Archives for February 2010

My grandson is in a mainly Chinese-speaking preschool, which of course thrills me, and there are more and more such schools springing up what with the growing prominence of China. The NY Times says:

While language fads come and go — there was Russian during the cold war, then Japanese in the 1980’s, then Arabic after 9/11 — thousands of public schools have stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade. Is the boom in Chinese language education going to last?

To discuss this, they have contributions from Susan Jacoby, Ingrid Pufahl (Center for Applied Linguistics), Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco, Norman Matloff, Hongyin Tao (professor of Chinese language and linguistics), and Bruce Fuller. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Having finished Alexander Grin’s delightful Алые паруса (Scarlet sails), I’ve moved on to Olga Forsh’s 1931 novella à clef Сумасшедший корабль (The crazy ship), about life in the early 1920s in the Saint Petersburg House of Arts, a refuge during those hungry years for writers like Viktor Shklovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Grin (who wrote Scarlet Sails there), Korney Chukovsky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Forsh herself. (Anyone know of a source identifying the characters in the story with their real-life counterparts?) A few pages in, a woman called Taisia (after like Anatole France’s Thaïs) says all the men adore her, and adds “Мне особо идет сомовый абажур” [‘The somovy lampshade especially becomes/suits me’]. I didn’t know the word somovy, and neither did the first dictionary I checked, but my three-volume Russian-English dictionary had it: it’s the adjective for сом [som], which all my dictionaries define as “sheatfish.” That did me little good (and my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate didn’t have an entry for it), but the internet soon informed me that the sheatfish, apparently more commonly (and certainly more transparently) called the wels catfish (wels being a loan from German, where Mackensen tells me it is “ungeklärter Herkunft” [of unknown origin]), is a large freshwater catfish. In fact, the indispensable Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide to the World’s Wildlife says:

This huge, bottom-dwelling catfish is one of the largest freshwater fishes in the world. The biggest specimen on record, caught in the 19th century in the Dnieper River in southern Russia, was over 15ft (4.5 m) long, and weighed over 660lb (300kg). However, it is unlikely that any wels of a similar size exist today since they have been heavily fished in most parts of their range.

With that in mind, you will be able to appreciate this wonderful excursus from the сом entry by the incorrigibly idiosyncratic Dahl, the 19th-century lexicographer still used as a basic source for Russian readers and writers: “акула больших рек; глотает уток и гусей, нередко хватал и купальщиов, поймал за лапу плывшего медведя, который выволок его на берег, и оба были убиты”: “[The som is] the shark of large rivers; it swallows ducks and geese, and not uncommonly seizes/bites bathers; it caught by the paw a swimming bear, which pulled it out onto the shore, and they were both killed.”

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The World Loanword Database (WOLD) is the most amazing thing I’ve seen in a while, linguistically speaking. Lameen Souag took time off from thesis-writing to share it, and I’m glad I have neither a thesis to write nor (at the moment) work to do, so I can splash around in it to my heart’s content. Here’s their description:

It provides vocabularies (mini-dictionaries of about 1000-2000 entries) of 41 languages from around the world, with comprehensive information about the loanword status of each word. It allows users to find loanwords, source words and donor languages in each of the 41 languages, but also makes it easy to compare loanwords across languages.
Each vocabulary was contributed by an expert on the language and its history. An accompanying book is being published by Mouton de Gruyter (Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook, edited by Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor)….
The database can be accessed by language, by meaning, by author, or by reference.

Here‘s the “Languages” page (with a nifty map: recipient languages are shown by a red symbol, donor languages by blue) and here‘s the “Vocabularies” one, with a percentage of loanwords for each language (ranging from Old High German at 6% to Tarifiyt Berber at 53%). I’ll give a random example of the kind of information you get when you dig down. Bezhta (Affiliation: Nakh-Daghestanian, Avar-Andic-Tsezic; the section is by Bernard Comrie and Madzhid Khalilov) has 32% loanwords; one of them is čarx ‘whetstone,’ the page for which tells us that it is from Avar čarx ‘whetstone’, from Georgian čarxi ‘lathe.’ It goes on to say:

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A Russian correspondent wrote me to say: “as a reader of your blog I see that you are interested in Russian formalistic prose. Here are two novels by Iliazd available for free download.” [N.b.: Russian only; Parizhachi has not been translated as of 2018.] He had excellent insight into my interests; some time back I was interested enough in Ilia Zdanevich, known as Iliazd (Ильязд), to write most of that Wikipedia article, and I draw your attention to this passage:

In 1923 he began his novel Parizhachi, about four couples who agree to dine together in the Bois de Boulogne; in the course of two and a half hours (each chapter has an exact time for a title, from 11.51 to 14.09) they all manage to betray each other, and the novel itself breaks all manner of orthographic, punctuational, and compositional rules. He continued working on this “hyperformalist” novel (which he described as an opis’, or “inventory”) until 1926, but it was not published until 1994. His second novel, Voskhishchenie (“Rapture”), was published in a small edition in 1930 and was ignored at the time. Set in a mythical Georgia among mountaineers, on the surface a crime novel, it is actually a fictionalized history of the Russian avant-garde, full of allusions to world literature; it could be said to anticipate magic realism. The language of the novel is innovative and poetic, and the Slavist Milivoje Jovanović called it “undoubtedly the summit toward which the Russian avant-garde was striving.”

Don’t those novels sound interesting? Well, those are the very novels you can download from the link in the first sentence. They’re both quite short, and I look forward to enjoying them in the not too distant future.

(Incidentally, today I created a Wikipedia article for the long-forgotten historical novelist Grigory Danilevsky; if anybody knows how to add the image from the Russian page on him, I wouldn’t object if you did so.)

Nick (aka opoudjis) over at Illinistefkondos took such a long break from posting I stopped visiting, and now when I finally get around to checking in I find all manner of goodies, which we can divide into two categories:
1) Wordle applied to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. His first post eliminates more and more stop words from the word cloud until you get a readable cluster (most common remaining word: θεός [theós] ‘god’). At the end he says “What’d be useful is to split up the corpus, say BC and AD, and see how they differ,” and this is what he does in his next post; here‘s the word cloud for BC texts, and here‘s the one for AD texts, which (as you will immediately notice) talk about God a lot more. After showing the clouds he gives fascinating breakdowns by proper nouns, common nominals (including adjectives), verbs, and so on. I eat up sentences like “Language change accounts for βαστάζω and ἀνέρχομαι replacing φέρω and ἄνειμι, and I assume καταδικάζω for ‘condemn’ replaced what came to look like more generic verbs, in καθαιρέω or καταγιγνώσκω.”
2) He delights me with a couple of posts featuring my man Tzetzes. (I really enjoyed writing that post, and was glad he found it.) This one mainly discusses other matters (including country matters, as represented by the etymology of the common, not to say vulgar, Greek noun μουνί), but it finishes up with an excursus on “The curious editorial fate of Tzetzes’ Theogony.” This is followed up by his latest post, which quotes the Kazhdan translation of the multilingual Tzetzes appendix from my post and annotates it to a fare-thee-well, even unto providing the reconstructed Proto-Ossetic for what Tzetzes calls the language of the Alans. (It turns out that Tzetzes’ “Scythian” is Cuman and his “Persian” Turkish.) Wonderful work, and don’t go away for so long next time, Nick!

People keep sending me this BBC story, “Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India,” so I guess I’d better post it. I’ve posted enough dead-and-dying-language stories I was going to let this one go, but the fact that you can actually listen to a clip of Boa Sr, the last person who knew the language to any extent, is unusual and worth applauding. (I don’t suppose anyone here knows what the deal is with that odd-looking name? On the Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese website, it’s given as “Sr.” with a period, for example in their brief obituary for her, but I suppose it’s probably not short for “Senior.”) I will add, as an irritated aside, that Alastair Lawson upholds the sorry tradition of BBC science “reporting” by proclaiming that Bo was “one of the world’s oldest languages.” Attention journalists: that is a meaningless statement. Please recalibrate your gobbledygook generators.

Richard Ishida, of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has created what he calls “small web-page utilities” to aid in language use online: a Unicode database viewer (“Look up characters, character blocks, paste in and discover unknown characters, store your own info about characters, search on character names, do hex/dec/ncr conversions, highlight character types, etc. etc.”), Unicode character pickers (“Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification”), and a Unicode Code Converter. (There’s also supposed to be a Language learning test app, but it doesn’t seem to be available at the moment.)
On the other hand, if what you need is a keyboard to write any language from Akan or Albanian (Shqip) to Xhosa or Yoruba, try Gate2Home:

This site enables you to write in your language wherever you are in the world, with an online onscreen keyboard emulator. The main purpose of this site is to let everyone who gets stuck without the ability to write/type/search the internet in their own language be able to do just that (usually travelers/tourists or anyone in front of a foreign computer).

(Via MetaFilter.)

I’m still reading the Gorky translation discussed here and here (I’m now on the second volume, V lyudyakh [Among people, tr. as In the World]), and in Chapter 8 there’s a nice anecdote about how the young narrator, forced to read dull books to the captain of the Volga steamer in whose galley he was working, was struck by the phrase собственно говоря ‘strictly speaking,’ which occurred in the context “Собственно говоря, никто не изобрел пороха…” (‘Strictly speaking, no one invented gunpowder…’), and back in Nizhny Novgorod with his family, asked to tell more of his shipboard experiences, he responded: “Мне уж нечего рассказывать, собственно говоря…” (‘I really don’t have anything to tell, strictly speaking…’), causing general laughter and leading him to be nicknamed “Strictly speaking.” I’m sure many of us who used to read books above our age level can recall similar experiences.

Right after that comes another absurd goof by the translator, Isidor Schneider. Gorky is describing an area where he went to wash the baby’s diapers alongside the city’s washerwomen, who mocked and entertained him; he writes: “На этом поле, по семикам, городское мещанство устраивало гулянье”—’On this field, during the seventh week after Easter [po semikám], the city’s petty bourgeoisie [meshchanstvo] would organize an outdoor celebration [gulyan’e, which the dictionary translates “fête”].’ And here’s the result of Schneider’s valiant struggle with it: “The people of the neighboring town of Semika had laid out part of the field as a sort of park.”

Addendum. Gorky talks about a young woman, a cutter’s wife, who was always reading (and scorned for it by the rough neighborhood folks); he mentions that she and her husband “were subscribers to the magazine ‘Neva,'” and Schneider has a footnote dutifully explaining that this was “a popular magazine that took its name from the river that flows through Leningrad—then, St. Petersburg.” Except that the magazine is actually Нива (Niva), ‘field of grain.’ Oh Izzy, Izzy: how did you get mixed up in this translation business, for which you were so little suited?

Further addendum. At the start of Chapter 14 Gorky mentions the books he read to his fellow workers at an icon shop, one of them being Ivan Vyzhigin, by the historical novelist (and reactionary hack) Faddey Bulgarin. Izzy renders this “Ivan Vyzhigin, the Bulgarian.”

But wait, there’s more. In Chapter 16, Gorky says “Читаю «Бурсу» Помяловского и тоже удивлен: это странно похоже на жизнь иконописной мастерской”: “I read Pomyalovsky‘s Bursa [i.e., Очерки бурсы, “Seminary Sketches”] and was amazed: it was strangely similar to the life of the icon shop.” Except that Schneider, seeing Bursa and thinking of la Bourse, translates it “I read Pomyalovsky’s The Stockmarket, and found the operations it depicted startlingly like those in the icon store.” (‘Stock market’ in Russian is биржа [birzha], which comes from French bourse, probably by way of Dutch beurs; бурса [bursa] ‘seminary’ is, like the French word, from Latin bursa ‘bag for money,’ via Polish or German.)

I’m afraid this doesn’t even have any Estonian in it, so it’s kind of hard to justify its presence here, except that I figure we can all use a laugh; as Robert Mackey says in his NY Times “Lede” post, which embeds it, “this note-perfect Estonian television ad for an evening news show, which reimagines the opening of ‘The Simpsons’ set in rural Estonia, is a cult hit on YouTube.” (Thanks, Sven!)

Addendum. Trond Engen reminds me that I seem never to have posted about the wonderful Medieval helpdesk video; it’s in Norwegian, with English subtitles, so it actually fits in LH without excessive shoehorning. (And as Trond says, “the comment section, as of today, is evidence that anything can be turned into a discussion for or against Nynorsk.”)

Update (July 2019). The clip has vanished from the Times page, but it’s available here (for now).

One of my heroes, Howard Zinn, died recently, and this moving reminiscence by Alice Walker gives me a hook to post about him here:

Coming back to Spelman, I discovered Howard Zinn was teaching a course on Russian History and Literature and a little of the language. I signed up for it, though I was only a sophomore and the course was for juniors (as I recall). I had loved Russian Literature since I discovered Tolstoy and Dostoevsky back in the school library in Putnam County, Georgia. As for the Russian language, as with any language, I most wanted to learn to say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you.

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