Archives for December 2005

Eric S. Raymond has an interesting essay, “SF Words and Prototype Worlds,” about the implications of the use of jargon like “monopole mines” or “groundcar” in science fiction stories.

The very experienced SF reader, at the fifth level, can see entire worlds in a grain of jargon. When he sees “groundcar” he associates to not only technical questions about flyer propulsion but socio-symbolic ones but about why the culture still uses groundcars at all (and he has a reportoire of possible answers ready to check against the author’s reporting). He is automatically aware of a huge range of consequences in areas as apparently far afield as (to name two at random) the architectural style of private buildings, and the ecological consequences of accelerated exploitation of wilderness areas not readily accessible by ground transport.
The better an SF writer is, the more subtly and effectively he will play off against the experienced reader’s analytical skills. At the highest levels, SFnal exposition takes on the nature of a delicate, powerful intellectual dance or game between writer and reader, requiring much from both and rewarding both very richly.
Indeed, to true aficionados of the genre this game is the whole point of SF, the unique quality which elevates it above other fictional forms. This attitude explains much about the genre that outsiders find obscure and annoying—the intimacy between fans and writers; the indifference or outright hostility to conventional “literary values”; the pervasive SF-fan complaint that outsiders “just don’t get it” and (when they deign to approve of SF at all) like all the wrong books for all the wrong reasons.

Raymond is also collecting jargon words (glossary here); compare Jesse Sheidlower’s OED project, described at LH here.

The Desital Library of Modern Japanese Language (do they mean “Digital”?) presents works like Liggins, J. Familiar Phrases in English and Romanized Japanese (1860), Brown, S.R. Colloquial Japanese (1863), and letters A-D of Hepburn‘s Japanese and English Dictionary (1867)—one hopes they’ll get around to the other letters eventually. (Via No-sword.)

I just discovered that the Russian-American poet Irina Mashinskaya (she emigrated in ’91, lives near New York City, and teaches mathematics) has a web page that links to the complete texts of each of her books (under КНИГИ, in the right-hand sidebar). I have her 1996 collection После эпиграфа [Posle epigrafa, ‘After the epigraph’], but it’s rather cheaply printed; the poems actually look nicer in the online edition. I wonder why more poets don’t do this? They can’t be making money off the few printed books sold; the poetry is more likely to be read if it’s freely available online, and I imagine if people liked what they saw they’d be likely to buy a book or two.

I’m taking this story with a liberal dose of salt, but even if it’s only half true, it’s still pretty amazing:

Four-year-old Tanish Shelar passes a surprised look at his six-year-old cousin when he pronounces Belgium as ‘Bel-jim’. He corrects his cousin promptly, “It’s ‘Belgium’.”

Shelar, a junior kindergarten student at St Jude’s in Panvel, can speak in seven languages — Sanskrit, German, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi and English. It all started when Tanish was eight-months-old when his mother, Dr Vedika Shelar, then living in Sholapur with her in-laws, heard through a friend about Siddha Samadhi Yoga (SSY). Founded by Rushi Prabhakar Guruji, their Infant Siddha Programme helps the overall development of a child. The programme specified that a child can be taught up to 20 languages by the age of six.

“I started speaking to him in English when he was just eight months. Then I proceeded to read and identify words with him in various languages,” says the dentist who has a clinic at Khandeshwar.

Via Chris’s Linguistics Blog.

I don’t usually post random collections of links, but they’re piling up and I’m afraid of losing them, so here you go:

Project Professor Professor “is a prodigious international effort to identify and list all active research professors whose first and last names are identical. The first two professors celebrated by Project Professor-Professor are Abraham Abraham and Warren Warren… If you know of other professors who should be part of this listing, please send pertinent info (including a URL, if possible) to: PROJECT PROFESSOR-PROFESSOR c/o marca@chem2.harvard.edu .”

Continuing on the name front, here is a list of Russian-Israeli names (thanks, Tatyana!). If you know Russian, I guarantee much laughter. (How would you like to be named Mikhail Klurglur?)

This post prompted a reader (thanks, Pat!) to send me a link to George Szirtes’ TS Eliot Lecture “Thin Ice and The Midnight Skaters,” a long discussion of many things connected with poetry and language. A snippet:

When our own family of four arrived in England as refugees in the December of 1956 only my father spoke any English, and he spoke it reasonably enough to act as interpreter to groups of other refugees. After a few days stop at an army camp we moved to Westgate on the Kent coast and found signifieds for which we had signifiers but of which we had no direct experience. There was the sea for a start. None of us had seen one of those, though we did have the word tenger, that meant ‘sea’. Tenger was a word from tales and fabulous stories, from other people’s talk, from films: it had a set of meanings that we had not experienced at first hand. The transfer of our old vocabulary to a new set of experiences naturally took time: so English tea meant not quite tea, so English bread meant not quite kenyér. For what we received as tea and bread was not what we had been used to. George Steiner talks about this in After Babel, about how even transactional language is inadequate to experience: brot and pain are not innocent blank counters. It is not just that you will get different kinds of bread in Germany and France but that these breads come with a complex baggage of history, culture and association.

And continuing with language and translation, a LibraryThing review by Ramage of Adair’s Georges Perec translation A Void sent me to Ian Monk’s “The Restrictive Muse. (Writings for the Oulipo)”, which has (among other amazing things) a stern e-less review of Adair’s e-less translation of Perec’s e-less novel. And while I’m on the subject of Ramage, the latest post features the Chesme Church (aka Church of Saint John at Chesme Palace), architect Yuri Felten (George Veldten), and says “I cannot believe it has never figured in a work of literature. An exhaustive ten-minute search in Google has, however, failed to turn up any citations.” I couldn’t find any searching in Russian, either; of course, the church is well south of the central city, but still, you’d think such a striking building would get mentioned somewhere. If my Russian-speaking readers know of any literary mentions, please leave a comment!

From the University of California’s eScholarship Editions (have I really not posted about that amazing collection of online books, many of them freely accessible to all comers?), this looks extremely interesting: Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970, by Sumathi Ramaswamy. From Chapter 2:

The putative unity suggested by the name “Tamil” notwithstanding, there is no monolithic presence which reigns in the regimes of Tamil devotion that so assiduously transform the language over time into an object of adulation, reverence, and allegiance. Instead, it is imagined in different ways in different contexts by different devotees. In four such regimes of imagination—the “religious,” the “classicist,” the “Indianist,” and the “Dravidianist”—Tamil is variously conceived as a divine tongue, favored by the gods themselves; as a classical language, the harbinger of “civilization” as a mother tongue that enables participation in the Indian nation; and as a mother/tongue that is the essence of a nation of Tamil speakers in and of themselves. Tamiḻppaṟṟu is thus not a static monolith, but evolves and shifts over time, entangled as it is in local, national, and global networks of notions and practices about language, culture, and community.
What follows in this chapter, then, is a discursive history of Tamil from the 1890s to the 1960s. By “discursive history” I mean the history of the discourses that gathered around Tamil as it became the focus of talk and practice…

(Via the indispensable wood s lot.)

One benefit of copyediting specialized material is that you learn new words. Taking my first glance at a new article about coelomic effusion in frogs (exciting, I know), I immediately wanted to know what coelomic meant. It certainly looked like it came ultimately from Greek κοιλος [koilos] ‘hollow,’ but that was pretty vague. So I went to the dictionary. It’s the adjective of coelom (SEE-lum), which Merriam-Webster said is “the usually epithelium-lined space between the body wall and the digestive tract of metazoans above the lower worms,” which told me basically nothing. The New Oxford American Dictionary said “the body cavity in metazoans, located between the intestinal canal and the body wall,” which was better, except that I had no idea what a metazoan was. M-W: “any of a group (Metazoa) that comprises all animals having the body composed of cells differentiated into tissues and organs and usually a digestive cavity lined with specialized cells.” No good whatever. NOAD: “Metazoa a major division of the animal kingdom that comprises all animals other than protozoans and sponges.” Much better; everybody and his dog is a metazoan. We see the virtues of NOAD’s “core sense” system—M-W’s definitions are absolutely accurate but sometimes make no sense to the average user, whereas NOAD’s are written with the nonspecialist in mind; if more specifics are needed, they are given after the core sense (here, “they are multicellular animals with differentiated tissues”).

I decided to see how other major dictionaries handle coelom. The OED says “The body-cavity of a cœlomate animal,” which is both good (“body cavity” is clear) and bad (what’s a “cœlomate animal”? why, it’s one “having a cœlome or body-cavity distinct from the intestinal cavity; belonging to the Cœlomata“—gee, thanks a heap!). But the American Heritage hits the jackpot:

The cavity within the body of all animals higher than the coelenterates and certain primitive worms, formed by the splitting of the embryonic mesoderm into two layers. In mammals it forms the peritoneal, pleural, and pericardial cavities. Also called body cavity.

It uses some fancy words, but the meaning is clear: it’s the body cavity in higher animals. Well done, AHD!
And now, back to the frogs…

George Szirtes discusses three translations of the poetry of Attila József (József Attila to the Hungarians, who put the family name first), who committed suicide at the age of 32 in 1937. As regular LH readers know, I love detailed comparisons like this:

For the third of the fourth verses: “Ám egyre több lágy buggya nás. / Vérboý eper a homokon, / bóbiskol, zizzen a kalász. / Vihar gubbaszt a lombokon”, Bátki offers: “More and more soft stirrings. / Blood-red berries on the sand. / Ears of wheat nodding and rustling. / A storm is perched above the land”.

This has a syntactic clarity (four short individual sentences) and conveys simple images in direct language. It even presents us with a rhyme in lines 2 and 4. (The original has an abab structure.) But the berries and the wheat have lost their pressing lushness, and the wonderfully threatening storm is lightened to sparrow-weight. These are not incidental details—they constitute the emotional mass and texture of the poem, without which “kaszaél”, the scythe-blade of the last line, loses much of its force…

[Read more…]

Towards the end of Nabokov’s Истребление тиранов (“Tyrants destroyed,” mentioned previously here) the protagonist, who has been agonizing over how to rid his country—and, more importantly, himself—of the dictator he had known as a young man, hears a procession in the street celebrating the tyrant’s fiftieth birthday. It has been established that the evil ruler is extremely fond of turnips (at one point, praising a 70-pound turnip an old woman has grown in her garden, he says “Вот это поэзия, вот бы у кого господам поэтам учиться” [“Now, that’s poetry, the poets should learn from it”] and “angrily” orders a bronze cast to be made from it), and one of the stanzas of the poem (by “our best poet”) resounding from all the radios of the city goes like this:

Вообразите, ни реп нет,
Ни баклажанов, ни брюкв…
Так и песня, что днесь у нас крепнет,
Задыхалась в луковках букв.
Imagine, [without our ruler] there are neither turnips,
nor eggplants, nor rutabagas…
Thus even the song which now burgeons among us
was stifled in bulbs of letters.

The ruler’s jubilee song self-presented as a root vegetable: how that must have warmed his cold, cold heart! At any rate, the word брюква [bryúkva] ‘rutabaga’ has always struck me as humorous, though that may partly be carryover from rutabaga itself. I’m not the only one who sees the American term (and consequently the vegetable itself) as hilarious, because the OED—which informs us the word is from “Swed. dial. (W. Götland) rotabagge“—includes among the citations these:
1951 O. NASH Family Reunion 107 We gobbled like pigs On rutabagas and salted figs.
1975 New Yorker 10 Nov. 176/2 Pertly written by pertly pretty housewives who have discovered organic gardening and how to rub two rutabagas together to feed four happy, whimsical tots—such books glut the shelves.
And—oho!—another citation suggests a possible source for Nabokov’s mock-poem:
1820 SHELLEY Œd. Tyr. I. 47 Hog-wash or grains, or ruta-baga, none Has yet been ours since your reign begun.
The Shelley poem (online here) presents a chorus of pigs complaining of the downward turn their lives have taken since Swellfoot came to rule over them; Nabokov’s tyrant is clearly a descendant of this same Swellfoot, who has provided his subjects with rutabagas even if he has extracted their freedoms.
But I digress. I went to Dahl to see if there were any quaint Russian sayings employing the word брюква, and discovered it had almost two dozen dialectal synonyms: брюкла, буква, бухма, бушма, бушня, калива, калига, голань, галанка, ланка, ландушка, немка, бакланка, баклага, грухва, грыжа, грыза, желтуха, землянуха, дикуша, рыганка, синюха. (Interesting that the second of these is буква, which in standard Russian means ‘letter (of the alphabet)’ as used in the quatrain above.) It must have been much more of a staple in nineteenth-century Russia than it has been since in English-speaking lands (the entire entry in Waverley Root’s wonderful compendium Food reads: “rutabaga, or swede turnip, a root more admired a century or two ago than it is now”); no wonder that the sole saying given by Dahl is Надоел ты мне, что брюква: ‘I’m as sick of you as of rutabaga.’

The site Minority languages of Russia on the Net is a treasure trove of information if you read Russian, and even if you don’t there are some useful links, like articles from The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire (e.g., The Nivkhs). Via Christopher Culver’s site Безѹмниѥ.

Update (Sept. 2019). First link replaced with archived version.