Archives for July 2008

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat discusses an interesting phenomenon in this post:

In Qur’anic Arabic (this is hardly ever applied in Modern Standard), at least in presentative contexts, the word “that” agrees in number and gender not only with the noun it refers to, but also with the addressee. (A YouTube video lecture on this by some shaykh is available for Arabic-speakers.) “That” is morphologically composed of two elements. The first bit agrees with the referent [examples]… The second bit agrees with the addressee [more examples]…

He finishes up with the question “do you know of any other language that does something like this?” So I thought I’d pass it along.

Mendele (Forum for Yiddish Literature and Yiddish Language) publishes a magazine, The Mendele Review, which recently devoted an issue to Waiting for Godot in Yiddish. “There are two known Yiddish translations of the play – Gizela Shkilnik’s posthumously published version from German issued by the Y.-L. Perets Farlag in Tel-Aviv in 1980 and a relatively recent unpublished version from English by Rina Yosifon of Haifa. The translators are briefly introduced and their translations of the Lucky monologue summarily compared – readers will wish to make their own comparisons.” My Yiddish is minimal and certainly not up to making comparisons (you can see both versions by scrolling down at the last link; direct links: Shkilnik, Yosifon), but I did very much enjoy listening to Rina Yosifon’s version (mp3 file); one thing that made made me laugh out loud was the rendering of “Seine Seine-et-Oise Seine-et-Marne Marne-et-Oise” by טראָצקי, װיסאָצקי און פּלאָצקי [Trotsky, Vysotsky, and Brodsky Plotsky]. Thanks, John!
(The monologue in French is below; I realize the translations are from German and English, which is a shame, but French is what I have, and it is after all the original original.)

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The always interesting eudæmonist has a post about working to pass a language proficiency interview in Armenian that includes the following reflection:

Another thing: so at the end of the interview, when the examiner was reviewing my errors, she said to me, ‘I understand that you’re thinking in English and then translating…’ and that got me thinking, because I didn’t think it was quite accurate. I wasn’t thinking in English so much as I had a mess of meaning (apart from language) that I wanted to communicate; the thought itself (or the meaning) was not in any particular language, and when Armenian failed, my brain supplied German,³ and when German failed, only then did my brain revert to English. It felt like I was dipping into my pool of language knowledge to find the means of communication, and due to the limits of what I have been able to learn, was coming back dry, in Armenian at least. Thus if I were asked, ‘what do want to say,’ I would have an English response, not because the original thought was in English but because English was the means by which I was able to express it.⁴

Footnote 3 says “The situation requiring a ‘foreign’ language, that is the one my brain rather stintingly supplies. Greek and Latin remain in the passive understanding, sadly,” and footnote 4 “I feel as though I have unwittingly fallen on one side of a theoretical debate I know nothing about and which frankly doesn’t interest me at present.” Whichever side it is, I think I’m on the same one.

Frequent commenter Kári Tulinius sent me the most sensible thing I’ve yet read about texting (a form of communication with which I, fossil that I am, have had zero experience), a Guardian piece, 2b or not 2b?, by that eminently sensible man, David Crystal. Some nuggets:

People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of it uses a distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages might seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. There is no point in paying to send a message if it breaks so many rules that it ceases to be intelligible. When messages are longer, containing more information, the amount of standard orthography increases. Many texters alter just the grammatical words (such as “you” and “be”). As older and more conservative language users have begun to text, an even more standardised style has appeared. Some texters refuse to depart at all from traditional orthography. And conventional spelling and punctuation is the norm when institutions send out information messages, as in this university text to students: “Weather Alert! No classes today due to snow storm”, or in the texts which radio listeners are invited to send in to programmes. These institutional messages now form the majority of texts in cyberspace – and several organisations forbid the use of abbreviations, knowing that many readers will not understand them. Bad textiquette.
Research has made it clear that the early media hysteria about the novelty (and thus the dangers) of text messaging was misplaced. In one American study, less than 20% of the text messages looked at showed abbreviated forms of any kind – about three per message. And in a Norwegian study, the proportion was even lower, with just 6% using abbreviations. In my own text collection, the figure is about 10%…

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John Kinsella had an essay a couple of years ago in Australian Book Review called “Parrotology: On the Necessity of Parrots in Poetry.” I had not even realized that parrots were considered a tired trope of Australian poetry, but Kinsella explains both that and the necessity (as he sees it) of retaining the parrot as “an addictively necessary part of a poetics.” It’s an enjoyable read:

Despising nation and patriotism and jingoism as I do, I baulk when I hear that ‘parrots’ are clichés or overused symbols of Australia, particularly the outback. I have a personal history of parrotology, a deep respect for all their varieties, and a fascination for their manifestations in literature, particularly poetry. For me, a parrot isn’t simply a parrot. In the thrust forward to make of Australian poetry some-thing more cosmopolitan, internationalist and sophisticated, there’s been some throwing of the baby out with the bathwater. Arguments of literary maturity are the old cultural cringe stuff reformed as residue, a bit like the cherishing of remnant bushland when all else is reduced to salinity. The parrot becomes a transitional object in this child-nation’s shift from linguistic acquisition to linguistic confidence and exploration.
Arguably, this exploration of linguistic possibilities in poetry — searching for new ways of expressing confidence in identity — is parallel to, or maybe even an extension of, the narratives of exploration that ‘opened up’ land for ‘settler’ use, and sought to reset the co-ordinates (namings, markings, topography and explication) of place, with the aim of creating ‘guilt-free’ occupation. It might well be, disturbingly, a new form of colonisation…

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Mark Liberman at the Log has a great post on the history of the Place des États-Unis in Paris. It was called the place de Bitche, after a town in Moselle “which had valiantly resisted the Prussian invasion during the war of 1870,” until 1881, when the U.S. embassy moved there. The name was so offensive to American sensibilities that the Mayor of Paris changed it to its present name, which it has kept even though the embassy moved to the Place de la Concorde some decades later. One odd sidelight is that the French apparently think bitch means ‘prostitute,’ probably because (as Laurent C says in the comments) English “son of a bitch” is equivalent to French “fils de pute.”

I’ve started reading War and Peace in Russian (something I’ve been wanting to do for many years), prompted by reaching that point in Henri Troyat’s biography, and in the very first section I’ve noticed several items of linguistic interest. The first thing, of course, is the fact that the first paragraph of the Great Russian Novel is almost entirely in French; Tolstoy goes on to talk about “том изысканном французском языке, на котором не только говорили, но и думали наши деды” [‘that recherché/distingué/refined/exquisite French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought’]. The second paragraph includes this bit of language history: “у нее был грипп, как она говорила (грипп был тогда новое слово, употреблявшееся только редкими)” [‘she had the grippe, as she said (grippe was then [July 1805] a new word, used only by the few)’].

But it’s at the end of the section that the linguistic interest intensifies to the point that it grippes me by the throat and won’t let go. Prince Vasilii has arrived early at Anna Scherer’s soirée in order to propose his son as first secretary in Vienna (at the Russian embassy, I presume), Anna having influence at court, but she shoots the idea down (with “an expression of devotion and respect, joined with sadness”). She then makes a counterproposal: he should marry off his “prodigal son” Anatolii to the daughter of the “rich and miserly” Prince Bolkonskii (modeled on Tolstoy’s own maternal grandfather, Prince Volkonskii). The prince perks up immediately and says:

Ecoutez, chère Annette. Arrangez-moi cette affaire et je suis votre вернейший раб à tout jamais (рап — comme mon староста m’écrit des донесенья: покой-ер-п).

The first part of this, before the parenthesis, is unproblematic: “Listen, dear Annette, arrange this affair for me and I am your most faithful slave forever.” The parenthesis, though, involves some kind of wordplay I can only partially penetrate: “rap, as my starosta [village headman] writes in his reports: pokoi-yer-p.” Evidently the starosta was not strong on spelling and wrote раб [rab]—in prerevolutionary spelling рабъ, with a silent hard sign (“yer”) at the end—the way it sounds, /rap/ (with final devoicing), i.e., рапъ (with Cyrillic p instead of b). Now, pokoi is the archaic name for the Cyrillic letter п (=Latin p) and yer is the hard sign ъ, but I can’t make out what the collocation pokoi-yer-p is supposed to mean. (Of the translators I have at hand, Ann Dunnigan says “‘slafe,’ as my village elder writes,” and Constance Garnett simply omits the parenthesis.) If anybody can explicate this, je suis votre вернейший раб à tout jamais.

Update. Commenter Ransom very kindly sent me scans of the relevant pages of B. A. Uspenskii’s “Старинная система чтения по складам,” which explains the old system of reading Russian by syllables, and all is now clear. The practice was to “spell” a word by breaking it up into syllables and reading each with the old names of the Cyrillic letters, so that, e.g., великъ [velikъ] would be read “веди езь, ве; люди иже, ли, вели; како еркъ, великъ” [vedi + ez’ = ve; lyudi + izhe = li > veli; kako + yerkъ > velikъ], where vedi, ez’, lyudi, izhe, kako are the names of the Cyrillic letters v, e, l, i, and k, but the hard sign, called yer, is read with the preceding consonant following it: yerkъ, pronounced “yerk.” Now we can see what’s going on in the Tolstoy passage: the Prince is giving only the end of the word рабъ, spelled рапъ by the starosta, because that’s the part that’s different; thus pokoi-yer-p is exactly parallel to kako-yer-k above. Furthermore, this also explains the peculiar word slovo-er-s, which I wrote about here; I’ll have to emend that entry after I’ve had some sleep.

Frequent commenter Jim Salant sent me a link a while back to a reading by Mary Gaitskill of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs” (as they call it) and a discussion with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman (pronounced TREECE-man). Here‘s a direct link to the mp3 file, in case you want to download it rather than playing it from the linked page, and here‘s the story itself, one of the best Nabokov (or anyone) ever wrote (if you don’t mind a little metaphysical mystery in your fiction). You will notice that the story is called “Signs and Symbols” at that last link, as it is in all available collections and in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (a superb collection of essays discussing every aspect of his writing); I was all set to be grumpy about the sloppy mistitling, but then in the discussion after the reading Treisman explains that Katherine White, who edited it for The New Yorker, insisted on changing the title over Nabokov’s objections, so that it appeared in the magazine as “Symbols and Signs.” I find it odd that they keep that title now, but I guess it’s one of those New Yorker quirks.

At any rate, Gaitskell reads well, barring a couple of mispronunciations that momentarily bothered me: Bori-SOV-na for Bo-RIS-ovna (daughter of Boris, feminine equivalent of Borisovich) is understandable, but the spelling pronunciation of “victuals” makes me unreasonably annoyed (it’s vittles, dammit!). And in the discussion they point out some interesting things, for instance that “beech plum” (as Nabokov writes it) is actually “beach” (OED cite: 1877 BARTLETT Dict. Amer. 550 Sand-Plum,.. a beach-plum. A plum growing on plum-trees whose habitat is sandy beaches)—although I find the suggestion that this has something to do with Buchenwald implausible (and that goes double for the suggestion that the “picture in a book” the son is afraid of is Breughel’s “Triumph of Death“—one look at it makes it impossible to imagine its being called “an idyllic landscape”).

While we’re on the subject of Nabokov: as I’ve mentioned before, I’m rereading Evgenii Onegin and following along in his commentary, and concerning V:XVI:4 he writes “big funeral: Perhaps a recollection of the burial of Onegin’s uncle… The allusion is to the noisy arval, the feast following the actual interment.” I wrote Anatoly, to whom I frequently turn for help with Russian (and who has temporarily taken down his Live Journal, which I keep clicking on in hopes it’s returned), “I can’t find arval (I also tried orval) in any of my dictionaries, even Dahl, so I’m assuming it’s a misprint, but I can’t think for what. I know the word trizna for funeral feast, but that’s not even close.” Anatoly didn’t know any Russian words that seemed relevant, but suggested I check my Webster’s Third New International, saying “N. got a lot of his more obscure words out of his trusty M-W 2nd edition.” It hadn’t even occurred to me that it might be English, but sure enough, there it was:

arval also arvel n. [ME arvell, of Scand. origin; akin to ON. erfiöl, fr. erfi inheritance, funeral feast + öl ale, drinking bout, banquet; akin to ON. arfi inheritance] dial. Brit: a funeral feast

As I said in my response, “Damn that guy and his terminally obscure terms!”

Tuesday was my birthday (I have as many years behind me now as Heinz has varieties), and my wife gave me, along with a gorgeous bluish-gray linen shirt, the Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur, one of my favorite living poets. I’ve only begun to explore it; I could quote what is still perhaps the poem of his I love best, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry”), but I think instead I’ll go with “Matthew VIII, 28 ff.” (q.v.):

Rabbi, we Gadarenes
Are not ascetics; we are fond of wealth and possessions.
Love, as you call it, we obviate by means
Of the planned release of aggressions.
We have deep faith in prosperity.
Soon, it is hoped, we will reach our full potential.
In the light of our gross product, the practice of charity
Is palpably inessential.
It is true that we go insane;
That for no good reason we are possessed by devils;
That we suffer, despite the amenities which obtain
At all but the lowest levels.
We shall not, however, resign
Our trust in the high-heaped table and the full trough.
If you cannot cure us without destroying our swine,
We had rather you shoved off.

An interesting post over at Derryl Murphy’s blog asking about a Prince Georgian usage he’s started hearing:

When the boys, or for that matter any kid here in town, wants to lay claim to something, they quickly shout out “I shoddy the last ginger ale!” or whatever it is they want to get.
Of course, a search of definitions comes up with the usual, and nothing else. … And so I find myself wondering, is this a spontaneous creation, or has it arisen from somewhere else and are others seeing it as well?

So: anybody know anything? Derryl adds that “as best as I recall, this only came up over the past 6-12 months.”