Archives for March 2008

This Wikipedia article has an extensive list of “Informal names for unknown or unspecified persons in various countries/regions” [As of 2017, replaced by this article, “List of terms related to an average person”]; as I said in the MetaFilter thread where I found it, it’s annoying that all the names are lumped together with only occasional attempts to distinguish legal terms (John Doe) from colloquial ones (Joe Blow), but it’s still a lot of fun. Where else are you going to learn that the term in the Faroe Islands is Miðalhampamaður?

Via dirk at Pepys Diary, this delightful excerpt from George Borrow’s Lavengro:

The very first person to whose care I was intrusted for the acquisition of Latin was an old friend of my fathers, a clergyman who kept a seminary at a town the very next we visited after our departure from ‘the Cross.’ Under his instruction, however, I continued only a few weeks, as we speedily left the place. ‘Captain,’ said this divine, when my father came to take leave of him on the eve of our departure, ‘I have a friendship for you, and therefore wish to give you a piece of advice concerning this son of yours. You are now removing him from my care; you do wrong, but we will let that pass. Listen to me: there is but one good school-book in the world – the one I use in my seminary – Lilly’s Latin grammar, in which your son has already made some progress. If you are anxious for the success of your son in life, for the correctness of his conduct and the soundness of his principles, keep him to Lilly’s grammar. If you can by any means, either fair or foul, induce him to get by heart Lilly’s Latin grammar, you may set your heart at rest with respect to him; I, myself, will be his warrant. I never yet knew a boy that was induced, either by fair means or foul, to learn Lilly’s Latin grammar by heart, who did not turn out a man, provided he lived long enough.’
My father, who did not understand the classical languages, received with respect the advice of his old friend, and from that moment conceived the highest opinion of Lilly’s Latin grammar. During three years I studied Lilly’s Latin grammar under the tuition of various schoolmasters, for I travelled with the regiment, and in every town in which we were stationary I was invariably (God bless my father!) sent to the classical academy of the place. It chanced, by good fortune, that in the generality of these schools the grammar of Lilly was in use; when, however, that was not the case, it made no difference in my educational course, my father always stipulating with the masters that I should be daily examined in Lilly. At the end of the three years I had the whole by heart; you had only to repeat the first two or three words of any sentence in any part of the book, and forthwith I would open cry, commencing without blundering and hesitation, and continue till you were glad to beg me to leave off, with many expressions of admiration at my proficiency in the Latin language. Sometimes, however, to convince you how well I merited these encomiums, I would follow you to the bottom of the stair, and even into the street, repeating in a kind of sing-song measure the sonorous lines of the golden schoolmaster. If I am here asked whether I understood anything of what I had got by heart, I reply – ‘Never mind, I understand it all now, and believe that no one ever yet got Lilly’s Latin grammar by heart when young, who repented of the feat at a mature age.’

If you wish to perfect your own education by memorizing Lily (the more usual spelling), here‘s an edition on Google Books.

Another fun etymology (via wordorigins.org): pettifogger (“a lawyer who engages in petty quibbling and cavilling, or who employs dubious or underhanded legal practices”) is explained by the OED as simply petty plus the earlier fogger, and the OED says of the latter:

[Of somewhat obscure history; but prob. derived from Fugger, the surname of a renowned family of merchants and financiers of Augsburg in the 15th and 16th c.
The name passed as an appellative into several European langs. In German fugger, fucker, focker (see Grimm) has had the senses ‘monopolist, engrosser’, ‘usurer’, ‘man of great wealth’, ‘great merchant’, and, in certain dialects (doubtless originally through ironical use), ‘huckster, pedlar.’ Kilian 1598 has Flem. focker ‘monopolist, universal dealer’ (monopola, pantopola), giving fuggerus and fuccardus as popular mod.L. equivalents; and in mod.Du. rijke fokker is an avaricious rich man. Walloon foukeur and Sp. fúcar are contemptuous designations for a man of great wealth. A ‘petty Fugger’ would mean one who on a small scale practises the dishonourable devices for gain poularly attributed to great financiers; it seems possible that the phrase ‘petty fogger of the law’, applied in this sense to some notorious person, may have caught the popular fancy, and so have given rise to the specialized use in sense 1. …]
1. A person given to underhand practices for the sake of gain; chiefly, a contemptuous designation for a lawyer of a low class. Usually preceded by petty (see PETTIFOGGER). Obs.
1576 FLEMING Panopl. Epist. 320 As for this pettie fogger, this false fellowe that is in no credite or countenance. […]

Yes, the jokes write themselves.

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has a thoughtful post pointing out that “Not everyone welcomes language revitalisation efforts”:

Apart from anything else, it often implies that a major decision taken by you or your parents – to speak to the children in a different language – was wrong, and, by increasing your exposure to the endangered language in question, puts you in a position where you can’t help but notice that this decision’s implications are nearly irreversible. (I have speculated that this might be one reason for the less than enthusiastic reaction of some of the first speakers to have brought up their kids as Arabic monolinguals to my arrival in Tabelbala.)

He goes on to quote a moving post by the Scottish writer Ken MacLeod that moves from Gaelic-English bilingual roadsigns to a meditation on “forgetting the language, leaving it to dwindle in the Sunday-morning sermon and the ceilidh and the old folks’ private talk.” Well worth the read, as are Lameen’s recent posts on Kwarandzie.

Continuing to read Ostler (see this post), I just hit this passage I have to share with you. He’s been discussing the spread of Aramaic, which replaced the earlier lingua franca Akkadian thanks to the Stalinesque Assyrian policy of deporting entire conquered populations (many of which were from the west and spoke Aramaic) and relocating them elsewhere in the empire, and the repercussions of the new ink-and-papyrus writing system it brought in its wake:

The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for ‘scribe’ came into use in Akkadian, sēpiru. as opposed to the old ṭupsarru, ‘tablet writer’, which went right back to the Sumerian word dubsar. Pictures of scribes at work from the mid-eighth century show them in pairs, one with a stylus and a tablet, the other with a pen and a sheet of papyrus or parchment. As with the onset of computers, good bureaucrats must have ensured that the old and the new coexisted for a long time: the ‘clay-free office’ did not happen in Assyria till the destruction of the empire by the Medes in 610 BC. ([footnote]In Babylon some diehards were still writing Akkadian on clay six centuries later.)

Twenty years ago I bought and read The Hill of Kronos by Peter Levi. This memoir of Levi’s love affair with Greece and its literature formed, along with The Flight of Ikaros by Kevin Andrews and of course lascivious old Henry Miller’s irresistible The Colossus of Maroussi, the basis of my image of Greece before my own visit (which thoroughly lived up to expectations).

In the first chapter, after saying “it was not difficult to meet poets in Athens, since they all went to the same three or four cafes and bars,” Levi introduces one of the heroes of the book, who recurs throughout as a touchstone of Greekness:

When I arrived I walked straight to Flocca and left a message with a waiter for Nikos Gatsos. He was in the cafe and he came over. He was the most enchanting and unexpected friend I had ever made. His appearance is that of an elephant of brilliant intelligence and extraordinary kindness. In forty years he has moved cafes once, when the old one was pulled down, and tables twice. His smile is seductive, his shoulders hunch, his eyes are hooded but distinctly mischievous. His conversation, which ranges widely, is humourous and subtle, pausing like a river to take in any strange object that presents itself. He knows more about poetry than anyone else I have ever met. He is admirably mysterious.

He makes his living as a song-writer, which means that over many years the Greeks have had better-written songs than anyone else, and by translations. As a poet he claims to have been on strike for forty years, but his long early poem, Amorgos, named after an island he has never seen, is one of the master works of the century; and if ever I knew a poet, and a great poet, he still is one. He was the son of an innkeeper in what was then a remote village in Arkadia. George Seferis once said to me that the only person alive he envied for his grasp of the Greek language was Gatsos. There is an element of surrealism in Amorgos, like cold water so refreshing it makes one gasp. But his language, the form of his speech, has a continuity with folk-songs. In his childhood that was still a living language:

And because of this I would have you, young men, to go down naked into the rivers
With wine and kisses and leaves in your mouth
To sing of Barbary as the carpenter follows the track of the wood’s grain
As the viper moves out from the garden of the barley
With her proud eyes furious
And as the strokes of lightning thresh the young

The translation I quote is by Sally Purcell.

[Read more…]

I’m slowly working my way through Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, a book I’d been dying to read and finally got last summer, and I just hit the brief excursus on Elamite (which is probably related to Dravidian). I had not realized that Elamite was still spoken when Alexander conquered the area (and possibly as late as the Arab conquest), nor had I realized that Elam became the heart of the Old Persian empire:

Two generations later, in 522 BC, Darius (Dārayavauš), the Persian heir to Anshan, took control of the whole Persian empire, which by now extended from Egypt and Anatolia to the borders of India. Despite two abortive Elamite rebellions shortly after his accession, he chose Elam as the hub of this empire, with Susa itself (known to him as Šušan) as the administrative capital, and Parša, i.e. Anshan, as the site for a new ceremonial capital, to be better known in the West by its Greek name of Persepolis.

He goes on to make the following interesting observation:

The Persians had never prized literacy very highly. Famously, their leaders were educated in three things only: to ride a horse, to shoot a straight arrow, and to tell the truth. So their Elamite neighbours, with two thousand years of cuneiform education behind them, were well placed to be extremely useful in the more humdrum side of empire-building.

Which means the Elamites played the same role with respect to the Old Persians as the Persians played with respect to the Turks a millennium and a half later.
An amusing sidelight: “Nevertheless, Elamite must have continued to be spoken in Elam [after a long period of Akkadian domination], since in 1300 BC it springs back to life as the official language, replacing Akkadian for all written purposes, except curses.” (Emphasis added.)

Richard Polt, a philosophy professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati specializing in Heidegger, has a serious obsession with typewriters, and he has written a very philosophical article (with great illustrations) called Typology: A Phenomenology of Early Typewriters (“The metaphysical significance of writing machines”):

The typewriter is in the process of becoming a thing of the past, along with dial phones and vinyl records. “Things of the past” are still present, of course — it’s their world that is absent (as Heidegger says somewhere about museum pieces). The context in which these things once fit, which gave them their appropriateness and integrated them into human lives, has slipped away — disappearing, piece by imperceptible piece, until one day we recognize that the Gestalt has already changed, that we live in a new world. …

… My own interest in early typewriters — writing machines of the 1870s through the 1930s — is primarily imaginative: these survivors draw me, both as conduits for written signs and as signs themselves of a lost world. In this talk I will try to use my imaginative interest as a basis for phenomenological reflection. I am going to focus especially on the question of “typing”: that is, both our acts of identifying types or forms of things, and the process by which types are themselves generated. What I think I see in typewriters is the finitude of typing.

If that’s too metaphysical for you, check out his Classic Typewriter Page; if you have even the slightest interest in typewriters, I guarantee you there’s something for you there, from the Brief History of Typewriters to the Typewriter Parts page (“What to call the whatchamacallits”) to ETCetera, the journal of the Early Typewriter Collectors Association (edited, of course, by Polk).

Previous LH typewriter posts: History of the Russian Typewriter and Polyglot Typewriting; I see that in the latter I linked to Polk’s list of typewriter repair shops worldwide. You can’t escape the guy! (Typology link via wood s lot.)

Another etymological adventure: I saw a reference to the fact that ajar was originally on char ‘on the turn’ (i.e., of a door, ‘slightly opened’), and I thought I’d investigate this mysterious char. The OED lists it as “chare, char,” saying the original but now obsolete sense ‘turn’ (whence either ‘occasion, time’ or ‘turning back, return’) is usually cher or char. An extension of this sense is ‘turn or stroke of work; an action, deed; a piece of work or business,’ and this develops the specialized meaning ‘an occasional turn of work, an odd job, esp. of household work; hence in pl. the household work of a domestic servant’ (1606 SHAKES. Ant. & Cl. IV. xv. 75 The Maid that Milkes, And doe’s the meanest chares; 1881 HUXLEY Sc. & Cult. ii. 34 Mere handicrafts and chares). But this, the “extant sense,” is “now usually CHORE.” Cue lightbulb over head.

What’s the etymology, you ask? Tangled:

OE. cerr, cierr, cyrr, masc. i- stem:—O.Teut. type *karri-z or *karzi-z… Often identified with OHG. chêr, MHG. kêr, Ger. kehr, MDu. kêr, Du. keer, masc.; besides which there is OHG. chêra, MHG. kêre, Ger. kehre, MDu. and MLG. kêre, LG. kêr str. fem.; but these represent OTeut. types *kairi-z-oz or kaizi-z, oz, and *kairâ or *kaizâ, the vowel of which has no connexion with that of the OE. word. No forms cognate to either are known outside Teutonic.

A few years ago I did a post on Chinese braille; now Matt of No-sword has done a couple of posts about the Japanese versions (kana, kanji), and Joel of Far Outliers has responded with Braille Family Resemblances and Mutations:

All varieties of Braille render the characters of their respective languages in a six-dot matrix (or did until until recently); all are read from left to right, even in Hebrew; all use word-spacing, even in Chinese and Japanese; and all tend to place diacritic characters before the characters they modify.

Fascinating stuff.