reported on his book. And it absolutely fascinated me that after describing the physiological arousal produced by exposure to cursing (“Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow”), the article continues:

Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé.

I wish I understood that overreaction, which is one of the main windmills at which I tilt.

(Thanks for the link, Bonnie!)

Geoff Pullum at Language Log has a properly outraged response to the discovery that the New Yorker‘s search engine, when baffled, says: “I’m sorry I couldn’t find that for which you were looking.” It’s like a parody of “good grammar” of the sort that one would have thought long laid to rest along with unsigned articles, even at that famously prissy magazine. I won’t repeat his strictures, but I will remind everyone that there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition. It is perfectly good English and always has been. See Geoff’s post for the sad tale of how the myth was born, grew, and overcame the truth, thus poisoning English writing in general and the New Yorker in particular.

So I was reading a travel narrative by John Verlenden (part 3, “Hama and the Waterwheels of Death,” of his ongoing series “Road to Damascus,” serialized in Exquisite Corpse) when I came across the word koaga in a context that suggested it was Arabic, though it certainly doesn’t look Arabic: “As a koaga – an outlander – with features that marked me as a wild beast–red hair, blue eyes–I’d become inured to snickers from Arab children.” And I did what we do in this ever-changing world in which we live in (to quote the wordily wordy Paul McCartney): I googled “koaga,” then added “arabic” because there’s a Guarani phrase Ko’aga Roñe’eta (said to mean ‘now we will speak’ and used as the name of an “on-line journal of human rights and humanitarian law”) that overwhelms the results, and wound up at WORDTHEQUE – Word by word multilingual library, which combines an online dictionary feature with texts in languages from Afan Oromo to Zulu in ways that bear more investigating than I’ve so far given it.

Because I’m still obsessed with this koaga word, which seems to exist only in the Verlenden piece. Anybody have a clue?

(Thanks for the Exquisite Corpse link, part of a translation issue, go to wood s lot.)

I happened across Nick Nicholas’s thesis while looking for something else; its title is “The story of pu: The grammaticalisation in space and time of a Modern Greek complementiser,” and it has five summaries ranging in length from “I am spending three years looking at the 1000-year history of one word in Mediaeval Greek” to the actual abstract:

This work is concerned with tracing the historical development of the various functions of the Modern Greek connective pu. This connective has a considerable range of functions, and there have been attempts in the literature to group together these functions in a synchronically valid framework. It is my contention that the most illuminating way of regarding the functional diffusion of pu — and of any content word — is by looking, not only at one synchronic distribution (that of Standard Modern Greek), but at the full range of synchronic distributions in the sundry diatopic variants (dialects) of Modern Greek, and that such a discussion must be informed by the diachrony of the form…

An insistence on diachrony is sweet music to this Indo-Europeanist manqué. (The page I’ve linked is HTML, but the chapters linked from it are pdf files.)

Neal Durando, in An Abécédaire Fugitif, begins “My grammar has crossed the Atlantic four times since I began giving English lessons in western France three years ago,” and goes on to list French words with associations they call up for him, often how he learned them:

FOIS /fwa/
time
“Cómo se dice ‘vez’?” I asked my Spanish friend Oscár as we crossed the tramway tracks to eat lunch at café Les Facultés in between classes at the University of Nantes. There were no English speakers within earshot, so Spanish was how I learned about French. We were anxious about crossing the tracks as the tramway announces itself with only a slight sighing sound. “Fois” he answered without looking at me, as he had an eye out for the tram that could have put an end to us. Vez, fois, once upon a time pedestrians had to watch for streetcars everywhere in the United States, even in Chicago, the city where I was to shortly find myself.

An enjoyable collection of motments. (Via wood s lot.)

Charlotte Brewer has created a site called Examining the OED that promises to be extremely interesting. The About page says:

The Oxford English Dictionary is everywhere recognized as a comprehensive authority on the history of English from 1150 to the present day. Both literary and linguistic scholars, as well as many others, use the dictionary in order to find out more about words and their meanings, and to study and learn from the unrivalled stores of quotation evidence provided for the individual entries (drawn from literary and non-literary sources from the earliest days of English up to the present). In particular, OED‘s representation of language has crucially affected literary and linguistic understanding of how English has changed and developed, and of the contribution made to this process by individuals such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other major writers.

Yet we know remarkably little about the methodology and underlying editorial practices of this enormous ‘engine of research’ (a term first used of the dictionary by one of its publishers, Charles Cannan, in 1905). Although OED is a landmark in lexicography and provides a reference point for many sorts of language studies, it is itself comparatively little studied. By exploring and analysing OED‘s quotations and quotation sources, this research project seeks to illuminate the foundations of the dictionary’s representation of the English language.

You can see in detail what’s available at the site map. (Thanks go once again to aldiboronti at Wordorigins, master of linguistic truffle-hunting.)

Oxford University Press has put online a long and fascinating interview (pdf file; HTML cache here) with J.L. Lighter, compiler of the indispensible and happily revived Historical Dictionary of American Slang (which he’s been working on since he left high school). As the introduction puts it:

The best news of the year for word buffs, amateur etymologists, professional linguists, and all who respond to the incredible richness of the American language is that J. E. Lighter has found a home for his Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
When Random House published the first two volumes of this dictionary, covering letters A through O, in 1994 and 1997, critics reached for such terms as definitive, absolutely outstanding, and landmark publication. Nevertheless, the publisher abandoned the project when it was only half-completed, leaving the author and his dictionary in publishing limbo—and his many fans aghast…

[Read more…]

The name Emeneau won’t mean much to non-linguists, but he was a giant in the field, and I’m glad he made it to 101. You can find out more about him here; I was reminded to post this by reading Sally Thomason’s touching tribute at Language Log, and I originally got the news at Noncompositional.

The online magazine Words Without Borders is trying to promote international literature:

Few literatures have truly prospered in isolation from the world. English-speaking culture in general and American culture in particular has long benefited from cross-pollination with other worlds and languages. Thus it is an especially dangerous imbalance when, today, 50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated *from English,* but only 6% are translated *into* English.
Words Without Borders undertakes to promote international communication through translation of the world’s best writing—selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers, translators, and publishing professionals—and publishing and promoting these works (or excerpts) on the web. We also serve as an advocacy organization for literature in translation, producing events that feature the work of foreign writers and connecting these writers to universities and to print and broadcast media.

Their archives go back to July/August 2003 (Literary Border-crossings in Iran), and they’ve got a blog with authors from the U.S., the Netherlands, Italy, and the U.K. (Via wood s lot.)