Archives for September 2015

I am sure I must have looked up windlass before, but since I’ve never used one, or seen one that I remember (I must have seen them on ships, where they’re used for weighing anchor, but not known what they were called), the meaning went right out of my head; I’m hoping that by posting about it I may manage to remember it. A windlass is (in the AHD’s words) “Any of numerous hauling or lifting machines consisting essentially of a horizontal cylinder turned by a crank or a motor so that a line attached to the load is wound around the cylinder”; there’s an image at the link. The OED says (entry from 1926) “Probably alteration of windas n., of obscure origin,” but AHD improves on that: “Middle English wyndlas, alteration of windas, from Old Norse vindāss: vinda, to wind + āss, pole.” In Russian they call it лебёдка [lebyodka], literally ‘female swan’ (‘swan’ is лебедь [lebed’]); compare crane and French grue, also names of lifting devices.

Again, not a weighty post, but the weather’s been miserable and I’m editing two books at once, so I trust you’ll cut me some slack. Lori Dorn reports that Welsh Weatherman Correctly Pronounces a 58-Letter Town Name Without Batting an Eye:

While reporting on the warm weather in Wales, broadcaster Liam Dutton correctly pronounced the name of the 58-letter town Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch without batting an eye or breaking a sweat. In fact, Dutton announced on Twitter that he’d be talking about the town in his broadcast and was really appreciative of the growing admiration for his performance.

It’s a very enjoyable 19 seconds.

I’ll pad out the post with a couple of links that have, strictly speaking, nothing to do with LH but which some readers may enjoy as much as I do:

The End of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Forgery Debate, by Andrew Bernhard (spoiler: it’s a forgery!)

New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use: Twenty thousand hi-res maps! What are you waiting for?

This is very silly, but I can’t resist sharing it: Ben Zimmer at the Log reports on the latest auto-replace disaster, which produced a sentence beginning “When the particitrousers of the revolutionary movement in Korea…”:

We can surmise that when the UK edition of Harden’s book came out for the Kindle, an editor felt the need to screen it for Americanisms that might not translate well across the pond. Pants, understandably, would be one such Americanism to flag, since in British usage pants more typically refers to underwear. The pants/trousers divide was evident in Samuel Butler’s 1875 poem, “A Psalm of Montreal: “Thou callest trousers ‘pants’, whereas I call them ‘trousers’, Therefore thou art in hell-fire and may the Lord pity thee!” (For more, see my 2006 post, “Pioneers of word rage.”)

Using the Google Books version of Harden’s book, we can locate six instances where American pants usage could safely be swapped out for trousers. But the search-and-replace mission went too far, finding the substring pants in the sentence beginning, “When the participants of the revolutionary movement in Korea…”

This isn’t the first time that sloppy e-book editing has led to search-and-replace follies. A few years ago, we learned of an edition of War and Peace for Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader in which all instances of Kindle were replaced with Nook, leading to sentences like “It was as if a light had been Nookd…”

See Ben’s post for links, discussion, and a 1904 joke involving occutrousers.

I’m now on Victor Terras’s chapter, “The Twentieth Century: 1925-53,” in The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (see this post), and thought I’d quote this passage on a couple of poets of the 1920s and ’30s (neither of them known to me):

Among the constructivists, there were at least two major poets: Eduard Bagritsky (pen-name of Eduard Dzyubin, 1897-1934) and Ilya Selvinsky (real given name: Karl, 1899-1968), who practiced a pointedly functional approach to poetic composition, seeking to integrate every level of their text — sound, rhythm, imagery, lexicon, syntax — with its intended meaning. Both Bagritsky and Selvinsky used slang, argot, regionalisms, local color, the rhythms of folk poetry whenever a poem’s theme demanded it. Bagritsky’s “local color” was that of Odessa and the Ukrainian countryside. His Lay of Opanas (Duma ob Opanase, 1926), loosely patterned after the Ukrainian folk ballad (duma), tells the story of the peasant Opanas, who chose the wrong side in the civil war and paid for it with his life. When Bagritsky moved on from themes of the revolution to topics of the Five Year Plan, his poetry retained an air of genuine revolutionary romanticism.

Ilya Selvinsky travelled widely, pursued several different professions, participated in a polar expedition, and projected his varied experiences into his work. He was one of the first Soviet writers to do serious research toward his literary projects and to view composing poetry as a goal-directed, rational activity. Like Bagritsky, he adapted his language to the subject at hand, using technical jargon, thieves’ cant, Odessa Yiddish, gypsy, and whatever other idiom was required. Selvinsky’s best poetic work is the verse epic The Ulyalaev Uprising (Ulyalaevshchina, written in 1924, published in 1927), which describes the rout of a counter-revolutionary uprising by Communist forces.

The more I read about Russian literature, the more impressed I am by the role Odessa has played in it, from the 19th century (Pushkin wrote chunks of Eugene Onegin there) through the great 20th-century Odessans like Babel, Olesha, Ilf and Petrov, and others; you can read about it in this New Yorker piece by Sally McGrane, which I’m happy to see includes Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Pyatero [The Five]: “It’s not very famous. But it is the most nostalgic, sweet description of Odessa. He was a great patriot of the city, he loved it. He spoke eleven languages—the normal Odessan, back then, spoke four or five, but he spoke eleven.”

Not exactly a new topic around these parts, but I thought Ben Macaulay’s take on it was more thoughtful and detailed than others I’ve seen, and even has audio files of the languages he highlights. He begins:

“Why don’t we just let all the languages die out?”, or some variant thereof, is the second question anyone asks me when I tell them I’m a linguist. (The first question is “How many languages do you speak?”) While that’s very jarring, I understand where the notion is coming from. The purpose of language is communication. What would be more efficient for communication, having to navigate the seven thousand languages that currently exist or just a few?

This idea makes it particularly difficult for people outside of linguistics to see language endangerment and extinction as an emergency. Those more inclined towards social justice might realize that language is one of the strongest bonds that holds a culture together, and the fact that a language is only spoken by a small community does not make it less worthy of respect. However, the need to keep languages alive runs even deeper than altruism.

Linguistics, or the investigation of patterns within and across languages, has yielded findings that not only shed light on the details, but on other areas such as auditory/visual perception and cognition in general. These findings increase exponentially with the number of languages that are documented and allowed to thrive and develop into new language states.
[…]

Keeping that in mind, let’s look at some examples of endangered languages and the different circumstances that put them at risk. To start is an example of a language with no tie to the linguistic community: not only does it lack the resources offered to documented endangered languages, but we actually don’t know whether there are still speakers or not.

Under one of them he says, “You may know Ayapa Zoque by its Spanish name, Ayapaneco. This language was the subject of a Vodafone marketing gimmick and started a trend of endangered language thinkpieces starting with a 2011 article in The Guardian.” This is leagues above those thinkpieces; check it out. (Thanks for the link, Parry!)

Last year we discussed Victorian colons in the context of Dickens; now, as I am finally remedying my lifelong failure to read Jane Eyre, I am struck by the punctuation in the second paragraph:

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

I like those colons very much; semicolons just wouldn’t be the same (and in any event one of the cardinal tenets of my editorial beliefs is that you can’t have two semicolons in the same sentence unless they are separating groups of items themselves separated by commas). It’s a pity we’ve let this form of punctuation slip away—I wonder when that happened?

The following paragraph has what to modern eyes is a bizarre mismatch of punctuation and wording:

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner, — something lighter, franker, more natural as it were — she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children.”

The combination of indirect discourse with quotation marks (which I encounter also in the Trollope novels I am reading to my wife) displeases me, and I am glad it has vanished into the dustbin of history. (I reproduce the punctuation from the 1850 edition of Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. By Currer Bell that is available on Google Books.)

Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org writes:

I’ve come across the following quotation in a number of places, such as this article from The Economist:

There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter.

The quotation is attributed to William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, who died in 1386. The problem is that I could only find the quotation in modern translation and it sounds distinctly un-Middle Englishy, so I doubted that it was authentic. Because I could only find it in translation, tracking it down was difficult—it’s hard to search for a Middle English quotation if you don’t have the Middle English diction. It turns out that the quote is genuine, but it is a rather free translation.
[. . .]

Langland says nothing about “writ[ing] a decent letter.” In the B-text he does bemoan the fact that English scholars can’t read a letter in languages other than Latin or English, but says nothing about writing them. The translation of clerk as “schoolboy” is also questionable. The word schoolboy connotes a relatively young age, but clerk, which is the ancestor of the modern cleric, referred to clergy, often used in the context of someone who could read and write. It could also refer to a university student—as in Chaucer’s clerk—but the word wouldn’t be applied to what we now dub a schoolboy. Also the word grammar has shifted in meaning considerably. […]

So a more accurate modern translation would read something like:

Latin, the basis of all, now beguiles children. None of these new university students can compose good poetry or write formally. Not one in a hundred can properly interpret what an author has written, or even read anything at all that is not written in Latin or English.

Langland was indeed bemoaning the state of learning, but not in the way people bemoan the supposed decline of English today. He was concerned with the fact that scholars didn’t know languages other than Latin and English, and the schoolchildren were not even learning good Latin. He was not going on about the decline of English, which at the time was not a prestige dialect—it was what linguists call a basilect, with Anglo-Norman French being the acrolect and Latin being the language of scholarship. The idea of English declining wouldn’t have made sense to him. If anything, English was on the rise, with poets like him, Chaucer, and Gower, once again composing serious verse in it.

Original and further details at the link; I love this sort of careful investigation.

Chi Luu (see this post) has a JSTOR Daily piece about a much-discussed topic, the English spelling system and the many attempts to reform it. It begins with Gerard Nolst Trenité’s “The Chaos,” a poem showcasing the absurdities of English orthography which I posted about almost a decade ago; continues with Patrick Groff’s 1976 paper “Why There Has Been No Spelling Reform,” his own preference (which I share) for keeping the historical forms of English spelling in place, and Anatoly Liberman’s cranky opposition to that view (“What sentiment? What value?”); and finishes up with a paean to the orthographical playfulness of the internet:

So are these deliberate misspellings a sign of English orthography simplifying organically, or deteriorating rapidly? The early constraints of mobile phone text messaging gave rise to short form spellings–which inevitably gave rise to a moral panic about literacy rates decreasing in young people. However, studies have shown that text-speak actually improves literacy, as users receive more exposure to language and different word forms, improving their reading development. According to David Crystal “there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language. […] If you can’t spell a word, then you don’t really know whether it’s cool to misspell it. Kids have a very precise idea of context – none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams – they know they would be marked down for it.”

In Young People’s Everyday Literacies: The Language Features of Instant Messaging, the analysis of a 32,000 word corpus of college students’ instant messages shows how IM users employ rich linguistic features to convey paralinguistic cues and clarify conversational contexts. One of the main features was eye dialect spellings and other simplified spelling forms. So deliberate misspellings are being used all the time, not because users are necessarily illiterate but because they know how to manipulate language in the right contexts. These new spellings are productively used and widely shared, quite unlike a spelling reform drafted by committee and applied by edict.

Lots of good stuff in there; thanks, Paul!

I was so tickled by the link Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) provided here that I thought I’d feature it; how can I, who began studying Russian in Argentina and still loves hearing Carlos Gardel, resist a site that features gorgeous images, clips of tango music and dancing, and lyrics in Spanish and Russian? Without further ado: Переводы стихов танго [Translations of tango lyrics].

And while we’re on the subject, I was intrigued to see that OnEtDi has a more specific etymology of tango than I was aware existed (it’s usually “perhaps of African origin”): “from Argentine Spanish tango, originally the name of an African-American drum dance, probably from a Niger-Congo language (compare Ibibio tamgu ‘to dance’).” Anybody know more about this?

Andrea Appleton at smithsonian.com reports on a new publication:

Middle Welsh and Manx, Lingwa de Planeta and Latgalian. In its 150-year history, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into every major language and numerous minor ones, including many that are extinct or invented. Only some religious texts and a few other children’s books—including The Little Prince by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—reportedly rival Alice for sheer number of linguistic variations.

But the real wonder is that any Alice translations exist at all. Penned in 1865 by English scholar Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, the book’s delight in wordplay and cultural parodies makes it a torment for translators.

How do you write about the Mouse’s tale without losing the all-important pun on “tail”? Some languages, like the Aboriginal tongue Pitjantjatjara, don’t even use puns. What about when a character takes an idiom literally? […]

A massive new work, Alice in a World of Wonderlands, devotes three volumes to exploring such questions. Published by Oak Knoll Press, the books include essays by 251 writers analyzing the beloved children’s book in 174 languages. The essays are scholarly but peppered with anecdotes illuminating the peculiarities of language and culture as they relate to Carroll’s book. […]

Language and typography scholar Michael Everson says the novel’s inherent difficulty is part of its appeal. “The Alice challenge seems to be one that people like because it’s really fun,” he says. “Wracking your brains to resurrect a pun that works in your language even though it shouldn’t, that sort of thing.” For instance, an early Gujarati translator managed to capture the tail/tale pun for readers of that western Indian tongue. When someone talks incessantly, it is often conveyed through the Gujarati phrase poonchadoo nathee dekhatun, which means “no end in sight”—allowing the translator to play on poonchadee, the word for “tail”, with poonchadoo.

I love the Gujarati example, and there are other goodies at the link (“In the Swahili edition, the Hatter wears a fez and the dormouse is a bush baby”). It’s amazing how clever people can be at coming up with corresponding wordplay. And I should note that the article doesn’t mention one of the more famous and successful versions, Nabokov’s Аня в Стране Чудес.