Archives for January 2006

This all started because while editing an article in MS Word for a veterinary journal, I noticed that the spellchecker did not recognize the word scrapie. That’s odd, I thought—it’s a reasonably common word that I (who am not given to browsing books about the diseases of livestock) have run across any number of times in my reading career. Why wouldn’t it be in the spellchecker’s dictionary? As is my wont, I went directly to the OED, where it was defined as “A subacute, invariably fatal, disease of sheep and goats, characterized by degeneration of the central nervous system, leading to uncoordinated gait and itching.” So far, so good. But the first citation was from 1910! Surely such a homely word referring to such a common rural phenomenon must have been around for centuries, and in fact the 1910 citation (from Vet. Jrnl. LXVI. 711) implies it’s not an innovation: “Shepherds and farmers.. class more than one disease with totally different symptoms under the head of Scrapy.” How can it not be attested before that?

So I thought I’d check to see how far back the comparable French word was attested, only to discover it wasn’t in any of my bilingual dictionaries. It’s not in my Russian ones either, but the Yandex online dictionary has it, and the translation they give is скрепи [skrepi], clearly borrowed from English. Do sheep not get this disease outside Merrie England? And did sheep there not develop it until the nineteenth century?

This is my favorite kind of discussion of translation—not a theoretical treatise filled with jargon, but a nuts-and-bolts analysis of particular issues that come up in the course of particular translations. And it’s by the wonderful J.M. Coetzee, so it’s well written as well as meaty. I’ll just quote a couple of tidbits to whet your appetite:

Dialogue comes with its own set of problems, particularly when it is very informal and incorporates regional usages, contemporary fashions and allusions, or slang. My dialogue is rarely of this kind. For the most part its character is formal, even if its rhythms are more abrupt than the rhythms of narrative prose. So hitting the right register ought not to be a problem for the translator.
Where my dialogue is aberrant is when it comes from the mouths of children or of characters for whom English is not a first language. In general, it is best for such speech to be translated not word for word but by speech typical of children in the language translated into (hereafter called the target language), or by the speech of a foreigner making typical foreign slips…

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A follow-up to this post: the exciting conclusion (pp. 190ff.) to Dixon’s discussion of Jalnguy (“mother-in-law language”).

I had intended that my Jalnguy questioning should fall into two parts. The first was now as complete as I could get it that trip—going through everyday language words and asking their Jalnguy equivalents. I took a day off to go down to the motel at Mission Beach to prepare for the second stage.
A six-by-four-inch card was made out for each Jalnguy verb, and on it were listed all the everyday-style verbs for which it had been given as correspondent. Since there was a many-to-one relation between everyday and mother-in-law vocabularies, I expected to finish up with a fair number of Guwal forms on each Jalnguy card. A couple had just one—Jalnguy yirrgunjinyu had only occurred as equivalent of Guwal miyandanyu “laugh”—but most had four, five or six Guwal verbs for the one Jalnguy item.
The jubumban card was fairly typical. This Jalnguy verb had been given by Chloe, and by George and Ginnie, as the equivalent of bijin “hit with a rounded object”, jilwan “kick with the foot or shove with the knee”, dudan “mash food with a stone”, dalinyu “deliver a blow to something on the ground, for example, fall on”. One Jalnguy verb and four Guwal equivalents…

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I’m catching up with teju cole, whom I recommended earlier and who I belatedly remembered is going to pull down the pillars of his blog at the end of the month, and I’ve just hit a remarkable (they’re all remarkable) entry called “amnesiac.” It begins with a quote from Tomas Tranströmer:

One can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: ‘Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.’

It goes on to describe the “fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” and the bustling slave market they created, which thrived “in spite of a British ban on the trade (in 1808) and a British naval presence in Nigerian waters,” and tells us that “This history is missing from Lagos. There is no monument to the great wound. There is no day of remembrance, no museums.” And then he describes a visit to “the famous CMS bookshop on Lagos Island”:

The interior of the shop is vaguely familiar, from my visits here as a schoolboy, when this was the leading bookseller in the city. We came here when there was something we couldn’t find at the University Bookshop in Akoka or at the Abiola Bookshop in Yaba. But today it is a depressing sight. The books available for sale are few in number and restricted to few categories. Many volumes are dusty or curled at the edges. There are primary and secondary school textbooks and there are assorted volumes on computer programming, on accounting and on law. The largest section of all is devoted to “inspirational” and Christian books. A woman walks in and brusquely asks the attendant where she can find bibles. She is directed to a well-stocked section, the only section of the shop in which there is more than one customer. The titles of the books are reiterations: how to make money quickly by adopting certain simple principles, how to discover God’s plan for your life, how to live a healthy, wealthy and victorious life according to the precepts of the pentecostal church.

The shelf given to general fiction is pitiful. Other than a few tattered copies of plays by Shakespeare and Soyinka (and why are they tattered?), all that is available is a handful of recently published novels: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come. Both of these are first novels by young Nigerian women based in the US and they are here because they have an energetic young Nigerian publisher behind them. There is also a single copy of Dan Brown’s ubiquitous book. And I see a stack of books by James Hadley Chase, a minor imitator of Ian Fleming’s, who was inexplicably popular in Nigeria when I was growing up and apparently still is. But where are the Nigeria-based Nigerian writers? Where is the selection of international literary fiction? The reader I had seen on the danfo had surely not bought her book here. Poets, too, are notable by their absence.

The listless air of the bookshop is tiring. There is an information desk at the back of the shop. I go there with the idea that I might ask some questions. But the woman standing behind the high desk is slumped over, like a large mammal felled by a single shot. But she’s not dead, only sleeping, same as the other woman I saw at the museum. A standing fan slowly shakes its large head from left to right to left. It covers her in breezes. What I am looking for, what Tranströmer described as a moving spot of sun, is somewhere in this city. But it is not here. Here, one must forget about yesterday: it never happened.

Why is history uncontested here? There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices? I step out of the shop into the midday glare. All around me the unaware forest of flickering faces is visible. The area boys are still hard at work but I imagine they’ll soon break for lunch. The past is not even past.

I don’t want to end on that depressing note, so I’ll quote from a later entry, jazz:

But the following week, a friend took me to a relatively new shop on Awolowo Road in Ikoyi. And there I finally found myself at home, joyous, inspired. The shop is called the Jazzhole/Glendora. The owner is Kunle Tejuosho, and he is one of a small but tenacious breed of Nigerian cultural innovators. It is a combination music and book shop. The presentation is outstanding, as well done as any Waterstones or Borders. There was a broad selection of jazz, pan-African and other international music near the capacious entrance, and rows and rows of books for the general reader towards the back. The shop was tastefully lit, with a cool and quiet interior. Here, I thought to myself, was that “moving spot of sun” I had so hungrily sought. I saw music by Ali Farka Toure, by Salif Keita. There were books by Ian McEwan, Philip Roth and, yes, Michael Ondaatje. The prices were high. Not higher than they would be in an American or British shop, but certainly beyond the reach of most Nigerians. And yet, the Jazzhole is vital. Knowing that there is such a place, in the absence of good libraries or other vendors, makes all the difference to those who must have such sustenance. And better at those high prices than not at all.

And whatever you do, don’t miss dust. A whole novel in a blog entry.

Update (August 2020). Alas, the Wayback Machine has no record of any of those entries (though it did have a capture of the front page of the blog, which I substituted for the first link). I really hate the practice of deliberately disappearing one’s own blog — time and entropy do enough such work. If you want to write it, write it and leave it. If you don’t want it around, don’t write it. Bah.

This is a follow-up to this post, with further excerpts from R.M.W. Dixon’s Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker:

I’d only begun to work systematically on Jalnguy in the last few weeks in the field, and didn’t realize the full significance of it until I came to mull over the data back in London.
The many-to-one correspondence between Guwal [everyday language] and Jalnguy [“mother-in-law” language] vocabularies was a key to the semantic structure of Dyirbal. If one Jalnguy word was given as the equivalent for a number of distinct Guwal terms, it meant that the Guwal words were seen, by speakers of the language, to be related. For nouns, it revealed the botanical and zoological classifications which the Aborigines perceived. For instance, bayi marbu “louse”, bayi nunggan “larger louse”, bayi daynyjar “tick”, and bayi mindiliny “larger tick” were all grouped together under a single Jalnguy term, bayi dimaniny.
It could be even more revealing with verbs. The everyday style has four different words for kinds of spearing, and also such verbs as nyuban “poke a stick into the ground (testing for the presence of yams or snails, say)”, nyirran “poke something sharp into something (for example, poke a fork into meat to see if it is cooked)”, gidan “poke a stick into a hollow log, to dislodge a bandicoot”. All seven of these Guwal verbs are rendered by just one word in Jalnguy: nyirrindan “pierce”.
Sometimes Jalnguy grouped together verbs in a most surprising fashion. For instance, gundumman was given as Jalnguy equivalent of julman “squeeze, for example, squeeze a boil, knead flour”, and also of bugaman “chase, run down, as in catch a runaway steer”. What did these two verbs have in common? It was only when I had a chance to discuss it with Chloe that she explained gundumman means “bring together”. Hands come together in julman, while bugaman describes a pursuer coming into contact with what he is chasing…

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Looking up something else, I happened to notice that English has two words lemma: lemma ‘auxiliary proposition; glossed word or phrase’ and lemma ‘the lower of the two bracts enclosing the flower in the spikelet of grasses.’ Not particularly noteworthy in itself; what struck me was the etymologies: the former is from Greek lēmma (with long e) ‘thing taken, assumption,’ from lambanein ‘to take’ (compare the perfect passive eilēmmai), the latter from Greek lemma ‘husk,’ from lepein ‘to peel.’ Etymologically, they’re completely unrelated. Kind of neat.

It’s Gilbert Sorrentino day at wood s lot; I haven’t read much Sorrentino (Aberration of Starlight and, I think, Mulligan Stew), but I like his style. I very much like this interview by Alexander Laurence (from 1994). Asked about what’s happened since the glory days of Black Mountain, he says:

Hard to answer this question. I was on a panel a little while ago with Robert Creeley, and we were both being asked versions of your question. Apparently, young people are enormously interested in “how things were” in the Fifties. Creeley said something much to the point, to the effect that we all took art very seriously in those days, we were absolutely committed. He’s right, of course, there was a sense then among young artists that we were writing for our lives—but maybe more importantly, there was a really drab “establishment” in place at that time—artistic and social and political—and young artists felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were destroying it, “deforming the ideogram,” as Jakobson says.

And his response to a question about commercial publishing is a wonderful rant:

Joyce, Pound, and Williams commanded the smallest of audiences and were shunned by what we now think of as “major” publishing houses. Publishers have always been craven when the odds are not in their favor, it’s just enhanced nowadays because there is so much money to be made if the publisher can hit the shit machine. What is most surprising to me is the number of—what can I call them?—”absent” books published. These are books that have no literary merit, no spirit of aesthetic adventure, no rough but interesting formal design, and—this is most important—no chance of commercial success! That’s what is so amazing to me—not the number of Judith Krantz-like novels published, nor the Calvin Trillin-Garrison Keillor warm and wise and witty and wonderful malarkey, but the novels that just lie there: life and love in a small town in Northern California, sexual awakening in a Baptist family in Pennsylvania—daughter flees to Greenwich Village, meets bum who makes her pregnant, discovers feminism—and on and on. Were I running these houses, I’d can all these editors in a minute. If they can’t make millions, would be my thinking, I’ll be God damned if they’re going to put out excrement that will only break even, i.e., if we want to break even, I’d say, let’s publish BOOKS. But, of course, the chances are that the people who own these houses would not know a book if it buggered them.

And don’t miss his rave for my man Flann O’Brien.

This is another in a series of posts (1, 2) presenting excerpts from R.M.W. Dixon’s Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker; this one deals with one of Dixon’s major interests, the avoidance forms common among Australian languages (you can see samples of so-called “mother-in-law language” here: scroll down to “2.3 Taboo and avoidance”). He introduces it on pp. 91ff:

Now that the rains had begun, we were keen to get back to Cairns before bad floods came; we had been warned that roads were often out for weeks at the height of the wet season. But Chloe insisted that before we left, we must go through one other type of language: Jalnguy. A special language that a man had to use when talking to—or even when talking in the presence of—his mother-in-law, and the mother-in-law would use it back. Jalnguy was also used between a woman and her father-in-law, and between certain types of cousins. Every member of the Jirrbalngan and Girramaygan tribes would know Jalnguy, and had to use it with relatives from these particular kin categories. They were people who should be kept at arm’s length in social dealings—one would not normally look them in the eye or be left alone with them without a chaperon—and the use of a special language, Jalnguy, was an overt index of this avoidance behavior.

There was never any choice involved, Chloe said. A man would talk with his wife in Guwal, the everyday language style, but if a mother-in-law was within hearing, he had immediately to switch to Jalnguy. All the texts and vocabulary I’d collected so far were Guwal. Some of the old people had warned Chloe that it wasn’t wise to divulge anything about Jalnguy, but she had decided to ignore them…

Everything, it appeared, had a different name in Jalnguy. “Water” was bana in the everyday style, Guwal, but jujama in Jirrbal Jalnguy. “Fire” was buni in straight-out Jirrbal but yibay in Jirrbal Jalnguy. “Man” was yara in Guwal and bayabay in Jalnguy, while “woman” was jugumbil and jayanmi respectively.

It appeared, though, that the grammar was the same—only the nouns, verbs, and adjectives differed…

We went through a few score words, getting Jalnguy equivalents… Then Chloe said that we needed some conversation in Jalnguy. It was always easier if she had a mate to talk to. We should go down to the mission, and once more enlist the aid of old Rosie Runaway.

It appeared that Jalnguy had not been actively used since about 1930. The gradual loosening of tribal bonds and the pressure of learning English as a second language may have been partly responsible. Since then Guwal had been used for everything, even when an avoidance relation was around. The traditional taboo relationships were still respected—a son-in-law would never look his mother-in-law in the eye, and he would talk softly in her presence, avoiding risqué subjects. But Jalnguy was no longer employed as a linguistic marker of these social attitudes.

In fact, only a few of the older people remembered much of the Jalnguy vocabulary. Rosie did, and although she and Chloe were not in a taboo relationship they were soon rattling on in a conversation that reconstructed old times. Walking in the bush, getting hot and sweaty and going for a bathe in the cool water of a nearby creek. Plaiting split lawyer vine into a dilly-bag. Then both ladies bewailed, in Jalnguy, the fact that they were the last ones who could speak it—children nowadays go to school and all they learn is how to speak English.

Every single vocabulary word was from Jalnguy—not once did either Chloe or Jarrmay [Rosie’s real name] lapse into Guwal. Later on we went back to Chloe’s and she translated the text, phrase-by-phrase, into Jirrbal Guwal and also into Girramay Guwal.

Jalnguy was a revelation. I’d never heard of anything like this before, in Australia or anywhere else. Every member of the tribe had to know two distinct languages—or at least, two distinct vocabularies, for the phonetics and grammar were the same. Two names for every animal, two forms for every verb, two varieties of each adjective. But it was also something of an embarrassment. I felt I had quite enough to do, over the coming wet season, trying to work out the structure of Guwal. I decided to concentrate on the everyday style first, try to learn to speak it and fully understand it. Further study of Jalnguy should be postponed until that object had been achieved.

We here at Casa Languagehat believe in fairness to the point of gritted teeth, yea, unto the uttering of small yips of pain. Having twice this month (1, 2) spifflicated William Safire, the oft-erring language columnist of the New York Times, I now find myself in the acutely uncomfortable position of defending him against his own copyeditors, who, according to Sunday’s column, not only exist but challenge him on mistaken grounds:

These thoughts are triggered by the copy desk’s (two words) objection to the spelling of a word in last week’s column, which dealt with irregardless as a jocular redundancy and therefore, in my judgment, “arrant nonsense.” Last year, I chose that very phrase as an example of “wedded words,” like unmitigated gall, congenital liar and blithering idiot.[…]

As a language columnist, I have a license to use almost any taboo word or misspelling as an object of study, but not as part of my own prose. The objection was not to its being a word-wedding, cliché or fixed phrase, but because the desk held that arrant should be spelled errant. You could look it up, it (the desk) said, in the Dodger and Yankee manager Casey Stengel’s classic phrase.

I looked it up, in Webster’s New World, and in Merriam-Webster’s, and in American Heritage, and cannot fault the desk: there it was in all three of the best sellers: “arrant, adjective, variant of errant.” That was the lexicographers’ way of saying that although some spelling deviants insisted on arrant with a beginning a, most sensible people agreed with the establishment and spelled errant with an e. The Times’s copy desk was going by the book.

Safire is unquestionably right; as he says, “We are not dealing here with one word with one meaning spelled two different ways, one preferred and one variant; in my view, we are dealing with a word whose meaning has split, and the resulting ‘variation’ in spelling signifies the difference in the two meanings.” If indeed the copyeditors wanted him to make the change (and I can’t suppress a small voice that suggests he might be making the whole exchange up as an excuse to discuss the two words), they were not only wrong but a disgrace to their (and my) profession.

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In the course of editing a medical article I came across the phrase in silico, which at first mystified me; fortunately, Wikipedia has an admirably thorough entry that not only defines it—”performed on computer or via computer simulation”—but discusses the propriety of the word-formation:

Contrary to widespread belief, in silico does not mean anything in Latin… “In silico” was briefly challenged by “in silicio”, which is correct Latin for in silicon (the Latin term for silicon, silicium, was created at the beginning of the 19th century by Berzelius). “In silico” was perceived as catchier, possibly through similarity to the word silicate. “In silico” is now almost universal; it even occurs in a journal title (In Silico Biology: http://www.bioinfo.de/isb/)

The Wikipedia article also provides a citation for the first use: “Using the data available in libraries […] two sets of experiments were performed on computers (experiments in silico) using the consistency of the data extracted.” (Danchin A, Medigue C, Gascuel O, Soldano H, Henaut A. From data banks to data bases. Res Microbiol. 1991 Sep-Oct;142(7-8):913-6.) I trust it will show up in the OED in due time. (Although generally I prefer that words be properly formed, I have to agree that in silico is preferable to the longer form, and hell, silicium isn’t classical anyway.)