Archives for November 2015

More synchronicity: in a nice follow-up to my Lake Talk post, here’s Marjola Rukaj’s “The secret languages of the Bazaars“:

When the čaršijas* [*To make reading easier the ‘bchs’ version of the word (čaršija) is used in the texts on Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbia; in those on Albania, the Albanian spelling (çarshija); whereas for the bazaars in Kosovo and Macedonia both wordings are used indifferently] were the pulsating heart of Balkan towns, many languages mingled and crossbred there. Similar languages belonging to the southern Slav family, but cousins of Greek, Albanian and Rumanian, part of the Balkan brotherhood formed over the centuries with population movement and the outside influence of German, Italian, Venetian and Hungarian. In the çarshijas everyone was multilingual with each person being able to speak to his neighbour in that person’s own language.

Along with the natural languages, defying the principles of historic linguistics, invented languages survived and even developed over the centuries. These were actual codes which the people of the čaršijas used to communicate. Secret languages with precise grammar rules and vocabulary were conceived in such a way as to confuse any outsider who tried to guess the meaning.

The secret languages existed for many centuries, probably since the birth of the çarshijas, though when they began cannot be precisely dated though they have been found in many texts from 1500. Some words and expressions survived in urban jargon in several towns but few people have studied them and with the emptying of the čaršijas they have become extinct. […]

According to the theory of Milenko Filipović, supported by the Kosovan Kadri Halimi, the secret languages respected the grammar rules of the local majority language, for example Serbo-Croat in Sarajevo, inserting words which were invented also from a morphological point of view. “Often the words were metaphors which then took on another meaning” states Filipović in a document of 1930. For instance gledač meant window, derived from the verb gledati – to look; pevac – pope [presumably ‘Orthodox priest’ — LH], from the verb pevati – to sing; ušačka – door, from the verb ući – to enter.

Another system was the so-called ters. This consisted in using the opposite of the root of the word. Somewhat similar was the šatrovački system in which the order of the syllables in a word was changed. An example of the latter can be found in the Albanian saying shatra-patra which probably derives from the Romani shatra, here indicating a Rom word inserted into other languages.

There are a lot more examples at the link; thanks, Michael!

The New England Historical Society features “Nonantum, the New England Town With Its Own Special Language” (based on Erica Noonan’s 2001 Boston Globe story “In Newton, they still speak the language of the lake“):

No matter where Nonantum natives go, they can tell someone is from their village when they hear them speak Lake Talk. Lake Talk is the unique argot of Nonantum, one of the 13 villages of Newton, Mass. Unintelligible to outsiders, it binds tighter the already close-knit Italian-American community.

According to Lake Talk, a mush (pronounced moosh) is a man, a jival is a girl, and a quister jival (quis-tah jiv-il) is a pretty girl.
[. . .]

Author Brenda Spalding grew up in Nonantum, and explains where Lake Talk came from:

In the 1930’s and 40’s the traveling gypsy carnivals came through the area and the locals would work for them. One thing that remained is the language of the carnivals and it’s still in use today.

[. . .]

Lake Talk is a mix of Italian, Romany and English slang.

I always enjoy this sort of local jargon, and I can’t help but notice the similarity between mush ‘man’ and Russian муж [muzh] ‘man.

I’m surprised to realize I haven’t mentioned Ann Leckie in any LH posts (though I have in comments); her novel Ancillary Justice is the best science fiction I’ve read in years, and it has an obvious linguistic hook, which I’ll let Alex Dally MacFarlane explain at the beginning of her very interesting and informative essay “Translating Gender: Ancillary Justice in Five Languages“:

In Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice (Orbit Books: 2013), the imperial Radch rules over much of human-inhabited space. Its culture – and its language – does not identify people on the basis of their gender: it is irrelevant to them. In the novel, written in English, Leckie represents this linguistic reality by using the female pronoun ‘she’ throughout, regardless of any information supplied about a Radchaai (and, often, a non-Radchaai) person’s perceived gender. This pronoun choice has two effects. Firstly, it successfully erases grammatical difference in the novel and makes moot the question of the characters’ genders. But secondly, it exists in a context of continuing discussions around the gendering of science fiction, the place of men and women and people of other genders within the genre, as characters in fiction and as professional/fans, and beyond the pages of the book it is profoundly political. It is a female pronoun.

When translating Ancillary Justice into other languages, the relationship between those two effects is vital to the work.

After reading a comment by the Hungarian translator, Csilla Kleinheincz, posted on Cheryl Morgan’s blog, we wanted to know more about this. We invited the translators of the novel into Bulgarian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian and Japanese to discuss the process, with particular interest in the translation of gender. What emerges is an insight into the work of translators and the rigidity and versatility of grammatical gender in the face of non-standard demands. Where necessary, translators turned to innovative and even inventive ways to write their languages.

It’s fascinating stuff; I’ll quote this bit because of its resonance with yesterday’s post:

Hebrew presented considerable challenges, as Emanuel Lottem explains in shared correspondence with Ann Leckie: “All verbs and adjectives vary according to gender. An exception is the pronoun ‘I’, which is the same for both females and males, but when a woman says ‘I sit’ it’s ‘ani yoshevet’, whereas a man would say ‘ani yoshev’. Moreover, all objects, concrete or abstract, are either feminine or masculine, so that in a sentence like ‘a large room (m.) with a large door (f.)’, the word ‘large’ would be ‘gadol’ in the former case, ‘gdola’ in the latter. This is not much of a problem when Breq tells her story, but it is when non-Radchaai are talking.”

This even presented a problem for the novel’s title: “The word for ‘justice’ – tzedeq – is unfortunately masculine, and I’d hate to use it in the title because of that.”

(I once posted three times in a row using Latin titles, entirely without premeditation; now I’ve similarly done two in a row on gender. Blogging is almost as full of synchronicity as life itself.)

An interesting piece by Ilana Masad on the difficulty of being a feminist, or transgender, in a Hebrew-speaking environment:

Many people may be familiar with languages like Spanish or French in which nouns are gendered. The main difference between Hebrew and these other languages, however, is that one cannot speak in first or second person in Hebrew without indicating gender. The word “I” is ungendered, but any verb connected to it in present or future tenses inherently is. Thus, the phrase “I want a cookie” becomes, in literal translation, “I female-want a female-cookie.” (Cookie is a female-gendered noun, which I’m okay with, because yum, cookies.) In the example above, the reason the word “canceled” is attached to the word “female” is because “train” is a female subject, grammatically, and thus most verb conjugations describing that train will be gendered.

In other words, interpersonal conversation is never without the indication of gender. Even if you and another person were on two sides of a barrier and your voices were not indicative of your gender, you would each know the other’s gender within a few sentences because of the verb formulations you’d use.
[. . .]

Coming back to Israel after a year away and speaking Hebrew day in and day out again has been a bit of a shock. I have been reminded of the many, many issues women deal with here. For one thing, the correct way to address a group of people in Hebrew is usually with male pronouns and verbs, unless the group is exclusively female. So if a lecture hall is filled with women, but one seat is occupied by a man, the professor is supposed to address the crowd with you-plural-male pronouns and verbs. Announcements at airports and train- and bus-stations similarly address crowds with the second-person-plural-male pronouns, because the assumption is that there will be men there (even one is enough to make this mandatory).

This “correct” way of speaking has been handed down from on high, the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which is “the world’s premiere institution for the Hebrew language, and in Israel, its decisions are binding on all governmental agencies.” The About section of the Academy’s website goes on to say: “Although the Academy has the reputation of being Israel’s ‘language police’, it does not police spontaneous speech. The institution considers its decisions binding only for written texts and formal speeches.”

What does this mean in practice? That formal speeches are addressed to men. That academics address their papers to men. That national examinations are usually addressed to men, with a little asterisk at the bottom of the page or the end of the exam booklet with some version of this disclaimer: “This test is geared towards both men and women.” […] Furthermore, in day-to-day speech, the general second-person pronoun used in hypotheticals or examples of any kind is also gendered male.

The stuff about gendered nouns is silly, but doesn’t affect the author’s main point. (And please, no jokes about LGBTQIA — yes, the terminology can get awkward, but there are good reasons for it.) Thanks, Yoram!

An Atlas Obscura piece by Dan Nosowitz has a pretty decent layman’s explanation of the origin of the peculiar NYC-area pronunciation of Italian foodstuffs (perhaps best exemplified by “pastafazool” for pasta e fagioli, which he doesn’t cite); Nosowitz talks to “a few linguists and experts on Italian-American culture,” provides some historical background and a helpful map (though it should be labeled “A map of Italy in 1494,” not “A map of Italy from 1494”), and gives some basic linguistic information:

During unification, the northern Italian powers decided that having a country that speaks about a dozen different languages would pose a bit of a challenge to their efforts, so they picked one and called it “Standard Italian” and made everyone learn it. The one that they picked was Tuscan, and they probably picked it because it was the language of Dante, the most famous Italian writer. (You can see why calling these languages “dialects” is tricky; Standard Italian is just one more dialect, not the base language which Calabrian or Piedmontese riffs on, which is kind of the implication.)

Nice photos and video clips, too. Worth a read. (Via MetaFilter.)

Or, as the webpage itself has it, ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЕ НАЗВАНИЯ ВИЛЬНЮССКИХ УЛИЦ / Vilniaus gatvių pavadinimai / Nazwy ulic Wilno. As Anatoly sometimes says (though he says it in Russian), this post will hardly be of interest to anyone, but when the link was sent to me (thanks, Paul!) I felt such a rush of nostalgic pleasure I had to make it anyway. When I saw the title, I thought “Oh, I’ve posted about that on LH.” But a few minutes’ searching convinced me I hadn’t, and I realized I was remembering having run across either this or a very similar site in the prehistoric days before LH existed; it must have been one of the first sites that convinced me the internet was going to be extremely relevant to my interests, even the very esoteric ones. There may not be many people out there who care that Aukų St. used to be known as Судебная, Sądowa, and Ofiarna, and I may never need that particular bit of information myself, but boy am I glad to have it at my fingertips.

Frequent commenter bulbul has alerted me to this LSA announcement:

Today, the LSA recognizes five linguists for their work to support endangered languages, promote linguistics to the public, and advance and serve the field of linguistics as a whole. Congratulations to the winners of the following LSA Awards:

● Linguistics, Language and the Public Award: Michael Erard. Michael Erard, editor of the online linguistics publication Schwa Fire, has over 15 years of experience writing on linguistic topics for the general public. Erard is the author of the popular book Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners and has contributed to media including the New York Times, Science, and NPR. The LL&P Award “honors an individual or group for work that effectively increases public awareness and understanding of linguistics and language.”
[. . .]

The other winners (Terry Langendoen, Nora C. England, Judith Tonhauser, and Barbara Partee) are all worthy, and my congratulations go to them as well, but Erard is a longtime friend of LH (I’ve been quoting him at least since 2003), and I’m especially pleased for his award.

I have received the following e-mail from Helen DeWitt, and it would give me the greatest possible pleasure to be able to help her out:

I am working on a story in which a character started a project in the 1990s using an Apple Performa, Nisus Writer, and the methods of Japanese input available in Apple OS 7 through 9. He then runs into problems with the introduction of OS X, which eliminates some of the input methods formerly available. (I devoutly hope the story is more interesting than this sounds.)

Now, I could swear when I used Nisus ca. 1999-2000 – that is, when the advance from The Last Samurai permitted me to pony up for a Mac – one of the methods of Japanese input enabled one to look up a character by radical and stroke numbers. In other words, you didn’t need to know how a word sounded to type it into a document; you could look at it, hazard a guess at the radical and stroke numbers, and look through the little chart that appeared onscreen. I, at least, found this enormously helpful, and it is unfortunately no longer available in OS X.

The only thing is, I’m starting to wonder if I imagined the whole thing. When I try to run a search on Google to see what other people have to say about this input system, I get no hits at all. (Well, maybe they are buried 50 pages into the list of hits; all I can say is that no amount of rephrasing, no amount of constraining for dates, has helped.) I wondered whether any of your readers might remember this system? The sort of thing it would interest me to know is whether it could also be used in Word or WordPerfect.

I’m afraid this is a little remote from the normal concerns of Languagehat – but maybe there is something of linguistic interest lurking somewhere. It seems to me that only someone who had never personally tried writing a text in Japanese (or, for that matter, Chinese) would replace the features we used to have with one which presupposed you always knew how to pronounce what you wanted to write – an interesting (if exasperating) mistake to make.

Anybody know?

Another intriguing passage from Alien Tongues (see this post), this time about Raymond Federman (footnote 56 on p. 198):

Raymond Federman, born in Paris, came to the United States at nineteen, after escaping from a deportation train and spending the rest of World War II working and hiding on a farm in southern France. Although he did not start learning English until he came to the United States, four years in the U.S. Army, including a stint in the 82nd Airborne and six months on the front lines in Korea, vastly accelerated his acquisition of “colloquial” English. Federman writes in both French and English, and his own observations about his bilingualism frequently support the generalizations made in this chapter. When he began writing his novel Amer Eldorado (circa 1970), he worked, alternately, on the French and English versions — one day on the French version, the next day on the English, and so on. He kept that up for about six months: “It drove me crazy. The two languages were pulling apart, pulling together, encouraging one another, defying one another, feeding one another, or perhaps I should say devouring one another. Eventually I dropped the English text and finished the French which became Amer Eldorado (published in 1974 by The Editions Stock). Then I went back to the English text and worked on it for three more years. That became Take It or Leave It. But no longer the same book. Amer Eldorado is about 200 pages long. A first-person narrative. Though Amer Eldorado is contained, in a manner of speaking, in Take It or Leave It (which is about 500 pages long), it is there not as a translation but as a loose adaptation. Moreover, Take It or Leave It uses two narrative voices (first and third person).” Federman always feels a sense of incompleteness when his work exists in only one language. When he writes poems, he immediately does a version in the other language (whichever), because he has the feeling that the original text is not finished until there is a version in the other language. He usually abandons self-translation of his novels, however, “for reasons of time, laziness, etc.,” but the result is that he feels his novels are never finished. Translations by other people do not do the trick. The only time Federman did an immediate translation of a prose text was for The Voice in the Closet / La voix dans le cabinet de débarras, where the two texts coexist in the same book, working from either end (the French text is rectangular, the English one, square). Federman says that his ambition is to write a book — admittedly, totally unreadable — in which the two languages would come together in the same sentence (there are a few such pages in Take It or Leave It). The cover would say “translated by the author,” but would not indicate from which language into which. (Federman did once publish a bilingual text [“D’une parenthèse à l’autre” / “From One Parenthesis to Another”] wherein the English version says “translated from the French by the author” and the French version says “translated from the English by the author.”) Behind the playfulness, there is a “need to abolish the ‘original.’ In fact, between the two texts translated by the author, there is no original, no possibility of origin” (personal communication).

I posted an example of one of his bilingual texts back in 2008.

In my march through the Russian nineteenth century, I’ve finally reached 1850, which brought me to Alexei Pisemsky, a favorite of Erik McDonald of XIX век (see this list of posts). His first published novel (an earlier one was suppressed by censors for a decade) was Tyufyak, and right away we face the problem of how to translate that. The translation is called The Simpleton, but that’s wrong; the protagonist, Pavel Beshmetev, is no simpleton, he’s been to college and wants to be a professor. For тюфяк the Oxford dictionary gives two definitions, “mattress (filled with straw, hay, etc.)” and “flabby fellow.” The term is introduced in the first pages of the novel, when Pavel’s aunt Perepetuya Petrovna (wonderful name!) says to the gossip Feoktista Savvishna “Леность непомерная, моциону никакого не имеет: целые дни сидит да лежит… тюфяк, совершенный тюфяк! Я еще его маленького прозвала тюфяком.” [Stupendously lazy, never gets any exercise, spends whole days sitting around and lying around… a tyufyak, a total tyufyak! Even when he was a little boy I called him a tyufyak.] The best way I can think of to convey the idea in English is “lump,” so I’m going with The Lump.

Our hapless lump Pavel goes to a provincial town and falls for the local belle Yuliya, but when he marries her he learns that she despises him and loves the cad Bakhtiarov. That’s the whole story in a nutshell, and it’s stretched out for 160 pages. I enjoyed it enough to keep reading, but I wanted it to be something other than it was. Odoevsky or Sollogub would have taken a third the number of pages to tell the story and treated it with humor and irony; Tolstoy or Dostoevsky would have intertwined it with other people’s stories and given it power and pathos. Pisemsky apparently wants us to feel bad for his characters, but he doesn’t make them real enough for that to happen — they’re all of purest cardboard, and when you’re introduced to a French teacher who can whistle entire operas and speaks suspiciously good Russian you have a hard time feeling the world of the novel is one to be taken seriously. Furthermore, the writing is workmanlike at best. I can see why people enjoyed him, but I probably won’t read his longer 1858 novel Tysyacha dush (One Thousand Souls) unless the beginning really grabs me.