Archives for October 2007

BELGIUM CRACKS UP.

Joel at Far Outliers quotes a chunk of Tony Judt’s new book in a fascinating and depressing post about how identity politics can splinter a country. Of course we’re familiar with this from many other examples (Sri Lanka is a poster child), and of course there’s no blood in the streets, but somehow one doesn’t think of ethnic rivalry going so far in prosperous, peaceful Belgium. Read it and weep.
Just so you’ll have something to take your mind off current political messes, here’s Papa’s Diary Project: “The 1924 diary of Harry Scheurman, transcribed and annotated by his grandson, Matt Unger.” It starts here, on New Year’s Eve, 1923 (“I don’t feel like going out with friends celebrating the N. Year”—but he did anyway: “My New Years Eve, was at an end at an East Side joint where prohibition drinks were freely served, I reached home 4am”); Matt is posting an entry a day, and I look forward to catching up as his Papa (from Snyatyn in Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian empire when he was born and now in Ukraine) discusses baseball, dating, and Jewish life on the Lower East Side, accompanied by his grandson’s annotations and relevant illustrations. Great stuff. (Via this NY Times article. Thanks, Bonnie!)

EURO OR EVRO?

Every time I try taking the EU seriously some piece of nonsense like this comes up to derail the effort. A BBC News story says:

The European Union and Bulgaria are at odds over how to spell the word euro.
The problem lies with Bulgaria’s Cyrillic alphabet, under which the common European currency is spelt “evro” rather than euro.
The row threatens to scupper the signing of an EU accord with Balkan state Montenegro, officials say.
Bulgarian diplomats said they could only sign the document if euro is spelt correctly in the Bulgarian version of the agreement…

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WORDS OF A MAN’S MOUTH.

The site words of a man’s mouth records a great find:

In December of 2005 this autograph book was found at a used knicknack store in Hong Kong’s central district and purchased for 380 Hong Kong dollars. The identity of the book’s original owner is a mystery. The stories the book reveals are hidden in plain sight. Aside from a few quotations in English, the bulk of the entries are in Chinese. Tiny pictures of men dot the pages of the book. The Chinese characters start in earnest on the seventh page… You are invited to browse the pages, comment on the imagery, and if you are able, translate the Chinese characters into English. Perhaps together we can discover (or perhaps imagine) the story behind the owner of this almost lost journal.

It turns out to be a “farewell book” in which classmates wrote quotes or their own thoughts for a fellow student; this is dated 1942 (the year 31 in the Nationalist calendar), and the classmates attended Jiao Da (Shanghai Jiao Tong University). Many of the inscriptions have been translated by commenters, and some of the students have been identified (“Cai Zhu-Hong, the person who signed this page, might be responsible for designing a new steam engine at East Shanghai Shipyard in 1958”; “Xu Shao-Gao, Senior Engineer… Graduated in 1942 from Jiao-Tong University, Department of Mechanical Engineering… Has various positions in the government as well as the Chinese Association of Mechanical Engineering”). A great use of the internet, and it’s very interesting to see what young people write in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. (It’s not clear whether the original owner of the book was Xi Yao or Xi Rao; different translators render it different ways.)

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SLAINTE.

Via the always interesting Far Outliers, another blog discovery: Slainte, “David Goldsworthy’s writings – Indonesia, Irish Music, Language and Linguistics, Mainly Poetry, but not Politics (or Economics).” How can I resist a description like that? His latest post [sorry, the archived link is empty — LH, 2021] is on Jakarta Chinese Indonesian:

Having learned most of my Indonesian in Central Java it came as a bit of a shock when I started working at my current school in Jakarta and being confronted with the Jakarta Chinese variety of Indonesian. I can’t say at this point in time just how much it differs from Central Javanese Indonesian other than it is often spoken at break-neck speed – much faster than one is used to hearing in Java.

I find the Jakarta Chinese variety of Indonesian a fascinating code and wish I had more time to devote to a serious analysis of it.

One difference is the counting system that one often hears. I think it comes from the Hokkien language…

The first five numbers are ce, nok, sa, si, nggo. An earlier post [again, the archived link is empty — LH, 2021] is on the Indonesian Orthodox Church; as my mother used to say, I never thought the subject would come up.

THE POETIC FROG.

Matt of No-sword has a typically informative post about two words for ‘frog’ in Japanese, kaeru and kawazu; he says “The common answer is that kawazu is the ‘old word’ that got replaced by the ‘new word’ kaeru, but this is a misconception. It’s really just another case of semantic overlap combined with poetic versus everyday register,” and proceeds to give a detailed and convincing explanation which you should read if you have any interest in the subject. But I came here to tell you about it because of the kicker:

Kawazu would probably have been forgotten by all but the specialists by now (much like tazu) if it weren’t for one thing: the Dark Side of the Moon of traditional Japanese poetry, that one haikai by Bashō that everyone knows…

古池や かはづ飛び込む 水の音
Furuike ya/ Kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto
Old pond/ Frog jumps in/ Sound of water

Bonus fact: Bashō was actually consciously playing with the kawazu tradition here by attributing the sound to the water rather than the frog. The frog’s implied silence, after centuries of naku kawazu, is a crucial part of the stillness that allows the sound of water to make its impact.

Isn’t that interesting? I’ve read that poem umpteen times without having the slightest inkling of this basic information!

TROUBADOUR BOOKS.

Today, as a reward to myself after two months of steady work, I finally visited Troubadour Books in North Hatfield, which had been recommended to me as one of the best bookstores in the Pioneer Valley. After spending a couple of hours there, I’m willing to state flatly that it’s the best bookstore in the area, and one of the best I’ve been in anywhere. Bob Willig, the owner, got into the business the way all the good ones do: by buying way, way too many books and realizing opening a bookstore was the only way out. (I’ve thought of it, believe me, but working as assistant manager of a bookstore many years ago pretty much inoculated me against the notion; it’s really, really hard to make a go of selling books. And here’s a moment of pure serendipity—I went in to turn down the radio so I could concentrate on what I was writing; WFCR was playing “Keepin’ Out Of Mischief Now,” and as I bent down to turn the knob I heard the line “Books are my best company.” Oh, and no, there’s no website; Bob calls himself “computer-illiterate” and has an ancient desktop with a dial-up connection that regulars needle him about.) When I went in (dropped off by my loving and endlessly tolerant wife) I asked Bob where the Russian history books were and if he had any books in Russian; he leaped into action, taking me around the main room (maneuvring past the piles of books in most of the aisles) and saying “Most of the post-medieval stuff is here, below Germany, but the early history is mostly back here, and I’ve got lots of stuff on Orthodoxy in the religion section… I don’t have much in Russian, but what there is is on the top shelf here.” (I’m compressing drastically, since he likes nothing better than talking about books.) Then a young woman came in and asked about Pound’s Cantos; being a Pound fan and a kibitzer, I trailed along to the Modernist nook (Joyce-Pound-Eliot), where Bob was distressed to be unable to find any copies. “That’s terrible, I usually have a bunch of them. I’m really sorry.” Meanwhile, with my eagle eye I noticed one and sang out like a whale-spotter in a crows-nest: “Upper shelf, on the right!” Everyone was happy, and I got into an extended conversation about Pound, anti-Semitism, Zukofsky, and the sad propensity of otherwise smart and perceptive writers to fall for things like Mussolini saying “I liked your book” (or, in Mark Twain’s case, all those ridiculous business ventures).

But what about the books, you say? Well, yes, I found a few books:

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ETYMOLOGY IN PROUST.

The other night, in our Long March through Proust (begun last November), my wife and I finally finished Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe)—it certainly ends with a bang!—and I now have a question and a complaint. The complaint is an artistic one, and I have not seen it mentioned anywhere: it seems utterly implausible that the narrator is welcomed into the circle of every single person he meets. The problem is not that he’s a self-absorbed cad, since so is pretty much everyone else in those circles, it’s that he’s a nobody from nowhere. His father is a Permanent Secretary in some Ministry or other, which is respectable but not so imposing as to open all doors; the family is well off but not so rich as to open all doors; he himself is an adolescent with lots of fantasies and a deep knowledge of the repertoire of the Paris ballet companies but no ability to do anything significant for anyone. As far as I can make out, a plausible response on the part of an aristocrat being introduced to him would be a vague smile, a limp handshake, and a quick retreat. Instead, every single person, even the goddam Prince de Guermantes, insists that he come to tea/dinner and meet the very best people in France—their normal companions won’t do for this young man, no, it’s got to be the cream of the cream. I’d call it a Mary Sue except that the hero is so repellent. (“Say, honey, could you come help me scout out a restaurant where I can seduce the woman I’ll be taking out to dinner instead of you?”) But you can’t help me with that; I’m just griping to get it out of my system.

The question is this: what the devil are all those etymologies doing in the latter part of Cities of the Plain? On p. 917 of my edition there occurs the following paragraph:

“I shall be all the more delighted to meet her,” I answered him, “because she has promised me a book by the former curé of Combray about the place-names of this region, and I shall be able to remind her of her promise. I’m interested in that priest, and also in etymologies.”

That is followed by four pages of detailed etymological discussion, beginning:

“Don’t put any faith in the ones he gives,” replied Brichot, “there is a copy of the book at la Raspelière, which I have glanced through, but without finding anything of any value; it is a mass of error. Let me give you an example. The word bricq is found in a number of place-names in this neighbourhood. The worthy cleric had the distinctly odd idea that it comes from briga, a height, a fortified place. He finds it already in the Celtic tribes, Latobriges, Nemetobriges, and so forth, and traces it down to such names as Briand, Brion, and so forth. To confine ourselves to the region in which we have the pleasure of your company at this moment, Bricquebose means the wood on the height, Bricqueville the habitation on the height, Bricquebec, where we shall be stopping presently before coming to Maineville, the height by the stream. Now there is not a word of truth in all this, for the simple reason that bricq is the old Norse word which means simply a bridge. Just as fleur, which Mme de Cambremer’s protégé takes infinite pains to connect, in one place with the Scandinavian words floi, flo, in another with the Irish word ae or aer, is, beyond any doubt, the fjord of the Danes, and means harbour. So too, the excellent priest thinks that the station of Saint-Mars-le-Vetu, which adjoins la Raspelière, means Saint-Martin-le-Vieux (vetus). It is unquestionable that the word vieux has played a great part in the toponymy of this region. Vieux comes as a rule from vadum, and means a passage, as at the place called les Vieux. It is what the English call ford (Oxford, Hereford). But, in this particular instance, Vêtu is derived not from vetus, but from vastatus, a place that is devastated and bare…

(The French is below the cut.) Now, I love etymologies as much as anyone and more than most, but I tend to like my etymologies in reference works, where I can be reasonably sure they’re plausible. The musings of a fictional character about fictional place names are of much less interest. I grasp that there are artistic points being made about the preservation of history in names, about the importance of perspective (X says this, but Y says that; I used to believe this, but now I believe that, and it changes the way I think about things), all well and good, but four pages? My wife, who loves Proust and has sat without complaint through hundred-page descriptions of trivial chitchat at posh dinner parties, begged me to skip over the next such section (for the etymologies do not end there, oh no, every time Brichot turns up he feels the need to bring a little more lexical enlightenment)—I had to point out to her that the etymologies helped her get to sleep quickly and probably produced a good sound sleep. But seriously, what’s the point of these passages? After the bricq and the fleur, the fjord and the vetus, what possible gain is there in going on about vasta and holm and carque and dozens of other odd bits of nomenclature? Inquiring minds want to know.

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UNHAPPY MEDIUM AND LANGUAGE OBSESSION.

I love being able to check referral logs and Technorati, because they introduce me to things I might not otherwise find. The latest is Unhappy Medium, the blog of a woman who had been anonymous but is now using her name, Elizabeth Little, because “I no longer have a real job, which means that I no longer fear for my gainful employment. In fact, as a full-time freelancer, I have come to accept the fact that I will never again have truly gainful employment.” (These words describe my situation as well.) She has a book coming out in November, Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, which sounds like a lot of fun:

Biting the Wax Tadpole is my take on comparative linguistics, a fresh, irreverent look at the languages of the world. …[I]f you’re the sort of person who has always believed yourself to be incapable of learning a new language – or even if you’ve just been bored to tears by all the soul-killing grammar classes you’ve suffered though – then you’re the reason I wrote this book. It’s designed to be as accessible and enjoyable as possible, without resorting to the sort of pandering condescension that you find in so many guides to style. Instead of warning against grammatical errors, I revel in them. The way I see it, there’s far more pleasure to be had in fucking up than in grim perfection.
I also wrote the book because if there’s anything in this world that I truly love, it’s language… Although I’m well aware that you probably don’t want to spend your free time rifling through Yoruba grammars, that’s not enough to keep me from standing outside your window with the equivalent of Peter Gabriel on a boombox, doing my best to convince you that language is far more exciting and entertaining than your teachers ever made it out to be.

You tell ’em! And she got the book contract because the publisher saw this essay, “Ablative, Allative, Adessive, Obsessive,” in the NY Times (which I had missed when it came out because I tend to skip the Travel section); it’s a very enjoyable read:

I don’t exactly have the usual collection of literary classics and popular nonfiction. Instead, I have language books. A lot of language books. Several shelves of them, in fact, and they’re not exactly useful titles like French in 30 Seconds or Spanish on the Go. My books are more along the lines of Beginning Dutch, An Introduction to Sanskrit, Practical Mongolian…
The fact of the matter is that foreign-language primers and grammars are my version of a bodice-ripping pirate romance: a guilty pleasure I’d love to hide but can’t quite make go away. I relish conjugation tables and declension charts. I thrill to morphophonemics, glottochronology, perfectiveness.

It can cause problems on dates (“It was only recently that I was in the company of a rather attractive young man and had the bright idea to pull a hefty comparative grammar out of my bag to illustrate the exciting complexities of Finno-Ugric locatives”), but on the whole, it’s a pretty good obsession to have. (But then, I would think that, wouldn’t I?)

SEVEN YEARS OF THE S LOT!

Mark Woods of the indispensable wood s lot posts a mention of his septennial along with a photo of himself wearing a fine hat and a cheerfully dubious expression that suits the sensibility of his dedicated cullings from the online cornucopia. Saith mw:

As I’ve said before (and no doubt will say again), “My sense of collegiality with those of similar sensibilities coupled with the voice I find in producing this collage have acted as a great anodyne for megrims, funks and other assorted black dogs of a chemical, tempermental and/or situational variety.”

Congratulations, keep up the good work, and if those photos are of the countryside around your “small town in Lanark County near Ottawa,” you’re a lucky man.

Incidentally, for those who don’t know, saith (the archaic third person singular of say) is pronounced exactly like the name Seth. It is not “say-eth”; if it were, it would be spelled sayeth, as one form of the archaic second person is spelled sayest.

KHALEEJI PIDGIN.

The always interesting R Devraj of Dick & Garlick (“Notes on Indian English, Hinglish, slang & pop culture”) links to a great post at Chez Sinjab about Khaleeji Pidgin, the confusing “Indo-Anglo-Urdu-Arabic mix” spoken in the Gulf (khalij means ‘gulf’ in Arabic).

I didn’t know sida was Urdu. I think only half of the Arabic I know is actually Arabic. And the more Fusa [fusha, Classical Arabic—LH] I learn, the more I realize that I don’t really know any Arabic at all. It’s ila, not sir; it’s rajul, not riyal and don’t think for a minute that “inta bachem?” is an acceptable way to ask a woman if she has children.
But here it is. This is by no means the Emirati dialect, but in the shops and on the streets of Ras Al Khaimah this is a popular and effective way for people with no common language to communicate. And so somehow I can convey more with a handful of words, and a few good hand signals and guttural gruffs than I could if I had a degree in grammatically sound Arabic.
Of course, there are certain rules to Khaleeji pidgin.

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