Archives for August 2008

Mark Liberman provides the best discussion you are likely to see of the tangled history of these words, and specifically of the use of “personal infer,” the oldest example Mark could find being “Why, in the name of all that’s consistent, you don’t mean to infer that you love this fellow?” from John Brougham’s play Flies in the Web (Mark couldn’t find a date for the play, but it’s clearly before Brougham’s death in 1880). Mark’s conclusion:

So whatever is going on with infer as “imply”, it’s not just a recent mistake in linking similar words to complex concepts. There’s a long history of erratic specialization (from the original sense “bring in” to the much more limited meaning “deduce”) and sporadic generalization (from contexts where “deduce” might be taken to mean “suggest”).

I was amused to see had thought that the first comment is was classic prescriptivist panic: “You’re right it is interesting, but I’ll bet you’re not going to start using non-personal infer instead of ‘imply’ yourself, are you? There’s no reason to do so.” Danger! Danger! Unacceptable usage sighted and possibly defended—fire the torpedoes!… but it turns out it was by our old pal Arthur “A.J.P.” Crown, and was not intended as prescriptivist panic at all. Once again my lovely rhetoric is shot out of the sky!

I’m not going to get into the politics of the mess in the north Caucasus except to say that there are no good guys, but I have to get a minor linguistic gripe off my chest: all the news broadcasts are talking about “ah-SET-ee-ə” and the “ah-SET-ee-ənz.” What’s next, cro-AT-ee-ə? ve-NET-ee-ən art? I realize none of the broadcasters and reporters have ever heard of Ossetia before, but you’d think the patterns of English spelling would clue them in to its proper pronunciation, ah-SEE-shə. I suppose it’s another case of hyperforeignification, like “bei-ZHING.”

Incidentally, Ossetian (as every schoolboy knows) is an Iranian language, and the Ossetian name for Ossetia is Iryston, based on Ir, the self-designation meaning ‘an Ossetian’ (well, actually it specifically refers to the majority group of Ossetians, and the minority Digors resent the use of that name for the whole people, causing some Ossetes to identify with the medieval Alans and call Ossetia “Alania,” but let’s set that aside—if you’re interested in the messy politics of Caucasian ethnic nomenclature and the Alans, read “The Politics of a Name: Between Consolidation and Separation in the Northern Caucasus” [pdf, html] by Victor Shnirelman); it used to be thought that Ir was derived from *arya- ‘Aryan’ and thus related to Iran, but Ronald Kim denies this in “On the Historical Phonology of Ossetic: The Origin of the Oblique Case Suffix,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 123 (Jan. – Mar. 2003), pp. 43-72 (JSTOR); the relevant discussion is on p. 60, fn. 42. Kim says it may be from a Caucasian language, or it may be descended from PIE *wiro- ‘man.’ (The word Ossetian is based on a Russian borrowing of the Georgian term Oseti.)

Update. A couple of weeks later, having heard the SET pronunciation approximately six thousand times and my favored pronunciation not once, I am giving up and reconciling myself to the fact that, for whatever stupid reasons, the new pronunciation is firmly established and I might as well accept it. Already I hear it with indifference, and soon I’ll probably start saying it myself; in a few years I’ll look back at this post with amusement and try to remember what it was like to experience the shock of the new. Such is language change.

“The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.” The first entry begins: “Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head (ñ) all down the back. [N.b.: They seem to have screwed up the formatting, since an ñ does not resemble an arrowhead. –LH] Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite.” Today’s reads, in its entirety, “Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon.” Should be good reading. Thanks, Paul!

I’d like to highlight a John Emerson contribution to this thread; another commenter had complained that Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary included the “word” zzxjoanw, allegedly a Maori word for ‘drum,’ and John linked to the Wikipedia entry:

Zzxjoanw is a famous fictitious entry which fooled logologists for many years….
Ross Eckler describes the hoax in his 1996 book Making the Alphabet Dance:

“The two-Z barrier was breached many years ago in a specialized dictionary, Rupert Hughes’s The Musical Guide (later, Music-Lovers Encyclopedia), published in various editions between 1905 and 1956. Its final entry, ZZXJOANW (shaw) Maori 1.Drum 2.Fife 3.Conclusion, remained unchallenged for more than seventy years until Philip Cohen pointed out various oddities: the strange pronunciation, the off diversity of meanings (including “conclusion”) and the non-Maori appearance of the word. (Maori uses the fourteen letters AEGHIKMNOPRTUW, and all words end in a vowel). A hoax clearly entered somewhere; no doubt Hughes expected it to be obvious, but he did not take into account the credulity of logologists, sensitized by dictionary-sanctioned outlandish words such as mlechchha and qaraqalpaq.”

I have to admit, I feel the way Hughes no doubt did: who could take such a collection of letters seriously? And as John adds, “The pronunciation given, “shaw” makes it virtually certain that the hoax was a dig at the spelling-reformer and music critic GBS.”

Jon Henley in The Guardian: “The end of the line?“

An unlikely row has erupted in France over suggestions that the semicolon’s days are numbered; worse, the growing influence of English is apparently to blame. Jon Henley reports on the uncertain fate of this most subtle and misused of punctuation marks. Aida Edemariam discovers which writers love it – and which would be glad to see it disappear.

As I told Paul, who sent me the link, I have to agree with Jonathan Franzen: “I love a good semicolon, but this sounds like one of those Literature is Dead! stories that the New York Times likes to run.”

The erudite and generous MMcM has sent me a copy of Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, by Josefa Heifetz Byrne, and I will be enjoying exploring it. This is not one of the silly books with pseudo-words of the type I discussed here; Mrs. Byrne spent ten years trawling through “specialized dictionaries and unabridged works too bulky for browsing,” as her husband’s introduction puts it (though I personally have never found a book “too bulky for browsing”) and plucked out her favorite oddities. Some of them are disappointingly ordinary (paladin, screed, trefoil), but the vast majority are genuinely rare, and many cry out to be used more widely: cooster ‘a worn-out libertine,’ crapaudine ‘swinging on top and bottom pivots like a door,’ lippitude ‘sore or bleary eyes.’
This ties in nicely with Nicholson Baker’s review (from the NY Times Book Review) of Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, which I was reading just before the Byrne book arrived. Shea “owns about a thousand dictionaries,” some of which he bought from a book dealer named Madeline, who owns 20,000 dictionaries. These are my kind of people. At any rate, Shea decided to spend a year reading the OED (supported by his tolerant girlfriend, a psychology teacher, one presumes, because he spends all day in the basement of the Hunter College library, trying to avoid eyestrain and madness: “Sometimes I get angry at the dictionary and let loose with a muffled yell”), and the book sounds like an enjoyable read, as of course is the review. I’ll quote the odd-word bits:

There’s hypergelast (a person who won’t stop laughing), lant (to add urine to ale to give it more kick), obmutescence (willful speechlessness) and ploiter (to work to little purpose)… Acnestis — the part of an animal’s back that the animal can’t reach to scratch. And bespawl — to splatter with saliva. In Chapter D, Shea encounters deipnophobia, the fear of dinner parties; Chapter K brings kankedort, an awkward situation… He is fond of polysyllabic near-homonyms — words like incompetible (outside the range of competency) and repertitious (found accidentally), which are quickly swallowed up in the sonic gravitation of familiar words. And a number of Shea’s finds deserve prompt resurrection: vicambulist, for instance — a person who wanders city streets.

Some of these are in Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, but most aren’t; I imagine if you spent long enough at it you could compile several such books without repetition. English is a bottomless word-hoard.

This is both frustrating and fun. Type in English words you think might be among the 100 most common, and if you’re right, the world will appear in its box. Note that if you start typing in a three-letter word that happens to start with a two-letter word, the latter will appear instead, but you can then go back and start typing again and it will accept the longer word (if, of course, it’s on the list). Warning: I’m pretty sure the list is flawed, because some of the words I (and people on the MetaFilter thread where I found it) tried have to be more common than a few of the ones they include. My score: 47. One person at MeFi claims to have gotten 74; I’m not sure I believe him. You have five minutes, and it’s harder than you think.

I just discovered a new phrase and, as is my wont, am sharing it with the world, or at least that portion of the world as ignorant as I (I quote the OED s.v. hiding “A flogging, thrashing, beating”):

to be on a hiding to nothing, to be faced with a situation in which any outcome would be unfavourable or in which success is impossible, spec. (app. orig. in Horse-racing) that of being expected to win easily, so that one gains no credit from victory, and is disgraced by defeat. Cf. TO prep. 19a [Connecting the names of two things (usu. numbers or quantities) compared or opposed to each other in respect of amount or value, as the odds in a wager or contest, the terms of a ratio, or the constituents of a compound: Against, as against. 1530 PALSGR. 712/1 Twenty to one he is ondone for ever…].
1905 A. M. BINSTEAD Mop Fair xi. 193 They will, like the man who was on a hiding to nothing the first time Tom Sayers saw him, ‘take it lying down’. 1964 C. P. SNOW Corridors of Power ii. 17 He wanted to get out of his present job as soon as he had cleaned it up a little—‘This is a hiding to nothing,’ he said simply—and back to the Treasury. 1975 Sunday Times 8 June 28/2 The Indian batsmen were on a hiding to nothing. They could not win. 1977 Times 29 Jan. 10/7 Derby know they are on a hiding to nothing at Fourth Division Colchester, who have a reputation as giant-killers. 1980 Spectator 8 Mar. 3/1 Lord Soames would have been on a hiding to nothing in trying to exercise gubernatorial authority and viceregal judgment.

It’s an extremely useful phrase; I guess “no-win situation” comes close, but it isn’t nearly as colorful.

A memorial post (in Russian) for Solzenitsyn (покойся с миром) over at Avva led with a quote from The First Circle that used the word фейхуа [feikhua], a variant of фейхоа [feikhóa] ‘feijoa’; the translation was obvious, but (as often happens with unusual botanical words) I realized I didn’t actually know what a feijoa was, or even how to pronounce the name. The Wikipedia entry explained what it was (and why you rarely see them in these parts: “maintaining the fruit in good condition for any length of time is not easy”), but didn’t tell me how to say it, so I turned to my trusty Merriam-Webster Collegiate:

feijoa
Pronunciation: \fā-ˈyō-ə, -ˈhō-ə\
Etymology: New Latin, genus name, from João da Silva Feijó died 1824 Brazilian naturalist

What the…? If it’s from a Brazilian name (pronounced fei-ZHO), why on earth would the two pronunciations be fei-YO-ə and fei-HO-ə? The latter I can understand, because there are a lot of Spanish loanwords (e.g., jalapeño) with j = /h/, but why j = /y/? And surely a fair number of people pronounce it the obvious way, with the normal English pronunciation of j, which is how I was mentally pronouncing it? So I decided to get a second opinion, and went to the OED, which had (I’m too lazy to try reproducing the IPA) fei-DZHO-ə (with the normal English j) and fei-YO-ə, in that order. Feeling somewhat comforted but still wanting backup, I went to the AHD, which had fā-zhô’ə, -jō-, -hō-; in other words, fei-ZHO-ə (with Portuguese j), fei-DZHO-ə (with English j), and fei-HO-ə (with Spanish j)—exactly the selection and ordering I would have chosen if I had the magical ability to impose pronunciations on a speech community.

But since the three dictionaries disagree so radically (M-W’s favored pronunciation isn’t even mentioned by AHD, and vice versa), I turn to you, o Varied Reader. If you know this fruit well enough to call it routinely by name, how do you say it: with joe, hoe, yo, or the foreign-sounding but etymologically accurate zho? (Or, god forbid, with yet a fifth version?) If you happen to know how those who deal with fruit professionally say it (if there is a consensus), that would be great added information.

One of the things that surprised me when I started reading War and Peace in Russian was that it wasn’t particularly well written in the “fine writing,” Nabokovian sense. The sentences were baggy, the words were not carefully harmonized, and there was an astonishing amount of repetition. But le style, c’est l’homme, and Tolstoy himself was baggy and unharmonized, and I was soon as caught up in the story as I had been when I read it in English.

But eventually I started realizing that his style worked in a way I wouldn’t have expected, and I’ll tell you exactly when this became clear to me. It’s early in Book I, Part Two; the Russian army is holed up in Braunau, having failed to meet up with Mack‘s Austrian army, already surrounded at Ulm and surrendering to the French. Young Nikolai Rostov, serving with the Pavlograd Hussars, is sharing quarters with his squadron commander, the excitable and high-living Captain Denisov (based on Denis Davydov), who comes back from a night of losing at gambling and asks Rostov to hide a purse with his remaining money under his pillow; the purse later disappears, and the protracted wrangle over who took it and who owes whom an apology is interrupted by the announcement that the army is going into action.

Now comes Chapter 6, of which I present the first two paragraphs, in Russian and then in English (in the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude):

Кутузов отступил к Вене, уничтожая за собой мосты на реках Инне (в Браунау) и Трауне (в Линце). 23-го октября русские войска переходили реку Энс. Русские обозы, артиллерия и колонны войск в середине дня тянулись через город Энс, по сю и по ту сторону моста.

День был теплый, осенний и дождливый. Пространная перспектива, раскрывавшаяся с возвышения, где стояли русские батареи, защищавшие мост, то вдруг затягивалась кисейным занавесом косого дождя, то вдруг расширялась, и при свете солнца далеко и ясно становились видны предметы, точно покрытые лаком. Виднелся городок под ногами с своими белыми домами и красными крышами, собором и мостом, по обеим сторонам которого, толпясь, лилися массы русских войск. Виднелись на повороте Дуная суда, и остров, и замок с парком, окруженный водами впадения Энса в Дунай, виднелся левый скалистый и покрытый сосновым лесом берег Дуная с таинственною далью зеленых вершин и голубеющими ущельями. Виднелись башни монастыря, выдававшегося из-за соснового, казавшегося нетронутым, дикого леса; далеко впереди на горе, по ту сторону Энса, виднелись разъезды неприятеля.

Kutuzov fell back toward Vienna, destroying behind him the bridges over the rivers Inn (at Braunau) and Traun (near Linz). On October 23 the Russian troops were crossing the river Enns. At midday the Russian baggage train, the artillery, and columns of troops were defiling through the town of Enns on both sides of the bridge.

It was a warm, rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could be clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down below, the little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed houses, its cathedral, and its bridge, on both sides of which streamed jostling masses of Russian troops. At the bend of the Danube, vessels, an island, and a castle with a park surrounded by the waters of the confluence of the Enns and the Danube became visible, and the rocky left bank of the Danube covered with pine forests, with a mystic background of green treetops and bluish gorges. The turrets of a convent stood out beyond a wild virgin pine forest, and far away on the other side of the Enns the enemy’s horse patrols could be discerned.

The bolded words are all forms of the same verb in Russian, conscientiously turned into different phrases in English so as to avoid the cardinal sin of repetition (and two of them are melded into the single phrase “became visible, and”). This is one way of doing things, it lends variety, but in this case the variety destroys what Tolstoy is doing with that paragraph.

Russian has a whole series of verbs relating to vision and other forms of perception that are the bane of translators; белеть [belét’], for instance, is defined as ‘to show up white’ in the Oxford dictionary, but when would you ever say something “shows up white” in English? In Russian, things белеют all the time: sails, clouds, faces, you name it, and each time the poor translator has to figure out what periphrasis to use, inevitably losing the compact force of the simple verb. Here we are dealing with the verb виднеться [vidnét’sya], which Oxford defines as ‘to be visible.’ Again, we rarely have occasion to talk about things being visible, but here we have виднеться used five times in rapid succession: the town, the vessels/island/castle/park, the left bank with its greenery, the convent, and finally the enemy. The thing is that the repetition doesn’t stand out the first few times, because the Russian verb is utterly lacking in distinction: it’s basically a placeholder, something to connect the reader/viewer to the things seen. It’s the verbal equivalent of a hand pointing helpfully in the desired direction. It’s almost as bland and featureless as “said,” which we are used to seeing repeated over and over without really noticing it. It’s a boring verb, and its repetition lulls rather than irritates.

And it is precisely that lulling effect Tolstoy is after. Here, he murmurs (after a brisk scene-setting paragraph), see this bucolic scene? Sun, rain, a little town, red roofs, a bridge, ships, an island, a convent… The barely heard mutter of Виднелся… Виднелись… Виднелся… Виднелись… виднелись… is like the soothing clack of the train passing over the rails as you drift off in your sleeping compartment, half-watching the countryside pass by outside. And then in the final three words of the paragraph his fuse reaches its end: виднелись разъезды неприятеля [vidnélis’ raz”yézdy nepriyátelya], “were visible the mounted patrols of the enemy.” We’re not idle onlookers observing a quiet countryside, we’re at war, and the shooting will soon start.

Note that it’s not just the repetition that is lost; even the significant inversion of the last clause, placing the all-important word “enemy” at the end, is ignored by the Maudes: “the enemy’s horse patrols could be discerned.” The Ann Dunnigan translation I happen to own handles it no better: “the enemy’s cavalry patrols could be seen on the hillside.” The translators are painting a landscape, while Tolstoy is setting you up and delivering a sucker punch.

Addendum (July 2022). Reading W&P to my wife all these years later, I realized that this passage from the start of Vol. 4, Part 3, ch. 5 makes an intriguing parallel to the one analyzed above (again the original is followed by the Maude translation):

Денисов и Петя подъехали к нему. С того места, на котором остановился мужик, были видны французы. Сейчас за лесом шло вниз полубугром яровое поле. Вправо, через крутой овраг, виднелась небольшая деревушка и барский домик с разваленными крышами. В этой деревушке и в барском доме, и по всему бугру, в саду, у колодцев и пруда, и по всей дороге в гору от моста к деревне, не более как в двухстах саженях расстояния, виднелись в колеблющемся тумане толпы народа. Слышны были явственно их нерусские крики на выдиравшихся в гору лошадей в повозках и призывы друг другу.

Denísov and Pétya rode up to him. From the spot where the peasant was standing they could see the French. Immediately beyond the forest, on a downward slope, lay a field of spring rye. To the right, beyond a steep ravine, was a small village and a landowner’s house with a broken roof. In the village, in the house, in the garden, by the well, by the pond, over all the rising ground, and all along the road uphill from the bridge leading to the village, not more than five hundred yards away, crowds of men could be seen through the shimmering mist. Their un-Russian shouting at their horses which were straining uphill with the carts, and their calls to one another, could be clearly heard.

Note that while the description is quite similar, the verb виднеться (bolded) occurs only twice (and the Maudes sensibly go with “was” for the first occurrence, rather than trying to bring out the element of seeing), and there is no comparable building to a climax. Tolstoy is doing something different here.