Archives for January 2012

RUSSIAN WORD OF THE DAY.

Here’s a where-have-you-been-all-my-life site, Don Livingston’s Russian Word of the Day (“musings on Russian vocabulary”). It hasn’t been updated for a couple of months, but there’s plenty of backlog to catch up with; the latest post, Вымя, gives a good idea of his style:

Every once in a while you just want to know an obscure word in a foreign language just to show off to your friends, so today’s word is вымя, which means udder. It is one of only ten nouns in modern Russian that end in -мя but are neuter. It declines like this:[…]

The udder is the part of the a cow (or goat or sheep) that houses the mammary glands and teats with which they feed their young:
— Сколько сосков на вымени у коровы?
— Четыре.
“How many teats are on a cow’s udder?”
“Four.”

Позови ветеринара. У козы заразилось вымя.
Call the vet. The goat’s udder is infected.

Вымя имеет хорошие вкусовые качества, хотя и не обладает высокой пищевой ценностью. (adapted from this source)
The udder has good flavor qualities, although it doesn’t have high nutritive value.

Есть ли вымя у быков? (source)
Do bulls have an udder?

Via Russian Dinosaur.

PARAPROSDOKIAN.

A reader sent me a link to this invigorating blast by Canadian writer, broadcaster, and lexicographer Bill Casselman (homepage, Autobiohagiography), titled “The Bogus Word Paraprosdokian & Lazy Con Artists of Academe.” Now, before going further, I should say that his attack on the “bogus word” is wildly exaggerated; however dubious its origins, it is definitely in use (in the restricted circles that need a word for “a figure of speech in which a sentence or phrase has a surprise ending”). But Casselman admits this, even while giving it another whack as “an oafish monstrosity with a spurious claim upon ancient authority,” and there is no point going to him for judicious academic assessments—he’s not that kind of writer. He’s a loudmouthed, shoot-from-the-hip smartass in the great tradition of Matt Taibbi and my old friend The Growling Wolf; a lot of people are put off by that kind of writing, but I eat it up, and I am glad to have found this guy.
Now, as for paraprosdokian: it is true, as he says, that it “appears NOWHERE in ancient Greek literature” and “was NEVER an ancient Greek word.” It is also true that it has, most unusually, an accusative ending. But it is not the case that it “was made up by some semiliterate doofus late in the 20th century, then added to lists of rhetorical terms at universities whose departments of classics must have been staffed by brain-dead sluggards and mummified pedagogues.” It was made up by some semiliterate doofus sometime in the nineteenth century (as Casselman acknowledges when presented with the evidence, including a quote from an 1891 issue of Punch: “A ‘paraprosdokian,’ which delights him to the point of repetition”—note, incidentally, the comma inside the quote mark). And while it is not an Ancient Greek word, it is a simple mashing together of the ancient Greek phrase παρὰ προσδοκίαν [para prosdokian] ‘beyond expectation,’ which (in the words of Messrs. Liddell and Scott, who cite Demetrius of Phalerum, Hermogenes of Tarsus, and Tiberius Rhetor) “is used of a kind of joke freq[uent] in Com[edy].” While one might wish the modern noun had been more elegantly formed, I cannot find it in my heart to hate it as much as Casselman does, but I am glad his hatred produced such a magnificently readable patch of prose.

PSYCHO BABBLE.

Caroline Jones of The American Scholar wrote to say “Here at The American Scholar, we have recently launched a new language blog that we think you would find interesting. Psycho Babble is written by Jessica Love, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Every Thursday, she posts about different linguistic issues and ideas, and we’re hoping to create a forum for discussion.” Psycholinguistics is something I’ve always wanted to find out more about but never actually read up on, so I expect this to be a useful read. Love’s latest post, on names, starts by pointing out that fictional names carry the significance the author put into them, then continues:

In life, however, names are not generally to be trusted. (Not human names anyhow: Fluffy the cat is probably not hurting on fluff.) The lack of a meaningful relationship between name and person, or to a lesser degree, name and place, is also what makes names so much harder to learn and remember than other words. Cleverly designed experiments reveal a so-called baker-Baker paradox: we find it easier to learn that a particular face belongs to a baker than to learn that the same face belongs to a Mr. Baker. The word “baker” actually means something in a way “Mr. Baker” does not. Bakers wake up early, tie on their aprons, and bake. This preexisting knowledge constitutes something sturdy to which new associations can be bound. As for “Mr. Baker,” well … we might suppose that he is male and, likelier than not, has an Anglo-Saxon ancestor.

The baker-Baker paradox has two caveats. First, we are considerably better at remembering names if we have assigned them ourselves. This is probably because the relationship between name and person is no longer arbitrary. […]

But caveat two is of more practical importance: to some extent, our names may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very arbitrariness of Mr. Baker’s name, for instance, might land him a job. A number of studies have demonstrated that having certain names—particularly those that sound ethnic or lower-class (and thus contain demographic information that makes them, well, less than arbitrary to many employers)—will hurt job seekers’ chances of landing an interview. According to economist David Figlio of Northwestern University, a girl whose name sounds more feminine (as determined by a longer length and greater frequency of “soft” consonants) is less likely to study science than her twin sister with a less feminine-sounding name.

Me, I’m adding it to my RSS feed.

MORE CORPORA.

The internet keeps providing linguists and other language researchers with more and more tools, and Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University, has created a splendid set at CORPUS.BYU.EDU, “seven online corpora | 45 – 425 million words each”: “They have many different uses, including: finding out how native speakers actually speak and write; looking at language variation and change; finding the frequency of words, phrases, and collocates; and designing authentic language teaching materials and resources.” The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), for example, has 400 million words and covers the span 1810-2009, and you can do a Google Books search of more than 155 billion words in more than 1.3 million books of American English (“Note however that what you see here is just a very early version of the corpus (interface), and many features will be added and corrections will be made over the coming months”). What will they come up with next?
Oh, and as lagniappe, here‘s an online searchable (and downloadable) scan of a 1911 English translation of Kluge’s German etymological dictionary. (Thanks, Paul!)

CHINESE LANGUAGE AND USAGE.

Chinese Language and Usage “is for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Chinese language.” It’s apparently a new site (it’s still in beta: “The site is still in the process of being defined and constructed, so a temporary placeholder design will be used until the site is fully formed and ready to leave beta”), but it certainly looks useful. I learned about it from user hippietrail, who sent me a link to his question “Do acronyms borrowed from English use neutral tone for all syllables?” He summarizes the responses this way: “It seems Chinese speakers think they pronounce the letters in borrowed acronyms like in English and that they don’t or can’t have tones.” It’s an interesting topic, and both he and I will be interested in what people here have to say.

THE WRITTEN WORLD.

I meant to post this earlier, but hopefully the first episodes are still available; this week BBC Radio 4 is doing an interesting series on language:

In this series of five In Our Time radio programmes Melvyn Bragg tells the story of the written word from its origins in the Middle East 6,000 years ago to the present day. He discovers how the technology of writing has developed: from the earliest clay tablets to paper, the printing press and beyond.
By examining and discussing some of the most important surviving texts, Melvyn and his guests explain how this most powerful of inventions has enabled the dissemination of thought worldwide. Many of the key texts discussed here are in the British Library, and the programme features extensive interviews with our expert curators.

And here‘s the British Library page, with gorgeous illustrations.

THE TURKISH LANGUAGE REFORM.

My copy of The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, by Geoffrey Lewis, has just arrived (thanks, Ken!), and I’m absolutely thrilled. I’ve been hankering to read this book since it was first mentioned in a comment thread, perhaps by Christopher Culver here; just opening it at random I hit on the sentence “Readers who have seen the point need not bother with the rest of this paragraph,” which makes me warm to the author immediately and suggests that the blurb calling the book “incisive, sometimes brutally candid and almost always witty” is telling the truth. Having read the brief Note on the Text (which ends, charmingly, “I beg the reader’s indulgence if on occasion I have misapplied ‘OT’ [Old Turkic] to a Middle Turkic word”) and the almost as brief Introduction (which, in a paragraph describing German attempts to rid the language of French encroachments, quotes Friedrich Wilhelm I’s “celebrated declaration to his nobles: ‘Ich stabiliere die Souveraineté wie einen Rocher de Bronze'”), I will reluctantly set the book aside until I have finished Svetlana Boym’s Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia; I’m sure it will inspire further posts as I work my way through it.

LIGHTNING RODS.

I have to admit, I put off reading Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods because I was afraid of being disappointed. I didn’t think I’d dislike it, mind you—how could I, when Helen DeWitt wrote it?—but I thought it might be a letdown after the brilliance of The Last Samurai (see my head-over-heels endorsement here). Specifically, I thought (knowing from reviews that it was about anonymous sex in the workplace) that it might be a well-written piece of sexual surrealism like Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, and I wasn’t sure how many of those the world needed. But it turns out to be something entirely different, a scathing but increasingly funny satire of American culture, using sex as a convenient lever to pry the contraption open and see how it works. To half-quote Judge Woolsey’s decision in the famous Ulysses case, “nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac”—unless you’re turned on by great sentences. DeWitt’s ear for the rhythm and feel of the bland commercialized language of Homo americanus rivals those of S. J. Perelman and John Ashbery; in fact, opening Ashbery’s collection your name here at random, I find that the opening lines of “The Gods of Fairness” could have come straight out of Lightning Rods: “The failure to see God is not a problem/ God has a problem with. Sure, he could see us/ if he had a hankering to do so, but that’s/ not the point.” Here’s DeWitt (again, picked at random): “If you’re in sales you know that confidence creates confidence. If you can convey to the customer that you consider yourself to have a first-class product, nine times out of ten the customer will see the product that way too.” (Her use of italics, incidentally, is masterly.) It’s hard to convey the cumulative effect of her prose by quoting a sentence or two out of context, so let me quote a couple of paragraphs about “Renée (or Miss Perfect, as she was known in her family)”:

[Read more…]

BLISS.

The poet Robert Kelly has been a LH favorite for a long time (see here and here); via wood s lot I’ve discovered a new poem of his called “Bliss” that I like a lot. Here’s the start of it:

that’s a snow word a loaded word
gone west in our sinister acropolis
(in shadow of Ionic columns
rubbed her back on a pilaster)
because it is always appropriate
to walk slowly around a thing
holding a twig of pear tree in your fingers
lightly as if you’d gone to dowse
the intentions of the Coming Beast
(roll over, you’re snoring)
I need my coffee, religion
is too far from here in human weather
(teeth of ancient rhetoric, zeugma thee
with me or is it a much bigger bird
strouthos to hoist thy chariot to me)
pelt of a virgin, torque of a Celt
(what is gold? answer at the back of the book)
in fact love is exactly like algebra
but I can’t at the moment say why can you
liberty has something to do with it, solving
for two unknowns, but why in Arabic?

His obsession with language chimes with mine, and his refusal to indulge the seeker after paraphrasable “meaning” celebrates what makes poetry different from prose. He may not be your cup of tea, and that’s fine, but his short, agile lines tickle my brain in a way that nobody else’s do.

EMMETT BENNETT, RIP.

A nice NY Times obit by Margalit Fox of the man without whose work Michael Ventris would never have been able to decipher Linear B:

Professor Bennett was considered the father of Mycenaean epigraphy — that is, the intricate art of reading inscriptions from the Mycenaean period, as the slice of the Greek Bronze Age from about 1600 to 1200 B.C. is known. His work, which entailed analysis so minute that he could eventually distinguish the handwritings of many different Bronze Age scribes, helped open a window onto the Mycenaean world. […]
In his seminal monograph “The Pylos Tablets” (1951), Professor Bennett published the first definitive list of the signs of Linear B. Compiling such a list is the essential first step in deciphering any unknown script, and it is no mean feat. […] Working with Alice Kober, a classicist at Brooklyn College who before her death in 1950 was one of the world’s foremost experts on the script, Professor Bennett spent much of the 1940s hammering out a list of about 80 characters. […] Thanks to the combined efforts of Professor Bennett, Professor Kober and Mr. Ventris, Linear B is now the earliest readable writing in Europe, and the Mycenaean Age is part of the canon of history.

As lagniappe, here‘s a little piece by Ben Zimmer on what to call 2012; me, I say “twenty-twelve,” but if you prefer the more leisurely “two thousand twelve,” that’s your prerogative.