Archives for January 2007

There may be nobody out there as fond of multilingual maps as I am (I can’t tell you how excited I was, years ago, to get hold of a trilingual map of Transylvania), but I’m going to blog this anyway: a Finnish/Russian map of the Karelian Isthmus (the region north and northwest of St. Petersburg that was taken from Finland after World War Two and added to Leningrad Oblast). It’s in a dozen sections; click on any of them and it opens up in a separate window, and if you click on that it expands to the point where you can easily read the names of every little feature of the landscape. I had given up on trying to find out exactly where Mustamäki and Neuvola (or Neivola) were from other internet and printed sources, but this section locates them precisely (northwest of Roshchino/Raivola). I know I’ve said this many times before, but: I love the internet. (Found via this Russian page on the Yalkala Museum.)
Addendum. I’ve discovered a more detailed online map of the southern part of Karelia, also bilingual (Finnish/Russian).

Karl Kraus, the great Austrian essayist, playwright, and cranky observer of mankind, is one of my favorite authors, so it is with great pleasure that I report to you, in the words of the Literary Saloon:

Karl Kraus died in 1936, and so as of this year his work is in the public domain in Austria — which also means they’ve now been able to open the doors to the Austrian Academy Corpus digital edition of his journal Die Fackel (‘The Torch’):

The AAC digital edition of the journal Die Fackel, edited by Karl Kraus from 1899 to 1936, offers free online access to the 37 volumes, 415 issues, 922 numbers, comprising more than 22.500 pages and 6 million wordforms.
The AAC-FACKEL contains a fully searchable database of the entire journal with various indexes, search tools and navigation aids in an innovative and highly functional graphic design interface, in which all pages of the original are available as digital texts and as facsimile images.

Unfortunately, for some inscrutable reason they require you to register, but it’s free and a relatively minor imposition considering the wealth now open to you (assuming you read German). Thanks, as so often, to wood s lot for the news.

Every once in a while, in the course of my ever-expanding investigations into the history of everything, I run across some obscure figure who seems worth writing about. The latest is Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (or Fyodorovich Fyodorov, if you prefer); I gather he’s not that obscure in Russia, but I’d never heard of him. He was born in 1828 (according to my reference books) or 1829 (according to various online sources), the illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Ivanovich Gagarin (as was customary in such cases, he was given the name and patronymic of his godfather); he had a decent education (though he was expelled from the Richelieu Lyceum of Odessa) and became a peripatetic teacher of history and geography before finding library work in Moscow in 1868. A decade later he joined the staff of the Rumyantsev Museum (now the Russian State Library), where he spent the next quarter of a century writing religio-philosophico-quasiscientific tracts that apparently impressed the likes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (though he published nothing during his lifetime—did they get manuscripts, or was it all word of mouth?). What he’s best known for is his insistence that mankind must become immortal and bring everyone who ever lived back to life, which sounds like standard-issue kookery but was apparently taken seriously in the Soviet period, influencing “scientific research… and even government policy” (according to S.V. Utechin). But the details! James Billington, in his indispensible The Icon and the Axe, says (on p. 443): “He also returned periodically to the idea that the assertive, artificial world of men contains less wisdom than that of animals, and that of animals less than that of the composed and earth-bound vegetable world.” So next time you eat a carrot, remember—it may be wiser than you! And according to the Russian Wikipedia entry, he refused to allow himself to be photographed or painted; the only existing representation was surreptitiously drawn by Leonid Pasternak, the poet’s father.

What has this to do with language, you say? I’ll tell you: according to Stephen Lukashevich’s N. F. Fedorov (1828-1903): A Study in Russian Eupsychian and Utopian Thought (pp. 144 ff.), Fedorov thought language began as an attempt to communicate with the dead fathers in the sky, and writing was “another fictitious resurrection of the dead fathers”:

As the evolution of mankind was accompanied by a process of secularization, the written language gradually lost its sacred, resurrectional character and its pictorial expression, until it became phonetic and alphabetical. Yet apparently this process of the secularization of the written language met with resistance, as witnessed by the fact that the writers and copyists of the Middle Ages continued to embellish their texts with a calligraphy and illuminations that often were as complex as the hieroglyphics and ideograms of the past. Moreover, their penmanship continued to retain its sacred character to the extent that it was possible to speak of a Gothic or of a Byzantine style of writing, just as one could speak of Gothic or Byzantine church architecture. But with the appearance of the cult of progress, which repudiated as evil all that was past, the written language lost its sacred, resurrectional character and became a means for preparing legal and commercial documents. Furthermore, as repudiation of the past and of the ancestors (fathers) was also a repudiation of fraternity, so too the written language, which helped the cause of progress, became a vehicle for the unfraternal relations that reigned in the modern world. Accordingly, the complex calligraphy and the intricate styles of penmanship yielded, first to plain, official writing, then to soberly efficient printing, and, finally to shorthand and stenography.

Fedorov called modern writing “the work of men who have stopped being human and who have become typewriters.” The quote is from his (posthumous) magnum opus, Философия общего дела [The Philosophy of the Common Task], originally published 1906-13 and available in English in What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task: Selected Works, ed. E. Koutiassov and M. Minto (Lausanne, Switzerland: Honeyglen/L’Age d’Homme, 1990). Besides the Wikipedia articles linked above (the Russian one has links to many of his writings in Russian), this webpage has a convenient summary of his views. I don’t know why, but I have an unreasonable fondness for these unaffiliated crackpots, burrowing away at their obsessive analyses of Life, God, and Meaning, glaring with half-seeing eyes at the world around them and scribbling, scribbling, scribbling. If his project for mass resurrection gets underway, I look forward to having a chat with Nikolai Fedorovich.

Yvonne Warburton, Online Publication Manager of the OED, writes about the trouble she had tracking down the first recorded occurrence of the phrase the thin red line: “It was generally believed to be associated with the Battle of Balaclava, which took place in 1854. It therefore seemed reasonable to assume that I would be able to find an 1854 first quotation, especially as the phrase was attributed in many later sources to Sir William Howard Russell, who was war correspondent for the Times during the Crimean War.” But it wasn’t nearly that simple, and the earliest citation they’ve found so far is from “a book by Russell called The British Expedition to the Crimea, published in 1887.” Well worth reading if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty of finding cites, and my thanks to aldiboronti at Wordorigins for bringing it to my attention!

Update (2019). Owlmirror has found an update that provides an 1855 citation:

And finally (for now) the expression has been uncovered in The Times of 24 January 1855, citing a debate about the distribution of ‘Crimean medals’ in the House of Lords the previous evening at which the Earl of Ellenborough had said:

“Nor were the services performed by the gallant 93d Regiment..to be forgotten – the services of that ‘thin red line’ which had met and routed the Russian cavalry.”

One of my favorite novelists, Richard Powers, has an essay in the latest NY Times Book Review in which he says “I haven’t touched a keyboard for years”: he just speaks into a microphone and lets his computer do the rest.

For most of history, most reading was done out loud. Augustine remarks with surprise that Bishop Ambrose could read without moving his tongue. Our passage into silent text came late and slow, and poets have resisted it all the way. From Homer to hip-hop, the hum is what counts. Blind Milton chanted “Paradise Lost” to his daughters. Of his 159-line “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth said, “I began it upon leaving Tintern … and concluded … after a ramble of four or five days. … Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.” Wallace Stevens used to compose while walking to work, then dictate the results to his secretary, before proceeding to his official correspondence as vice president of the Hartford insurance company[…] The all-time champion of Xtreme Dictation, though, must be Thomas Aquinas. Witnesses report how he could relay four different topics to four secretaries at once, and even (Maritain writes) “lay down to rest in the midst of the dictation to continue to dictate while sleeping.” That’s what I really want from my tablet; I trust that technicians are working on the problem.
Why all this need for speech? Long after we’ve fully retooled for printed silence, we still feel residual meaning in the wake of how things sound. Speech and writing share some major neural circuitry, much of it auditory. All readers, even the fast ones, subvocalize. That’s why so many writers — like Flaubert, shouting his sentences in his gueuloir — test the rightness of their words out loud.
What could be less conducive to thought’s cadences than stopping every time your short-term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You’d be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow.

I should try it sometime, but being lazy and Luddish, I probably won’t.

While editing a medical article I just came across the term “tetraplegia”; I assumed it should be quadriplegia, since it wasn’t in my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, but a Google search led me to the relevant Wikipedia article, which says:

Quadriplegia, also known as tetraplegia, is a symptom in which a human experiences paralysis of all four limbs… The condition is also termed tetraplegia; both terms mean “paralysis of four limbs”, however tetraplegia is becoming the more accepted term for this condition. Tetraplegia, used commonly in Europe, is the more etymologically correct version since both “tetra” and “plegia” are Greek roots whereas “quadra” is a Latin root.

I wasn’t aware that anyone still cared about what used to be called “bastard words,” and I’m very pleased to be proved wrong. Now if only they’d do something about television…
Of course, I’m not comfortable taking Wikipedia’s word for it; does anybody know whether the tetra- form is in fact increasingly used in English?

I don’t often have occasion to try to decipher a bit of Thai, but when I do, I’ll be awfully glad to be able to simply type it into thai2english rather than having to leaf through Mary Haas’s Thai-English Student’s Dictionary trying to find the right string of characters. Once you’ve entered your text, you get this notice:

The transliteration for the text you entered is shown below. Moving your mouse over any underlined word will bring up a dictionary definition for it, or you can get a more detailed definition by clicking on the word. Clicking on the arrow at the start of each line will show a definition of every word in that line.

And it works! Thanks go to MMcM of Polyglot Vegetarian for linking to it in the course of a long and fascinating entry on a Boston Thai restaurant named Coconut Cafe, part of which is devoted to an examination of the words for ‘coconut’ in many languages; the only thing I would have added is the tidbit that Persian نارگیل nārgil, “from one of the Indian languages” (cf. Sanskrit नारीकेल nārikela), is the source of English narghile, since coconuts were originally used in making the things. (Oh, and I would have put macrons on the long a’s. Picky, picky.)

John Emerson of Idiocentrism has alerted me to a webpage presenting the correspondence of Augustine and Jerome concerning the Latin translation of the Bible: three letters from the former, one from the latter, and an excerpt from Book 18 of Augustine’s City of God. Jerome slaps Augustine down pretty effectively:

… you ask why a former translation which I made of some of the canonical books was carefully marked with asterisks and obelisks, whereas I afterwards published a translation without these. You must pardon my saying that you seem to me not to understand the matter: for the former translation is from the Septuagint; and wherever obelisks are placed, they are designed to indicate that the Seventy have said more than is found in the Hebrew. But the asterisks indicate what has been added by Origen from the version of Theodotion. In that version I was translating from the Greek: but in the later version, translating from the Hebrew itself, I have expressed what I understood it to mean, being careful to preserve rather the exact sense than the order of the words. I am surprised that you do not read the books of the Seventy translators in the genuine form in which they were originally given to the world, but as they have been corrected, or rather corrupted, by Origen, with his obelisks and asterisks […]. Do you wish to be a true admirer and partisan of the Seventy translators? Then do not read what you find under the asterisks; rather erase them from the volumes, that you may approve yourself indeed a follower of the ancients. If, however, you do this, you will be compelled to find fault with all the libraries of the Churches; for you will scarcely find more than one manuscript here and there which has not these interpolations.

The Gate2Home site “enables you to write in your language wherever you are in the world, with an online onscreen keyboard emulator”:

The need for this site arose due to the lack of possibility to change the keyboard language at internet places around the world. These places usually allow you to view sites in your language due to IE language encoding, but don’t allow you to type in your language (because of administrator or system limitations). Furthermore, even if you can change the language, you’ll probably find yourself in front of a keyboard with a different language layout, and you’ll have to guess the position of the keys.
However, this site solves those problems by allowing you to type in your language, and to view your language’s keyboard layout on-screen in a virtual Semi-Real keyboard. It also allows you to simply type in a different language without messing with the operating system settings.

The languages included are: Albanian (Shqip) / Arabic (العربية) / Armenian (հայերեն) / Azeri (Azərbaycan) / Belarusian (Беларуская) / Bengali (বাংলা) / Bulgarian (Български) / Chinese (中文) / Croatian (hrvatski) / Czech (Česky) / Danish (dansk) / Devanagari (देवनागरी) / Divehi (ދިވެހި) / Dutch (Nederlands) / English (English) / Estonian (eesti) / Faeroese ( Føroyskt) / Farsi Persian (فارسی) / Finnish (suomi) / French (Français) / Gaelic (Gàidhlig/Gaeilge) / Georgian ( ქართული) / German (Deutsch) / Greek (Ελληνικά) / Gujarati (ગુજરાતી) / Hebrew (עברית) / Hindi (हिन्दी) / Hungarian (magyar) / Icelandic ( Íslenska) / Irish (Gaeilge) / Italian (italiano) / Japanese (日本語) / Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ) / Kazakh (Қазақ) / Korean (한국어) / Kyrgyz (Кыргыз) / Latvian (Latviešu) / Lithuanian ( Lietuvių) / Macedonian (Македонски) / Malayalam (മലയാളം) / Maltese (Malti) / Maori (Māori) / Marathi (मराठी) / Mongolian (Монгол) / Multilingual / Norwegian (Norsk) / Polish (Polski) / Portuguese (Português) / Punjabi (ਪਜਾਬੀ/पंजाबी) / Romanian (Română) / Russian (Русский) / Serbian (Српски) / Slovak (Slovenčina) / Slovenian (Slovenščina) / Spanish (español) / Swedish (svenska) / Syriac / Tamil (தமிழ்) / Tatar (Tatarça) / Telugu (తెలుగు) / Thai (ไทย) / Turkish (Türkçe) / Ukrainian (Українська) / Urdu (اردو) / Uzbek (Ўзбек) / Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt). All I can say is, this is truly wonderful. (Via MetaFilter.)

Arnold Zwicky of Language Log posts a detailed exegesis of the words and phrases used in a recent Zippy cartoon: “Nov shmoz ka pop?” “Notary Sojac!” “Nize baby! Banana oil! Jeep!” “Potrzebie! Ferschlugginer! Axolotl!” I’m too young to remember The Squirrel Cage or Smokey Stover (though the phrase “Nov shmoz ka pop,” from the former, does ring a faint bell, so I must have seen it used somewhere by someone quoting it, perhaps in my days in science fiction fandom), but the Mad Magazine flashbacks were a nostalgic thrill. I remember how bamboozled I was when I discovered that potrzebie was an actual Polish word, pronounced po-CHEB-yeh rather than POT-er-zee-bee; I still, however, use the latter pronunciation, because I speak Mad but I don’t speak Polish.