Archives for May 2006

I’m a bit late with this, but I wanted to get enough of my books categorized that my own statistics page would make an impressive showing (I’ll bet no other LT users come close to 145 languages!). Anyway, LibraryThing has added a feature I’ve been wanting since the beginning, language support:

• Every book has three fields: primary language, secondary language and original language.
• Languages are drawn from Amazon, your library record or the whole LibraryThing collection…
• The catalog shows “language” and “original language” fields. Go to “change fields” to see them.
• Language can be edited within your catalog, much as tags are.
• Each language has its own dedicated page (eg., French). At present, these only show the most popular works originally in that language.

Now, I have some complaints about the system. It would be useful to have more than “primary” and “secondary” fields; I have a number of books that have three equal languages, like Moderní Perská Frazeologie a Konversace by Mansour Shaki, which has everything in Czech, Persian, and English. And the “complete” menu of languages is immensely frustrating; it includes extremely minor languages like Yapese and breaks French down into Old and Middle as well as the modern variety, but lumps all the Chinese “dialects” (actually separate languages) under the same heading, so that I have to file my Cantonese dictionary, phrasebook, etc., as if they were Mandarin. Meanwhile it perversely insists on breaking the single language Serbocroatian down into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, so that I have to decide for each book how to file it; I pretty much flip a coin, except that I give the original language of my Andric novels as “Bosnian”—it would probably piss him off, but books like Bridge on the Drina and Bosnian Chronicle are full of Turkish loan words and local expressions, and if you’re going to use “Bosnian” for anything it might as well be that.

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I absolutely have to pass on this AskMetaFilter comment by the learned and much-traveled polyglot zaelic; one begins to get a feel for how he came by his polyglottery:

In my family, when we spoke English we were generally being nice. For the nasty backbiting stuff we had a pool of languages that would always leave somebody out of the loop – Hungarian, Yiddish, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. I learned Romanian completely through the bitter invective of my Grandmother, who hadn’t taught it to her own kids, who in turn, used Russian as a secret language of hate. As adults it came as a surprise to find everybody in the family was fully conversant in Spanish — no one ever told anybody else, because it was only used to whisper nasty comments about people in private. And my Mom has just started to teach me abusive language in Turkish that she learned in the 1940s working at her family’s Sephardic Turkish restaurant in Budapest.

Wow. And I thought it was impressive that my mother’s parents could lapse into Norwegian when they didn’t want the kids to understand.
If any of you have similar anecdotes, the microphone is, as always, open.

I imagine the name of C.T. Onions is familiar to many of my readers; he joined the staff of the OED in 1895 and became a full editor in 1914 (he wrote the final entry in the first edition, “zyxt obs. (Kentish) 2nd sing. ind. pres. of SEE v“), and at the end of his long life he was putting the finishing touches on the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), published a year after his death. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to check the etymology of Onions, especially given that its bearer was perhaps the most famous English etymologist, but I just got around to looking it up (as I eventually get around to looking everything up) and discovered that it is not (as one might think) from the edible rounded bulb of Allium cepa but is one of a number of anglicized variants (Eynon, Enion, Inions, Onians, etc.) of the Welsh name Einion, which is from Latin Annianus (best known, though that isn’t saying much, as the name of an Alexandrian monk). It’s also pronounced un-EYE-unz, though as the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names informs us, UN-yunz “is appropriate for C. T. ~, philologist, grammarian and an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; also for Oliver ~, author.” But now that I look the latter up (never having heard of him), I find that the Wikipedia article says “pronounced oh-NY-ons.” Oh dear, oh dear—I hate it when reference works disagree! (Yes, I know, it’s only Wikipedia, where anybody can write whatever they want, but why would somebody insert such an odd bit of information unless they were basing it on something?)

I imagine Brits know this from childhood, but it had somehow escaped my notice that Tennyson not only hailed from Lincolnshire but wrote dialect poetry. I quote the beginning of “The Church-Warden and the Curate“:

Eh? good daäy! good daäy! thaw it bean’t not mooch of a daäy.
Nasty casselty weather! An’ mea haäfe down wi’ my haäy!

It’s not exactly “Crossing the Bar,” but it’s not without its charms. (Casselty is defined in the glossary as ‘casualty, chance weather.’)

It’s always fun to make guesses about unfamiliar words. The Tensor has a post on this very subject, introducing “two separate bits of terminology associated with modern sport fencing: homologated and maraging.” If you already know these words, you’re presumably a fencer (and I’d be interested to know how you pronounce the latter, since it seems to have undergone a curious process of foreignizing in some circles in the few decades of its existence). If you don’t, take a stab (so to speak) at the meaning of “homologated jackets, britches, and masks” and “maraging blades” (or, more properly as far as I can tell, “maraged blades”). Then pop over to The Tensor and get the facts (which suprised me).

Addendum (2019). I just ran across this post and was alarmed at my fecklessness in having left the important facts to be discovered by visiting a post at The Tensor which might vanish away at any time. As it happens, it’s still there, but just in case:

ho·mol·o·gate: To approve, especially to confirm officially. (From Medieval Latin homologāre, homologāt-, from Greek homologein, ‘to agree’, from homologos, ‘agreeing’) […]

The word maraging actually refers to steel subjected to a particular heat treatment process to greatly increase its hardness. It’s derived from the words martensite (a kind of crystalline mineral that forms during the process) and aging, so it’s pronounced like the English words mar and aging. Live and learn.

Pok-ta-pok, according to the OED, is “the Maya name of the sacred ball game of Middle America, called tlachtli by the Aztecs, which was played on a court as a religious ritual. The object of the game was to knock a rubber ball through a stone ring, using only the hips, knees, and elbows.” Now, when I ran across this entry, it struck me forcibly because I recently got Long Hidden: The Olmec Series, a (superb) new CD by my favorite living bassist, William Parker (review), and one of the longer tracks is called “Pok-a-Tok,” about which Parker says “Pok-a-Tok is an Olmec ballgame whose object is to knock a four and a half pound rubber ball through a small ring using only the elbows, wrist, and hips.” At first I thought Parker simply got the name wrong (he’s a musician, not a linguist, as is shown by his absurd statement that “the Olmec spoke a dialect of the Manding language”), but when I googled it I got a large number of hits, though not nearly as many as for pok-ta-pok. So does anyone know if there is any basis for the variation—for instance, is one the Maya form and the other the Olmec—or is “pok-a-tok” simply a widespread error? And can the word be analyzed? The OED says simply “[Maya].”
Update. Jesse Sheidlower, Editor-at-Large of the Oxford English Dictionary, informs me that the revised OED entry for this term explains that the form pok-ta-pok is itself an error; the correct word in Yucatec Maya is actually pokolpok, and the ta- form is an error introduced by Frans Blom in 1932 and repeated throughout the literature. The classical Maya name for the game was pitz.
Further update. The September 2006 quarterly update of the OED just came out, and they’ve put the revised entry (dated June 2006) online. The etymology now reads:
[Alteration of, or error for, Yucatec Maya pokolpok (1877 in J. PIO PEREZ, Diccionario de la lengua Maya).
  Blom states (p. 497 of the article cited in quot. 1932) that he adopted the word to signify the game after consulting Juan Martinez Hernandez ‘the outstanding Maya linguist of today’. This inaccurate name remained current for some time. The classical Maya name was pitz.]

Joel Martinsen reports on a Chinese publication that makes me wish I knew Chinese:

Among all of the copycat urban lifestyle magazines, the paparazzi rags, and the ever-changing array of undistinguished special-interest publications that make up China’s periodicals market, Yaowen-Jiaozi (咬文嚼字) stands out as one of the most delightfully peculiar magazines available. With a title variously translated as “Correct Wording,” “Verbalism,” and “Chewing Words,” it turns a critical eye to the misuse and abuse of language in Chinese society…
Perhaps there’s a bit of guilty pleasure to be had in unmasking the usage foibles of major papers, but it’s done with a wink rather than a warning of impending social breakdown. The strongest condemnation is reserved for those who should know better: copyeditors who let malapropisms slip by, sign-makers who splash typos across storefronts, and monks in TV shows who mispronounce their Sanskrit transliterations.
In 2005, the magazine featured a different evening paper’s errors in each issue, while this year the scheduled targets are television stations. In addition to biting the popular media over language misuse, Yaowen-Jiaozi also chews on pressing usage questions: What’s the pronunciation of 峠, which appears in names in translations of Japanese novels? What’s the correct usage of · ? What are the usage differences between 三部曲 and 三步曲?

What fun! But lest you think they’re nothing but “a curmudgeonly group of conservative language pedants,” they’re quite willing to accomodate change when it makes sense to them:

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Thanks to a MetaFilter comment by xueexueg, I’ve discovered the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini, which, as xueexueg says, will be the OED of older Italian. It’s only up to the letter D (and is only “quasi complete” for A and B) and uses only texts from before 1375, but it’s extremely comprehensive and fun to consult. Looking up amore (naturalmente!), we find first a full list of spellings (ammore, amò, amô, amor, amor’, âmor, amore, ämore, amori, amorre, amors, amur, amure, amuri, amurj, mor, ‘mor, ‘more), a list of collocations it occurs in (amare per amore, amor falso, amore fraterno, amore paterno, amor fino…), a set of definitions, and finally the heart of the entry, a list of citations illustrating each of the senses:

1 Sentimento di chi desidera o intrattiene un rapporto intimo ed esclusivo, spirituale o fisico, con un’altra persona; affetto intenso, passione.
[1] Raimb. de Vaqueiras, Contrasto, c. 1190 (gen.), 53, pag. 165: Si per m’amor ve chevei, / oguano morrei de frei: / tropo son de mala lei / li Provenzal.
[2] Giacomo da Lentini, c. 1230/50 (tosc.), 19c.1, pag. 275: Amor è un[o] desio che ven da core / per abondanza di gran piacimento…
[3] Pamphilus volg., c. 1250 (venez.), [Panfilo], pag. 47.20: E chascun amore lo qual non è pasudo, çoè saciado de çogi e de solaci, sì è debele et enfermo.
[4] Andrea da Grosseto (ed. Selmi), 1268 (tosc.), L. 3, cap. 19, pag. 256.5: Et sappi, che a l’amor perfetto fa fine ‘l tempo et non l’animo; perciò che, nonn- è in podestà dell’animo del lasciare e di rimanersi de l’amore.
[5] Giovanni, 1286 (prat.), 8, pag. 22: Dialtuccia piace(n)te i(n) aspecto, / suo viso rispre(n)de i(n) dilecto: / alchuno no(n) fue sì in p(er)fecto / amore. […]

A splendid project; I hope it’s well funded and perseveres to the end of the alphabet.

I have received a welcome shipment from Language Log Plaza: a copy of Far from the Madding Gerund, a collection of posts by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum from Language Log. Now, you might think: “Why should I pay for a book the entirety of whose contents is available online gratis?” But except to those frighteningly nouveau-siècle types who think books are a relic of the past, like clay tablets and slide rules, the experience of reading is much enhanced by being able to see the words in nice crisp type on a page that can be carried around, read while walking down the street, and (if inspiration strikes and one is not part of the books-are-sacred-objects crowd) annotated by hand. And this is a beautifully produced book (my hat is off to the publisher, William, James & Company): handsome, nicely laid out (with URLs and annotations in smaller-type sidebars), well indexed; hell, it even smells good. And it’s actually been proofread, which seems to be viewed as an unnecessary expense by most publishers these days; the only thing I’ve found to raise an eyebrow at so far is the failure to change quotes-within-quotes to single quotes in this (from page 25): “A grammatical, usage or pronunciation mistake made by “correcting” something that’s right to begin with. For example, use of the pronoun whom in ‘Whom shall I say is calling?'” But that’s extremely small potatoes.
And all of that is beside the real point, which is that this is a tremendous pleasure to read. I’ve read just about everything in it already, but I find myself inexorably drawn to read it all again. The first selection is one of my all-time favorite posts, last year’s The disappearing modal: for those who’ll believe anything, which contains this immortal exchange:

Q: Is James Cochran, then, nothing but a mendacious pontificating old windbag?
A: Yes, it would appear that he is an utter fraud.

I read that several times over when it appeared online (once, out loud, to my wife), and I’ve reread it again now with undiminished joy. The selection after that is They are a prophet, which promotes one of my favorite causes, singular they. Then comes The blowing of Strunk and White’s rules off, an attack on one of my favorite targets, and after that a demolition job on the Chicago Manual of Style‘s sadly deficient new grammar section (“They commissioned a tired rehash of traditional grammar repeating centuries-old errors of analysis instead of trying to obtain a more up-to-date presentation. A real lost opportunity that has lessened the authority of a wonderful reference book, one that on topics from punctuation to citation to indexing to editing can really be trusted”)… Well, it’s all good stuff, is what I’m trying to say.

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As an American, I’ve never actually had any experience with Bovril (and I can’t say I have any desire to), but I certainly know the word. Imagine my surprise when I was leafing through the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and encountered the following in the article on LYTTON, FIRST BARON (better known to me, and I presume you, as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose name lives on in the Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad writing):

His sf novel is The Coming Race (1871[…]), a utopia set in an underground lost world inhabited by an evolved form of Homo sapiens, larger and wiser than surface dwellers. This race derives its moral and physical virtue from vril, an electromagnetic form of energy of universal utility which fuels flying machines and automata, and even makes telepathy possible. (The UK beef-tea Bovril took its name from vril.)

This is no urban myth; the official website of the company that makes the stuff says “The name Bovril comes from an unusual word Johnston found in a book. ‘Vril’ was ‘an electric fluid’ which ‘cured diseases and established equilibrium of natural powers.’ He combined it with the first two letters of the Latin word for beef ‘Bos’.” But the OED’s etymology (yes, they have an entry for Bovril—they’re Brits, aren’t they?) says simply “f. L. bōs, bovis, ox, cow.” Were they ashamed to cite a trashy popular novel? If so, they’d gotten over it by the time the Visor-Vywer fascicle appeared in 1920; it includes the entry:

vril
[Invented by Lytton.]
A mysterious force imagined as having been discovered by the people described in one of Lytton’s novels.
1871 LYTTON Coming Race vii. 47 These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers.

The last citation is from 1888 (Pall Mall G. 27 Dec. 4/1 If so,.. we are within hailing distance of the discovery of vril); I think it should be brought back into circulation. Use the vril, Luke!