One of my favorite nonstandard bits of English is the double modal, as exemplified by sentences like “You might should do that.” They are a peripheral part of my dialect thanks to my Ozark ancestors, and while I don’t use them on a daily basis, I delight in tossing them into the mix once in a while; they give me that warm down-home feeling. A few years ago the Log had a post on them (with some followups linked in the “Updates” at the bottom); now they’ve become all the rage in the linguablogosphere (Lingua Franca, Sentence first), thanks to the appearance on the scene of MultiMo, the Database of Multiple Modals, created by Paul Reed and Michael Montgomery of the University of South Carolina. The database “brings together the research and investigations from more than forty years of scholarship, primarily in the Southern United States, Scotland, and Northern England” and “includes almost 2000 examples, nearly all documented MMs, in a manner designed to spur further research using them”; it is accompanied by “a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the published scholarly research” and “a commentary section that provides pertinent comments on MMs from scholars and a variety of other sources either printed or online.” If you want to take part, contact one of the administrators for a username and password. You might could enjoy it.
Archives for February 2012
ENOT.
My wife and I watched a PBS show about raccoons yesterday and were astonished—I had no idea how ubiquitous, resourceful, and rapidly evolving they are, and it seems clear that they’ll wind up taking over the world from us and probably running it better. At any rate, I was pleased that I remembered the Russian word for them, енот [enot, pronounced something like “ye know’t”], and after the show I decided to look up the etymology. Vasmer says “Возм., заимств. через нем. Genettkatze или голл. genetta из франц. genette, исп., порт. ginetta, источником которого является араб. jarnait ‘соболиная кошка’ (i.e., it may be borrowed via German Genettkatze or Dutch genetta from a Romance form deriving from Arabic jarnait). What amused me was the entry in Dahl, who doesn’t usually do much in the way of etymology (Russian below the cut):
small American animal of the bear familly, raccoon, poloskun-bear [medved’-poloskun; poloskun ‘raccoon,’ from poloskat’ ‘rinse,’ poloskat’ ‘splash around, paddle’], Ursus lotor. The first raccoon furs were brought to Saint Petersburg, to the Cabinet [presumably the Kunstkamera], and a Greek named Gennadi was in charge of them; the buyers called them genadievy [“Gennadi’s”], from which the name enot is supposedly derived. But the raccoon civet is called Viverra genetta, and although that’s a completely different creature, isn’t it more to the point to look for a connection here? [Sample sentence:] Raccoon furs are in the most general use among us. In southern Siberia there is a raccoon called locally manal and mangut, which by its description is very similar to the American.
I love that kind of discursive, semi-encyclopedic definition.
CLICKS IN ENGLISH.
Melissa Wright, a linguist at Birmingham City University, specializes in “the relationship between the phonetic-linguistic details of everyday talk and the interactional structures within which (and through which) that talk is produced”; at her home page, she says of her PD thesis: “I examined the phonetic and interactional organisation of naturally-occurring British and American English conversation. I showed that there are complex and systematic mappings between clicks and interactional structures in talk, a finding which is striking given that clicks have so far been regarded by linguists as functioning only paralinguistically.” Her recent paper “On clicks in English talk-in-interaction” (Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41: 207-229; abstract) has been briefly described in this Scientific American article by Anne Pycha as follows:
Speakers, it turns out, use clicks for a previously overlooked purpose: as a form of verbal punctuation in between thoughts or phrases. Melissa Wright […] recently analyzed click sounds in six large sets of recorded English conversations. She found that speakers used clicks frequently to signal that they were ending one stretch of conversation and shifting to a new one. For example, a speaker might say, “Yeah, that was a great game,” produce a click, then say, “The reason I’m calling is to invite you to dinner tomorrow.”
This pattern, which occurred for both British and American speakers, suggests that clicks have a meaning similar to saying “anyway” or “so.” That is, clicks provide us with a phonetic resource to organize conversations and communicate our intentions to listeners. This finding had previously eluded linguists, whose research often focuses on words and sentences in isolation. Wright was able to uncover the new pattern because she analyzed clicks in the context of complete conversations, suggesting that this method could be important for making new discoveries about the nature of language.
I don’t know if the “new discoveries about the nature of language” thing is from Wright’s paper or added by Pycha to spice things up; it raised my eyebrows, but not as much as the succeeding paragraph about, yes, the origin of language, for which see this exasperated 2003 LH post. (Thanks, Paul!)
PERLMANN’S SILENCE.
This Guardian review by Alberto Manguel makes Perlmann’s Silence
Throughout the days preceding the conference, Perlmann has with him a paper by a Russian linguistic, Vassily Leskov, on how memory is informed by language. Suddenly, when he can’t avoid stating the subject of his own (unwritten) presentation, Perlmann gives Leskov’s subject as his own. With the help of a dictionary, he translates the Russian paper and copies it for the other participants. Then Leskov announces his arrival. The story acquires here a Hitchcock-like suspense. Suicide and murder are contemplated. Complications multiply. Perlmann’s anguish grows.
(I don’t know whether “linguistic” for “linguist” is a typo or a mistake on Manguel’s part, but either way it’s comforting to see the Grauniad live down to its standards of copyediting.)
I’m not going to make a separate post for this, but if you’re interested in Serbian/Serbocroatian/whatever you call it, you’ll be interested in Monumenta Serbica. Thanks, Paul!
MONTIGOMO IN OGONYOK.
Remember this post from two years ago? The post was about Chukovsky and Gumilyov but the thread started with a discussion of how to translate люблю (literally ‘I love’) and wound up as an extended investigation of the possible sources of Chekhov’s “Montigomo the Hawk’s Claw.” Well, Sashura, who sparked the investigation, has an article (in Russian) in today’s Огонёк about that very topic; if you read Russian, it’s well worth your while, and if you don’t, you can get the basics from the LH thread I linked to. What I want to mention here is the sentence “Особая благодарность здесь посетителям блога американского лингвиста Стива Додсона Languagehat.com, часто публикующего заметки о русской литературе” [Special thanks to the habitués of the blog of the American linguist Steve Dodson languagehat.com, which often publishes notes on Russian literature]. You can all take a bow.
A BOOK FROM THE SKY.
Victor Mair has a typically informative and enjoyable post over at the Log that has a lot to say about (in the words of its title) “The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation”; what I want to highlight here is the following passage about an astonishing and (to my mind) brilliant work of art/épatage:
The ultimate sendup of Chinese character formation is Xu Bing’s famous Tiānshū 天书 (A Book from the Sky), which consists entirely of characters that look like real characters, but are in fact all fake. When A Book from the Sky was first exhibited in Beijing in 1988, it caused enormous consternation, because those who came to view it felt that the characters were familiar, but no matter how hard they strained, they could not make sound or sense of a single character in the entire lot. Sounds and meanings could arbitrarily or imaginatively be assigned to each and every one of Xu Bing’s 4,000 characters from the sky. All of the strokes and all of the components are “legal” in the sense that they occur in officially authorized characters, but they have been combined in “illegal” ways. That is to say, they don’t add up to any characters that occur in historical texts or dictionaries. Once they realized that they had been “had”, conservative viewers were outraged because they thought that Xu Bing was making fun / light of them and their revered writing system. It wasn’t long before the exhibition closed and Xu fled to the United States in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
At the “Tiānshū” link you can see an image of the book; I wish I owned a copy. Xu Bing is right up there with R. Mutt as far as I’m concerned.
MONDAY BEGINS ON SATURDAY.
I’m reading Понедельник начинается в субботу (Monday Begins on Saturday
Of course, I don’t get all the allusions on my own, which is why I’m glad to have found this page, which annotates the book (and is part of a site that does the same for all the Strugatskys’ work). The internet: long may it prosper!
BAFFLING ENCYCLOPEDIA.
A piece by Robert Woolsey of KCAW describes what Zackary Sholem Berger, who sent me the link, justly calls a “comic-tragic” story:
A new encyclopedia of the Tlingit language has teachers in Sitka scratching their heads. The massive work by New Zealand scholar Sally-Ann Lambert is extraordinarily detailed, and the product of years of effort.
The problem is: The language in the book is not recognizable by contemporary scholars, or Native Tlingit speakers.
I won’t try to summarize the story, but I will say that if you produce a “Hlingit Word Encyclopedia” that is unintelligible to actual Tlingit speakers, you’ve gone seriously astray…. although the author’s “rationale for the huge investment in time and energy in the book may ultimately have little to do with whether or not it is accepted.” It’s a weird world, folks.
I’M DONE WORK.
A recent post by Anatoly (in Russian) sent me to this post at Ganesha’s Scarf, which describes a phenomenon of Canadian speech of which I had been entirely ignorant:
Yesterday Libby informed me that for the past YEAR she has thought that I had some grammar problem because I kept saying I was done things… “I’m done work,” I’m done my sandwich,” I’m done Bossypants so now you can take it”, etc. Apparently she didn’t want to point it out lest she embarrass me, until the other day when she heard another Canadian interviewed who kept saying the same thing. (btw for everyone who has no clue what’s wrong with these quotes, apparently most people would say “I’m done with work” “I’m done with my sandwich” […]
This blogpost is very likely the first website to write anything about the issue. All I’ve managed to find is a lot of arguing on various forums on whether it should be “I’m done dishes” or “I’m done with homework.” The forums confirm that this is Canadian and common to some parts of the East Coast – NJ, New Hampshire, Philadelphia.
The last bit about the East Coast of the U.S. sounds unlikely to me; I think I’d have heard of it in that case, and Anatoly says it’s confined to Canada. Is anybody familiar with this? (There must be linguistic literature about it, but I don’t know how to search for it.)
READING NOTES ON RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY.
Kenny Cargill has a relatively new blog on Russian history, culture, language, and literature (“I will also be discussing many readings from my M.A. thesis treating Fyodor Dostoevsky’s significance as a public intellectual and journalist during the 1870s”); it’s been around since August 2010, but there are only seven posts so far. The two most recent are a review of The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English
If readers could only become familiar with some translation theory, then perhaps they would be receptive to these more avant-garde translations. In particular, Lawrence Venuti in his The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation has contributed the notion of “abusive translation,” meaning translation that deliberately subverts English stylistic conventions, in providing an academic framework in which to appreciate translations that privilege fidelity to the original text’s linguistic structure over all other considerations. Such a technique is ultimately bound to contribute more to the literature of the target language: “If a work is worth translating, then it should not just slip unobtrusively into the target language. It should be allowed to stretch and challenge that language with the same vitality that its original possesses — possibly even a greater vitality, born of new linguistic and metaphorical contrasts” (8). The problem is, however, that most English-language critics and readers, and particularly those monolingual readers who have no way of understanding or appreciating how the target-language translation mimics the source-language text, will naturally privilege fluency, comprehensibility and even some stylistic normativity over experimentation.
The very name “abusive translation” suggests that it’s a bad thing, but it’s described as a good one. The problem (in my view) comes when the alleged mimicry of the source-language text, rather than preserving “the same vitality that its original possesses,” is actually adding an apparent vitality (or Verfremdungseffekt) that is not there in the original; this is precisely the problem with the much-lauded Pevear and Volokhonsky, and I disagree that the pushback against them means that “we as readers in English want to read translations that adhere to John Dryden’s ‘imitation’ principle of translation, that is we want to read what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pasternak would have written had they been born in England or America, and not in Russia.” I would say rather that it means we want exactly as much weirdness as the author put into the text and do not need added weirdness sprinkled in by the translator for the frisson of exoticism. At any rate, I look forward to reading more by Cargill, whether I agree with a particular point or not. The waterfront he covers is one I frequent myself.
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