Archives for July 2011

PIDDLEHINTON AND PUDDLETOWN.

I’m over halfway through Daniel Martin (see this post), and having gotten to the chapter “Westward,” where the protagonist drives to a place called “Grimstone Down,” I of course had to haul out my Ordnance Survey Motoring Atlas of Great Britain, and was once again struck by the amazing concentration of tasty, crunchy, unpredictable place names on the map of England—no wonder the English have such a knack for using language! In the bit of Dorset where the Downs are located, glancing around I find Toller Fratrum and Toller Porcorum, Chilfrome and Cattistock, Wynford Eagle and Maiden Newton and Compton Valence, Up Sydling and Sydling St Nicholas, Cerne Abbas and Nether Cerne, Minterne Magna and Alton Pancras, Plush and Duntish and Mappowder, Piddletrenthide and Piddlehinton, Puddletown and Tolpuddle and Afpuddle and Briantspuddle… you actually have to hunt to find a relatively boring name like West Stafford or Crossways. And down by the coast there’s Eype and Burton Bradstock and Swyre and West Bexington and Langton Herring… I’d better stop before I bump against Durdle Door and fall into Lulworth Cove!

By the way, this weekend another batch of incredibly generous birthday gifts was delivered, and I have to mention The World’s Writing Systems by Peter T. Daniels (thanks, Bill!), Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff, Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had by Edward Achorn (Radbourn is my favorite 19th-century baseball player; I’m sorry he’s no longer credited with sixty wins for that season, as he was in my youth), and The Kat Who Walked In Beauty: The Panoramic Dailies of 1920 by George Herriman (see my appreciation of Herriman’s genius here, and a quote here; thanks, Sven & Leslie!).

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COLOR NAME SITES.

Kári Tulinius sent me a link to this Johnson piece in which the author (G.L.) tries to find sites dedicated to the problem of what to call colors beyond the obvious red, yellow, etc.; unfortunately, many of the links go to Wikipedia, but there are some others of interest. I wrote about the Finnish site Coloria back in 2004, but their c o l o r a t u r e page, which “displays on one page all the names users have proposed for each shade,” is well worth a separate mention, as is the Omniglot color page, and the London College of Communication’s crowdsourcing game looks like fun. But I emitted a combined chuckle and groan (a gruckle?) when I read “Among the oddities [at the Omniglot page] is that ‘green’ is baccarat in Ingush and bäccara in Chechen; what relationship this might have to the card game played on green baize is impossible to guess.” It’s actually quite easy to guess; the answer is “none whatever.” The “c” in these words is pronounced /ts/ (my little Chechen dictionary gives the word as “bätstsara(n)”), and it’s simply another of those linguistic coincidences that are so much more common than people think.

LANGUAGE CONNECTIONS ON THE WEB.

Daniel Ford and Josh Batson have made a fascinating post on the Google Research Blog describing the connections between languages on the web:

Looking at the language web in 2008, we see a surprisingly clear map of Europe and Asia. The language linkages invite explanations around geopolitics, linguistics, and historical associations.
The outlines of the Iberian and Scandinavian Peninsulas are clearly visible, which suggest geographic rather than purely linguistic associations.
Examining links between other languages, it seems that many are explained by people and communities which speak both languages.
The language webs of many former Soviet republics link back to the Russian web, with the strongest link from Ukrainian. While Russia is the major importer of Ukrainian products, the bilingual nature of Ukraine is a more plausible explanation. Most Ukrainians speak both languages, and Russian is even the dominant language in large parts of the country.
The link from Arabic to French speaks to the long connection between France and its former colonies. In many of these countries Arabic and French are now commonly spoken together, and there has been significant emigration from these countries to France. …
What’s happened since 2008? The languages of the web have become more densely connected. There is now significant content in even more languages, and these languages are more closely linked.

By all means click on the maps, and go to Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa for “some ponderings”; I was particularly interested in his caveat at the end:

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KANGAROO.

Joel of Far Outliers has one of his typically thought-provoking posts with an extensive quote from a book, in this case Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horwitz, and I have to excerpt and share this part of the quote, for reasons that should be obvious:

As for kangooroo, this was a fair approximation of the Guugu Yimidhirr word, which Eric rendered gangurru. But Aborigines, unlike Maori and Tahitians, didn’t have a shared language; living in small, widely scattered groups, they spoke scores of different tongues. The English failed to recognize this. The result was a comically circular instance of linguistic transmission. Officers of the First Fleet, familiar with the Endeavour’s journals, used the words Cook and his men had collected in Queensland to try and communicate with Botany Bay Aborigines eighteen years later.

“Whatever animal is shown them,” a frustrated officer on the Fleet reported, “they call kangaroo.” Even the sight of English sheep and cattle prompted the Gwyeagal to cheerfully cry out “Kangaroo, kangaroo!” In fact, the Gwyeagal had no such word in their vocabulary (they called the marsupial patagorang). Rather, they’d picked up “kangaroo” from the English and guessed that it referred to all large beasts. So a word that originated with an encounter between Cook and a small clan in north Queensland traveled to England with the Endeavour, then back to Botany Bay with the First Fleet, and eventually became the universal name for Australia’s symbol. There was an added twist. The Guugu Yimidhirr had ten different words for the marsupials, depending on their size and color. “Gangurru means a large gray or black kangaroo,” Eric said. “If Cook had asked about a small red one, the whole world would be saying nharrgali today.”

CHARACTER ORIGIN RESOURCES.

In the course of the discussion thread at this No-sword post, Leonardo Boiko decided to create a List of resources on kanji/hánzí character origins that is useful even for those of us who do not read Japanese or Chinese. As he puts it, “Here’s a few sources I use when investigating characters. They all have etymological theories, and can be opinionated—do apply scholarly skepticism.” Among the “Offline” links, this book looks worth investigating, and the mention of Morohashi took me back thirty-five years to when I constantly heard his name on the lips of the wonderful scholar Susan Cherniack (and my goodness, it seems he lived to be 99!). In Leonardo’s words, “Morohashi is God and the Daikanwa [his dictionary] is the Bible.” But for that, you have to know Japanese.

AN AFTERNOON WITH COWAN.

John Cowan was in the area with his wife, so we arranged to meet (at Amherst Books, of course; he, like me, can happily spend hours in a bookstore, so it didn’t matter who got there first). We spent several hours wandering around the town and talking; I showed him Emily Dickinson’s house, the Black Sheep deli, and the Amherst College campus, where we discovered that the Frost Library would let us in without making us show ID, and for a while we were each holding biographical dictionaries of China, reading each other particularly piquant entries (one of them described Cao Cao as a “young thug”) and laughing perhaps too loudly for the library setting. He liked the Common, where he showed me how to identify various kinds of trees; he also convinced me to try using an RSS reader, and suggested I upgrade to a less antediluvian version of Movable Type and use reCAPTCHA to keep the spammers away. He told me about Project Wombat, and we traded stories from The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, for which it turns out we have a mutual enthusiasm. In short, a good time was had by all.
And yes, of course I got more books at Amherst Books, including Russia’s Alternative Prose, by Robert Porter, and A Russian Cultural Revival: A Critical Anthology of Emigre Literature Before 1939, by Temira Pachmuss. I’m incorrigible.

POM, POM-POM-POM, POOM.

In the latest adventure in bedtime reading, I’ve just started Master and Commander, the first in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series; if my wife likes it enough, it should keep us occupied for some time, since there are twenty novels in the series. A minor problem is that she found it too absorbing to fall asleep, but after I stopped she drifted off readily enough, and the prose is such a delight to read I hope and trust she’ll want to continue. Here’s a sample passage from the opening scene, in which Lieutenant Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy, temporarily without a ship, is enjoying a string quartet a little too enthusiastically (he has already been chidden by his neighbor for beating the measure with his hand):

The minuet set Jack’s head wagging with its insistent beat, but he was wholly unconscious of it; and when he felt his hand stirring on his breeches and threatening to take to the air he thrust it under the crook of his knee. It was a witty, agreeable minuet, no more; but it was succeeded by a curiously difficult, almost harsh last movement, a piece that seemed to be on the edge of saying something of the very greatest importance. The volume of sound died away to the single whispering of a fiddle, and the steady hum of low conversation that had never stopped at the back of the room threatened to drown it: a soldier exploded in a stifled guffaw and Jack looked angrily around. Then the rest of the quartet joined the fiddle and all of them worked back to the point from which the statement might arise: it was essential to get straight back into the current, so as the ‘cello came in with its predictable and necessary contribution of pom, pom-pom-pom, poom, Jack’s chin sank upon his breast and in unison with the ‘cello he went pom, pom-pom-pom, poom. An elbow drove into his ribs and the sound shshsh hissed in his ear. He found that his hand was high in the air, beating time; he lowered it, clenched his mouth shut and looked down at his feet until the music was over. He heard the noble conclusion and recognized that it was far beyond the straightforward winding-up that he had foreseen, but he could take no pleasure in it.

Somehow my throat doesn’t tire quickly when I read that kind of writing.

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CATASTASIS.

I’ve just read the longish chapter “Catastasis” (beginning on page 167 in my Back Bay edition) of Daniel Martin (see this post); it’s brilliant, and redeems much of what I was a bit impatient with in the earlier part of the novel (which, after the amazing first chapter I quoted in that earlier post, settles into a fairly conventional life-and-loves narrative). But of course I had to investigate the title, which meant nothing to me as an English word (in Ancient Greek, κατάστασις primarily means ‘establishment, institution,’ and in Modern Greek, κατάσταση is the basic word for ‘condition, state’ or ‘situation, circumstances’; ‘in (a) good condition’ is σε καλή κατάσταση). It isn’t in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, but it is of course in the OED, and it turns out to be a term for (to quote Wikipedia‘s creaky old definition) “the third part of an ancient drama, in which the intrigue or action that was initiated in the epitasis, is supported and heightened, until ready to be unravelled in the catastrophe.” The interesting thing is that it is not a classical term; it was invented by Scaliger in his Poetics (published posthumously in 1561), information which I added to the Wikipedia article (with, of course, references). My question is how Scaliger came up with these classical-sounding but unclassical terms; does anyone know enough about Renaissance philology and criticism to have an idea?

THE LAST STATION.

We finally got around to seeing the well-reviewed 2009 movie about Tolstoy’s final days, and they did a pretty good job of it. Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren were excellent as the Count and Countess, and young Valentin Bulgakov was a well-chosen viewpoint character. But (sigh) they butchered the Russian names (at one point Sofia Andreyevna is referred to as “Countess Tolstoya”), and they kept having close-ups of an EXIT sign at the eponymous station misspelled as ВЫХОД (missing the prerevolutionary final hard sign, ъ). You can’t have everything.

COPS AND MULTILINGUALISM.

At first I was intrigued when I saw the link to the latest issue (Vol. 11, No. 1) of the journal Reconstruction (at wood s lot), since its theme was “Multilingual Realities in Translation.” Then I got discouraged when I turned to the Introduction and saw the epigraph “No theorization, inasmuch as it is produced in a language, will be able to dominate the Babelian performance” (by, of course, Jacques Derrida) and the first sentence “The idea of this issue is to consider the possibility of Babelian performances in the context of scholarly mediations on multilingual realities in translation,” and I almost gave up when the first two articles turned out to be “Decotitles, the Animated Discourse of Fox’s Recent Anglophonic Internationalism” (by DT Kofoed) and “Call Center Cultures and the Transnationalization of Affective Labor” (by John Muthyala). No offense if dense theory and phrases like “the Transnationalization of Affective Labor” are your meat and drink, but they’re not mine. But “Facing off: French and English in Bon Cop, Bad Cop” by Heather Macdougall sounded interesting enough to check out, and aside from the obligatory nod to Theory (“a fixed dichotomy separated by an empty void”—an empty void? what other kind could there be?), there’s some interesting background on a truly bilingual movie, apparently “the highest-grossing domestically-produced film in Canadian history”:

Patrick Huard, an established Québecois actor, first thought of the concept for a bilingual film when he was presenting at the Genies, the Canadian film awards. Relating the incident to Playback magazine, he explains,

The French-Canadians and the English were laughing at the same jokes, and I wasn’t prepared for that. I was doing a joke on the French, and the English would laugh. And the other way around. […] I was surprised, and realized that maybe there’s something that we have in common. The one thing we can laugh about together is our differences. That’s when I had a flash for Bon Cop.

Bon Cop, Bad Cop is a Canadian version [of the formulaic odd-couple cop movie] that employs Canada’s most obvious cultural dichotomy, language, to provide a contrast between the two principal characters. David Bouchard is a hot-tempered Montreal cop who chain-smokes, drives too fast, and is always one wrong move away from being suspended; Martin Ward, by contrast, is a Toronto officer with an exemplary record, an ambition to get a desk job, and a healthy diet low in cholesterol. The two are forced to work together when a murder victim is found on the Ontario-Quebec border. …

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