Archives for December 2006

COMMISSAR.

I’m reading N. N. Sukhanov’s The Russian Revolution 1917, the only full-length eyewitness account of the 1917 revolutions, and I just got to this on page 62: “Braunstein proposed that directives be given… for district committees to be formed, and for plenipotentiary Commissars to be appointed in each district to restore order and direct the struggle against anarchy and pogroms.” I quote from the OED citation, but I have a gripe against the OED here. Why on earth would they quote that line and not the far more interesting footnote that is appended to it? The footnote reads: “Braunstein, by the way, was the first of us to use this word Commissar, which was later so needlessly misused.” This Braunstein (actually Brounshtein, Михаил Адамович Броунштейн) is an exceedingly minor and utterly forgotten figure, but he apparently introduced an old word equivalent to commissioner into the context in which it developed the only meaning most of us associate with it; you’d think that would be worth a mention, as would the fact that Sukhanov is talking about February/March 1917, which antedates their first citation, 1918 tr. Lenin’s Less. Revolution (title-p.), By Vladimir Oulianow (N. Lenin) President of the Council of People’s Commissars.

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TWO TAKES ON TRANSLATION.

In The Guardian, Simon Armitage discusses his new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

Naturally, to the trained medievalist the poem is perfectly readable in its original form; no translation necessary. And even for the non-specialist, certain lines, such as “Bot Arthure wolde not ete til al were served”, present little problem, especially when placed within the context of the narrative. Conversely, lines such as “Forthi, iwysse, bi zowre wylle, wende me bihoues” are incomprehensible to the general reader. But it is the lines that fall somewhere between those extremes – the majority of lines, in fact – which fascinate the most. They seem to make sense, though not quite. To the untrained eye, it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalisingly near yet frustratingly blurred. To a contemporary poet, one interested in narrative and form, and to a northerner who not only recognises plenty of the poem’s dialect but detects an echo of his own speech rhythms within the original, the urge to blow a little warm breath across that layer of frosting eventually proved irresistible.

I’m not quite sure why he felt he needed to see the original manuscript in the British Library or to witness the actual gralloching of a deer (though I do love the word, which I wrote about here), but the sample at the end of the article is appealing, and I like his daring—he’s not afraid to toss in “never mind being minus his head!”

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TAIWANESE CABBAGE.

Kerim Friedman alerted me to a post at Prince Roy’s Realm about “why Taiwanese (and apparently only Taiwanese) refer to Western cabbage (as opposed to Napa Vally cabbage, or 白菜 bok choy) as 高麗菜 instead of the more orthodox Mandarin usages 洋白菜, 包心菜, or 捲心菜.” There is apparently a popular theory that the word (which a commenter renders as “Gao Li Cai”) derives from the name of Korea, but much more likely to me seems the idea that it’s a borrowing from a Germanic language (cf. English cole, German Kohl); if you have information or ideas about this, by all means share them. (The comment thread is worth your attention as well; Mark Anthony Jones points out that Cato the Elder claimed “every illness… could be cured by eating loads of boiled cabbage. The reason why Romans survived six centuries without the need for doctors, he said, was because of their habit of eating boiled cabbage three times a day!”)

CJVLANG.

Céline of Naked Translations has a post beginning “Frequent commenter bathrobe has a site on the translations of Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince“; since Bathrobe (who now, to avoid excessive identification with that item of clothing, sometimes signs himself 小王子 ‘the Little Prince’) is also a frequent commenter here, I should really have pointed you before now to his excellent site cjvlang, “an armchair excursion into three fascinating languages of the Orient: Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese (CJV).” Besides the Little Prince section, he discusses days of the week, birds, Harry Potter translations (which has subsections on Those Magical Books and Their Titles, Translation of Puns and Word Play, Names of People and Places, Mistranslations, Names of Shops, serious translation errors, and Names of Owl Species, inter alia), and the writing systems. From the Little Prince section, his page on “the fox’s secret” compares the versions of a short passage of three sentences (“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux”) in 45 Chinese translations, four Vietnamese translations, and 16 Japanese translations (not to mention four English ones). Here are Shī 1991:

這就是我的秘密,一個很簡單的秘密:只有用心靈,一個人才能真正看得明白;單是透過雙眼看不見事情的真像。
Zhè jiù shì wǒ de mìmì, yīge hěn jiǎndān de mìmì: Zhǐ yǒu yòng xīnlíng, yīge rén cái néng zhēnzhèng kàn de míngbái; dān shì tòuguò shuāngyǎn kàn-bu-jiàn shìqíng de zhēnxiàng.
‘This is my secret, a very simple secret: only with the spirit, a person can truly understand; just looking through the two eyes cannot see the true image of things.’

And Mǎ 2006:

现在告诉你我的秘密,一个非常简单的秘密:只有用心去观察,才能看的真切;最根本的东西用眼睛是看不见的。
Xiànzài gàosu nǐ wǒ de mìmì, yīge fēicháng jiǎndān de mìmì: Zhǐ yǒu yòng xīn qù guānchá, cái néng kàn de zhēnqiè; zuì gēnběn de dōngxi yòng yǎnjing shì kàn-bu-jiàn de.
‘Now I will tell you my secret, a very simple secret: Only observing with the heart, can see distinctly; the most basic thing with the eyes cannot see.’

If you like comparing translations, you’ll want to spend some time chez the Blogger Formerly Known as Bathrobe.

RFOPH, BROPS, RIHPH.

The multifarious Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience, dissatisfied with Latin’s “lexical conservatism” and “resistance to fancy,” has dug up “two attempts to make Latin interesting—the first in seventh-century Ireland, the second in High Renaissance Italy.” The Italian stuff is well worth looking at (“the legendary 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii” and “Teofilo Folengo, aka. Merlin Coccaius, a favourite of Rabelais’s”), but the one that caught my fancy was “the work of the mysterious Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, a grammarian of sorts from 7th-century Britain or Ireland”:

His treatises, the Epitomae and Epistolae, are full of odd collocations and deliberate perversions and obfuscations. He has been commonly taken as a parodist, though Vivien Law reads him rather as an arcanist. Words in his text are like gnostic spellwords, little observing Latin morphology—at one point he lists Twelve ‘Latins’, his jargon spewing out in a torrent of letters: assena, semedia, numeria (nim, dun, tor, quir, quan, ses, sen, onx, amin, ple), metrofia (dicantabat, bora, gcno, sade, teer, rfoph, brops, rihph, gal, fkal, clitps, mrmos, fann, ulioa, gabpal, blaqth, merc, pal, gatrb, biun, spadx), lumbrosa, sincolla, belsavia, presina, militana, spela, polema. Elsewhere he deliberates about the declension of ego, and specifically about its vocative case (how do you say “O I”?). He writes of word-scrambling, scinderatio fonorum—as if from Greek φωνη—

Scinderatio autem litterarum superflua est, sed tamen a glifosis sensuque subtilibus recipitur; unde et fona breuia scindi magis commodius est quam longa, ut Cicero dicit: RRR SS PP MM N T EE OO A V I, quod sic soluendum est: Spes Romanorum perit.

Somehow I’m not at all surprised that a speaker of Old Irish, the weirdest language I’ve ever studied, came up with those delightfully mad inventions.

Incidentally, it seems to me that some blogger I read regularly recently discussed the first-person vocative (“O I”), but I can’t remember who it was. Step forth in the comment thread and I will link to you forthwith.

The first-person vocative was recently discussed by Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat, who quotes Eco, who is referring to none other than the mad Irishman quoted above.

PINOCHET.

I’m sure many of you have wondered, as I have, what the “correct” pronunciation of Pinochet’s family name is. Well, Eric Bakovic has not only wondered, he’s thoroughly researched it, and this post on Phonoloblog (a follow-up to his earlier Language Log post) has everything you will ever need to know on the subject. Short answer: you can pretty much say it however you like and be correct (in the sense that there are Chileans who say it like that). There are northern dialects in Chile where ch is realized as [š], but more important is the social element; Bakovic quotes a Slate Explainer article by Daniel Engber as follows:

The confusion starts with the ch sound, which can serve as a marker of social class in Chilean Spanish. In educated speech, the Spanish ch is similar to the English pronunciation, as in the word chess. But popular dialect turns the ch into something more like sh. A high-class Chilean would probably pronounce the country’s name as “chee-lay,” while someone with less status might say “shee-lay.” Likewise, the same two people might describe the ex-dictator as “pee-no-chay” and “pee-no-shay.” …

It gets more complicated with the final t. As a general rule, the whole syllable—”chet”—should be spoken aloud. But in casual conversation, Chileans tend to drop the final sound. Someone who pronounced Pinochet as “pee-no-chet” would be correct, but he’d also be speaking in a formal (and perhaps a bit uppity) tone. On the other hand, some Chileans are inclined to use the French pronunciation of Pinochet, since the name is of French Basque origin. In that case, they’d drop the t and go back to “pee-no-shay” or “pee-no-chay.”

Finally, there are those who forgo the other options in favor of the somewhat-derogatory nickname “Pinocho.” When graffiti artists scrawl Pinochet’s name, they sometimes render it as “Pin” alongside the number eight, or “ocho” in Spanish. Thus, “Pinocho.”

Chileans point out that however you say the name, you’re unlikely to be corrected. … It wouldn’t be awkward for two people to have a long discussion about the ex-dictator using two different pronunciations.

How did Pinochet himself say it? Three different sources told the Explainer they knew or remembered how the general or his family pronounced the name. And they gave three conflicting answers. You can hear Pinochet utter his own name two seconds into this video clip from 1980—it sounds a lot like “pee-no-chay.” If you’ve come across another audio or video clip in which Pinochet or a member of his family pronounces the name, please send it to the Explainer.

Bakovic points out that it’s not actually all that clear how he’s saying it in that video because the sound quality is so poor, and also that “Pinochet’s Wikipedia entry says his father was a ‘descendant of Breton immigrants who arrived in Chile during the 18th century’, and Brittany’s quite a way from the Basque country.” Final -t is pronounced in Breton, for what that’s worth, but I’d love to get the actual etymology of the name if anyone knows it.

Bakovich goes on to provide much more information about South American dialects (in particular, my beloved porteño); I recommend the whole post to your attention.

MALAY PRONOUNS II.

Last year I had a post about the complex system of Malay pronouns; now Jordan F. MacVay of MacVaysia has posted an extensive if not exhaustive list sent him by Nizar Ismail. Here’s the (comparatively short) list of 1st person plural pronouns, just to whet your appetite:

Kami – “we”, plural of “I”, listener excluded.
Kita – “we”, “you + I”, “you all + I”, listener(s) included.
Kema – “kami/kita”, in Perak.
Sēpa – “kami”, in Kedah/Penang.
Iboq – “kami” in Semang (an aborigine tribe in Pahang/Terengganu).
Manira – classical “kami/kita”, probably from Sanskrit.
Kita orang or simply kitorang – informal, broken, very common, daily speech. Not used in Indonesia/Brunei.

The list of 2nd person pronouns is truly mind-boggling; the most common in Malaysia is awak, but Nizar says:

Jordan was right about “awak” being a nasty choice when talking to someone older. It’s most suitable for someone in the same level, husband and wife, friends that are not so close. To the children, you can use “kamu” instead. You won’t have much problem like this in Indonesia, but in Malaysia, I suppose you can try using “pakcik” (uncle) and “makcik” (aunty) when talking to someone old enough to be your parents, or just “abang” or “akak” to someone who is old but not old enough to be your parents. Confused? Heck, me too!

The comments are full of additional information, unfortunately much of it in Malay. But the post is quite enough to try to assimilate. Thanks for posting it and letting me know, Jordan!

TURKISH, THE SUN LANGUAGE.

Christopher Culver at Безѹмниѥ has a post on a “theory” so terminally silly you’d think it would have to be the invention of a satirist, but apparently it’s real (in the sense that people actually believe it). Chris begins by quoting Brent Brendemoen on “the so-called Güneş Dil Teorisi, the ‘Sun-language Theory’”:

According to this theory of language development, Turkish was the mother of all languages. Thus it was no longer necessary to search for pure Turkish words to replace Arabic and Persian ones, since the ultimate origin of these words and languages was Turkish anyhow.

He goes on to quote Geoffrey L. Lewis in the first issue of Turkic Languages:

The theme was that man first realized his own identity when he conceived the idea of establishing what the external objections surrounding him were. Language first consisted of gestures, to which some significant sounds were then added. Kvergić saw evidence for his view in the Turkish pronouns. M indicates oneself, as in men the ancient form of ben ‘I’, and elim ‘my hand’….

[The theory] saw the beginning of language as the moment when primitive man looked up at the sun and “Aaa!”

That vocable, , was the “first-degree radical of the Turkish language”. It originally meant sun, then sunlight, warmth, fire, height, bigness, power, god, master, motion, time, distance, life, colour, water, earth, voice. As man’s vocal mechanisms developed, other vowels and consonants became available, each with its own shade of meaning. Because the primeval exclamation was shouted, and it is obviously easier to begin a shout with a vowel than with a consonant, any word now beginning with a consonant originally began with a vowel, since abraded. The words yağmur ‘rain’, çamur ‘mud’, and hamur ‘dough’, for example, are compounded of ağmur ‘flowing water’, preceded by ay ‘high’, ‘earth’ and ah ‘food’ respectively. (The reader is urged not to waste time searching the dictionary for the last four words.)

… [The reformer] Dilmen began the next day with a lengthy outline of the theory, proving, among other things, the identity of English god, German Gott and Turkish kut ‘luck’. The proof is simple enough: Gott is oğ + ot, god is oğ + od, kut is uk + ut. He avoids explaining the second t of Gott by spelling it with only one t.

I can understand how people could have believed this sort of thing in the 18th century, but two centuries later you’d think even language reformers would have a little more sophistication.

LESSER KNOWN MARKS.

Those of us who make a living correcting other people’s writing have long been familiar with the standard proofreader’s marks; now Eve Corbel has come up with some useful additions. The world has long needed a symbol for “remove permanently from your lexicon.” (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)

Update (2010). The link above no longer works, but for the moment the comic is featured on the Geist comix front page.

Update (2017). The Geist link no longer works, but the comic is now available here. Internet, thy name is linkrot!

DARMOK REVISITED.

Last year I did a short post about the allusive Darmok language used on an episode of Star Trek. I should have waited, because the Tensor has done a thorough analysis that will leave you convinced the idea wasn’t even half baked. His conclusion:

It’s not that a language made up entirely out of allusions is unworthy of fictional exploration. Raphael Carter suggests Tamarese is similar to the language of the Ascians in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and I wonder if either of these might have been inspired by the four-character idioms that famously give students of Chinese so much trouble. But stories about such a language-of-allusions just don’t fit into the Star Trek universe because it can’t be squared with the Universal Translator.

See his post for details, which you will enjoy if you (like the Tensor and myself) are an aficionado of both sf and language—speaking of which, see this post at The Millions if you’re interested in my books-of-the-year recommendations, one of which is Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. (Note to self: must read Gene Wolfe’s novels.)