Archives for February 2011

CONFERTISPARSISON.

A good piece by Dot Wordsworth in The Spectator this week (on superstitions about the use of “between”) includes this fascinating sidelight:

A good counter-example comes in a translation made in 1856 by John Williams of a Welsh grammar compiled 600 years earlier by Ederyn [sic; should be Edeyrn] the Golden Tongued: ‘A syllable that terminates with four consonants, having the obscure pronunciation of the mutescent y between each is called confertisparsison.’ (That word is from Latin confertus ‘crowded’, sparsus ‘sparse’ and sonus ‘sound’, and I look forward to being able to use it one distant day.)

Paul, who sent me the link, asks, “since there is a word to describe this form when four consonants are involved, should there not also be a word when only three are to be found?” I myself would economically (or lazily) extend the use of “confertisparsison,” but you might be able to find the proper term in the Edeyrn/Williams table.

RECOGNIZING RECONNAISSANCE.

Having read a little farther in Baklanov (see the previous post), I have another linguistic nugget. In chapter 3, he talks about “командиры полков, вызванные на рекогносцировку”: ‘regimental commanders sent out on rekognostsirovka.’ That last word was completely mystifying to me, and yet when I looked it up and discovered it meant ‘reconnaissance,’ I (figuratively) smacked myself on the forehead and wondered why it hadn’t been obvious. After all, reconnaissance in French can mean ‘recognition’ and the verb reconnaître is from Latin recognoscere, all of which I know perfectly well, so I should have recognized rekognostsirovka for what it was. And yet the Latinate form completely flummoxed me. Mind you, if my German were better I wouldn’t have had a problem, because the German word for ‘reconnoiter’ is rekognoszieren, which is where the Russians got their verb rekognostsirovat’. All of which goes to show that you can never know too many languages.

THE CUSTOMARY INTIMATE PRONOUN.

In my long march through Russian history and literature, I’ve gotten up to World War Two (and am freshly astonished by Stalin’s pigheaded refusal to believe the Germans were attacking even after months of warnings from all quarters and, on the day itself, reports of cities being bombed and borders overrun). I have thus pulled down from the shelf my volume of Grigory Baklanov, well known for his war novels, and begun his Iyul’ 41 goda (July 1941; Russian text). It’s always a pleasure to be surprised by a writer, and I am having that pleasure now; expecting a well-told tale of the front lines, I’m getting along with it a vivid picture of the repression that preceded the war (he makes you feel exactly what it was like to have a half-deranged man take the stage at a political meeting and have his finger waver in your direction as he’s denouncing “Trotskyists,” or to hear feet tramping up the stairs of your apartment building in the small hours of the morning and wait silently with your wife to find out if they will knock on your door or someone else’s), as well as some very nice writing (“А за окном было уже позднее утро, солнце растопило смолу на стволах сосен, ею сильно пахло в лесном воздухе”: “But beyond the window it was already late morning, the sun was warming the resin on the trunks of the pines, the forest air smelled strongly of it”).

I’m only on the second chapter, but I wanted to pass along this interesting example of pronoun usage in those days. The corps commissar has dropped by the office of the corps commander:

“You’re going to be here?” he asked after a bit [using the familiar ты (ty) ‘you’]. “Then I’ll go.”

This ты was not an expression of full and friendly intimacy between them. It was rather the customary/expected ты. Otherwise it might have looked as though commander and commissar were not united/unified/indivisible.

The original:

– Ты здесь будешь? – спросил он погодя.- Так я поеду.

Это “ты” не было выражением полной душевной близости между ними. Это было скорее полагавшееся “ты”. Иначе могло выглядеть со стороны, что командир и комиссар не едины.

(If anyone has suggestions for must-read Russian WWII novels or stories, I’m all ears.)

NABOKOV VINDICATED!

I wasn’t going to write about Carl Zimmer’s NY Times piece “Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated,” since it has to do with neither language nor hats, but people keep sending me the link, so I bow to popular demand. As everyone who cares about Nabokov knows, he was mad about butterflies, and enough of an expert on them to have had articles published. (In fact, there’s a whole book on the subject.) He had a theory, which professional lepidopterists didn’t take seriously, that the Polyommatus blues (example) came to the New World from Asia in a series of five waves, spanning millions of years. Now they discover that, lo and behold, he was right: “‘By God, he got every one right,’ Dr. Pierce said. ‘I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.'” This would, I am sure, have pleased the old fellow considerably more than the fuss over the publication of the scraps of his last novel.

SAID TO TAKE IT.

I was reading Gina Kolata’s piece “Mysterious Maladies” in today’s NY Times when I was stopped by this quote:

People are “squished into categories that don’t really fit or they are given a medicine and said to take it — if you feel better you have the disease,” [Dr. Aronowitz] said.

To me, “said to take it” can mean only one thing: it is said that they take it. But the intended meaning is clearly “told to take it.” My guess is that this is an error, either on Aronowitz’s part (a slip of the tongue) or introduced by Kolata or an editor in unknown circumstances, but I know better by now than to assume my judgment of English usage matches with those of less grizzled users of the language, so I put it to you, Varied Reader: can you interpret “said to take it” in the intended way, or is it clearly an error?

Update. Just heard back from Ms. Kolata; she says it’s an exact quote from Dr. Aronowitz.

Further update.
Upon reflection, I agree with Robert Mrtvola in the thread (February 8, 2011 at 10:13 pm), who says:

While I agree with Bathrobe that the phrase “are said to” sounds odd here, frankly the whole sentence seems very awkward, and people are often inarticulate in interviews. Nevertheless, shouldn’t we accept the reports of the physician-commenters, who have averred that something like “allegedly” or “it is said” (rather than “are told to”) is probably what Dr. Aronowitz meant? Said by whom? By the patients themselves (or their families, caregivers, whomever). The doctors can’t vouch for these people’s veracity, so they cover themselves with a passive construction.

DAVID GORDON, POET.

There are a lot of David Gordons out there, and a lot of them have written books; in trying to disentangle the LibraryThing author page I managed to separate out six different ones before it was time for dinner, and there are still over a dozen books labeled “David Gordon (unknown).” The one I want to talk about here is currently author #6, the American poet. I bought his Rest: Part III of a Long Poem some years ago, instantly attracted by the Cantos-like air of it… well, hell, it’s basically a ripoff of the Cantos, in fact you could (if you were in a cruel mood) photocopy a page or two and use it to separate a true scholar of Pound from a phony who would be taken in by I Can’t Believe It’s Not Ezra. But what do I care? I’m a sucker for the polyglot, polymath, polyrhythmic style, and if I can get it without the typos and antisemitism (and with explanatory notes at the back), all the better. I always wondered who Gordon was, and now the magic of the internet brings me this biographical page from the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre (30 rue Mazarine, 75006 Paris), from which I present to you the first few entries:

1929, Washington, D.C. born.
1932, New Iberia, LA, picked up Cajun phrases from playmates.
1939, Began to piece together that my paternal grandfather, Alexander was born in Sialkot, in the Punjab of Pakistan, which city was founded by an uncle of the Pandavas, heros of the Mahabarata. As a young child Alexander spoke Punjabi; his missionary parents had escaped by a 60 mile night ride to Lahore by horse and buggy through the midst of the Sepoi Mutiny, where more than 70,000 Sepois were massacring foreigners. As a kid I puzzled over some of the mysterious inscriptions.
1941, Just after Pearl Harbor my father mentioned a Huguenot ancestor’s horror tales about Louis XIV’s dragoons being quartered in the citizens’ homes without their consent.
1945, Met Yehudi Menuhin in an ice cream parlour, who expounded a 15 minute music lesson that remains useful to this day.
1948, Trombonist in a Navy Band, where in Guam I heard some Polynesian dialects. Got polio.
1949, Renewed interest in Sanskrit at an Indian temple.

Then he met Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky and Hollis Frampton and E. E. Cummings and Guy Davenport and Reno Odlin and Hugh Kenner… Well, I’m jealous, and I’d like to hang out with him sometime. Anyway, here’s a brief excerpt from page 43, so you can get an idea of what he’s like; someday I’ll have to get parts I and II of the “long poem”:

[Read more…]

AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH.

Frequent commenter Paul sent me a link to this OED essay by Bruce Moore, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at Australian National University, on “Australian English in the twentieth century.” It’s full of interesting facts; here’s the section on the history of the tripartite division of accents:

And then, at the end of the nineteenth century, something curious and largely unpredictable happened to Australian English. In response to a newly-developed concept of Received Pronunciation in Britain, which was closely tied to notions of social prestige, some Australian speakers modified their vowels and diphthongs in order to move them towards the British exemplars. From the 1890s, and well into the 1950s, elocution was in the air, and elocution teachers found a ready market for the teaching of British vowels and diphthongs to the socially-aspirational classes. This modified form of Australian speech came to be called Cultivated Australian.
As if in response against this new British-based Cultivated Australian, a diametrically opposed form of Australian English developed in the first part of the twentieth century. This form moved the Australian vowels and diphthongs even further away from what was now the British standard of pronunciation, and emphasized nasality, flatness of intonation, and the elision of syllables.This second modified form of Australian speech came to be called Broad Australian. While it is true that when non-Australians hear any Australian say ‘mate’ or ‘race’ they are likely to mistake the words for ‘mite’ and ‘rice’, the mishearing is most likely to occur with speakers of Broad Australian.
The majority of Australians continued to speak with the accent that had been established in the first fifty years of settlement, and this form of speech came to be known as General Australian. General Australian was now book-ended by Cultivated Australian and Broad Australian, and these forms of Australian English came to carry with them very different sets of values. Cultivated Australian, for example, came to express a longing for British values and a nostalgia for a country that was still regarded by many as ‘home’. Broad Australian was strongly nationalistic, and carried with it notions of egalitarianism that were antagonistic to a perceived class-obsessed and hierarchical Britain. …
In the second half of the twentieth century… Australian English became ‘naturalized’ in its own country, its accent and vocabulary were accepted as a national norm, and it was celebrated in such works as the Australian National Dictionary of 1988. In the first half of the twentieth century Cultivated Australian had been the socially prestigious accent; by the end of the century its utterance was likely to generate derision and laughter. As a result, Broad Australian, too, has been in decline, as if this extreme form was no longer required now that the imperial elements were dead. General Australian is now to the fore—as it had been before the false dawns of Cultivated and Broad.

Australian English previously on LH: slang, word map, yeah no, swearing.

GOLDEN AGE SPANISH SONNETS.

Frequent commenter Bathrobe sent me a link to Alix Ingber’s sonnet site:

This is an ongoing project. Its primary purpose is to provide good verse translations of Golden Age Spanish sonnets to English-speaking readers. I hope that it may also serve to provide an online forum for the discussion of these works as well as a resource for anyone interested in delving further into the material.

The translations don’t thrill me, but they’re satisfactory, she includes the originals, and the commentary is useful; she says visitors “are invited to submit their own translations and/or commentary.”

TWITTER DIALECTS.

An interesting ScienceDaily report on Twitter regionalisms:

Microbloggers may think they’re interacting in one big Twitterverse, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science find that regional slang and dialects are as evident in tweets as they are in everyday conversations.
Postings on Twitter reflect some well-known regionalisms, such as Southerners’ “y’all,” and Pittsburghers’ “yinz,” and the usual regional divides in references to soda, pop and Coke. But Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU’s Machine Learning Department, said the automated method he and his colleagues have developed for analyzing Twitter word use shows that regional dialects appear to be evolving within social media.
In northern California, something that’s cool is “koo” in tweets, while in southern California, it’s “coo.” In many cities, something is “sumthin,” but tweets in New York City favor “suttin.” While many of us might complain in tweets of being “very” tired, people in northern California tend to be “hella” tired, New Yorkers “deadass” tired and Angelenos are simply tired “af.”
The “af” is an acronym that, like many others on Twitter, stands for a vulgarity. LOL is a commonly used acronym for “laughing out loud,” but Twitterers in Washington, D.C., seem to have an affinity for the cruder LLS. …
Automated analysis of Twitter message streams offers linguists an opportunity to watch regional dialects evolve in real time. “It will be interesting to see what happens. Will ‘suttin’ remain a word we see primarily in New York City, or will it spread?” Eisenstein asked.

You can read the actual paper here (pdf). Thanks, Paul!

A WIRE BRUSH STAY.

A recent post by the “old hack” canehan, after passing on to us a number of amusing bloopers, ends with this intriguing anecdote:

But I was particularly delighted to find I still had a copy of the most famous press release in motor sports, that for the 24 Hours of Montjuic motorcycle race in Barcelona in July, 1979.
At the end of 2 1/2 pages of seriously mangled English, the organisers “…greet to the misters representing of the informative medias in their arrive into the Condal City, and they hope a wire brush stay and their cordial gratitude.”
“A wire brush stay” – often transmuted into ” a wire brush weekend” – became a staple of the motor sport press for many years. One Spanish journalist attempted to work out how the dictionary-wielding translator got to the phrase – we thought his finger had slipped from the right word – but never did find any rational explanation.

So I join canehan in asking: Anyone out there have a clue?