Sophie Hardach has a very interesting piece for BBC Future about the problem of translating languages that don’t have large written corpora:
Imagine you come across a message that could contain life-saving information. But there’s a problem: you don’t understand a word. You’re not even sure which of the world’s thousands of languages it is written in. What do you do?
If the message is in French or Spanish, typing it into an automatic translation engine will instantly solve the mystery and produce a solid answer in English. But many other languages still defy machine translation, including languages spoken by millions of people, such as Wolof, Luganda, Twi and Ewe in Africa. That’s because the algorithms that power these engines learn from human translations – ideally, millions of words of translated text.
There is an abundance of such material for languages like English, French, Spanish and German […] No such data mountain exists, however, for languages that may be widely spoken but not as prolifically translated. They are known as low-resource languages. The fallback machine-training material for these languages consists of religious publications, including the much-translated Bible. But this amounts to a narrow dataset, and is not enough to train accurate, wide-ranging translation robots.
Google Translate currently offers the ability to communicate in around 108 different languages while Microsoft’s Bing Translator offers around 70 languages. Yet there are more than 7,000 spoken languages around the world, and at least 4,000 with a writing system. […] To break that barrier, IARPA is funding research to develop a system that can find, translate and summarise information from any low-resource language, whether it is in text or speech. […] To tackle the problem, each team is divided into smaller specialist groups that solve one aspect of the system. The main components are automatic search, speech recognition, translation and text summarisation technologies, all adapted to low-resource languages. Since the four-year project began in 2017, the teams have worked on eight different languages, including Swahili, Tagalog, Somali and Kazakh.
There are all sorts of fascinating details about how this works, but I’m going to quote the same passage Trevor Joyce quoted when he sent me the link:
Once it has found and translated the relevant information, the search engine sums it up for the user. It’s during this summarising process that neural models display some of their strangest behaviour – they hallucinate.
Imagine you are searching for a news report about protesters who stormed a building on a Monday. But the summary that comes up says they stormed it on a Thursday. This is because the neural model drew on its background knowledge, based on millions of pages of training text, when it summarised the report. In those texts, there were more examples of people storming buildings on Thursdays, so it concluded this should apply to the latest example too.
Similarly, neural models may insert dates or numbers into a summary. Computer scientists call this hallucinating.
“These neural network models, they’re so powerful, they have memorised a lot of languages, they add words that were not in the source,” says Mirella Lapata, a computer scientist at the University of Edinburgh who is developing a summarisation element for one of the teams.
Lapata and her colleagues have avoided the problem by extracting keywords from each document, rather than telling the machine to sum it up in sentences. Keywords are less elegant than sentences, but they limit the models’ tendencies to write robot poetry.
And here’s a tidbit to whet your appetite: “While the search engine is designed for living languages, the project includes a sub-group working on languages that have not been spoken in thousands of years.” Thanks, Trevor!
Hmph.
As Wikipedia says “this article reads like a press release” (which is admittedly hardly surprising.)
These neural network models, they’re so powerful, they have memorised a lot of languages, they add words that were not in the source
I don’t think that “powerful” is quite the word to describe a wannabe translation system that behaves like this …
It seems to me that no amount of fancy computing is going to get round what really is a poverty of stimulus problem. The pretended analogy with how a human being learns to read without needing vast quantities of text is quite vacuous: the human being is not trying to work out meanings from the text alone, like these systems are.
An analogy involving a much more sophisticated neural net (a human linguist with a PhD, in fact) is the only full-scale dictionary of a language well known to me, which was compiled entirely from written sources by someone with no knowledge of that language, but who is a fluent speaker of a closely-related language and an experienced translator. Errors abound. There’s an inevitable limit to how much a process like this can achieve in principle, that can never be solved by throwing more cycles at it.
There may be a case that this sort of system can be better than nothing. That doesn’t actually make it any good. And to cite Slashdot’s disclaimer for its reader polls: “If you’re using these numbers to do anything important, you’re insane.”
This all belongs in the “neural nets are magical” category.
It seems to me that no amount of fancy computing is going to get round what really is a poverty of stimulus problem.
The very first sentence quoted from the article acknowledges that, in a roundabout meta-meta kind of way. No stimulus ? No problemo – we magick one by Gedankenexperiment:
# Imagine you come across a message that could contain life-saving information. But there’s a problem: you don’t understand a word. #
These follow-the-bouncing-ball-of-my-thoughts people rarely notice the flip side of their playful assumptions. Yes, it could contain life-saving infornation. But it could just as well not contain such information. It could be “remember pick up chicken liver at Sol’s”. Or “Donald ist doof“. Or even “this message contains no information”.
Yes, indeed, DE. Likewise the latest and fanciest Bayesian algorithms won’t give you a reliable phylogenetic tree based on Swadesh 100-word lists, especially not with the latest and fanciest automatic cognate recognizers.
@Stu Clayton: Your “remember pick up chicken liver at Sol’s,” reminded me, of course, of the dubious miracle of the preserved message: “Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma” in A Canticle for Liebowitz
I don’t think that “powerful” is quite the word to describe a wannabe translation system that behaves like this …
This sound like a use of the word in the sense that’s used to describe scientific theories: A theory is powerful if it generates lots of testable predictions. A theory that isn’t powerful enough predicts some of the observed data but not all of it. A theory is too powerful if it generates predictions that correspond to observed data and also extra predictions beyond what’s been observed. “Powerful” isn’t synonymous with “good.”
A theory is powerful if it generates lots of testable predictions.
Every logically inconsistent theory generates the maximum possible number of testable predictions.
http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Overgeneration
is a similar concept.
The problems with these projects actually sound more deeprooted (even), involving fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of language itself. Saussure is probably not on their reading lists …
More broadly, this attitude bedevils “artificial intelligence” throughout; but as the Hausa say, Kama da Wane ba Wane ba “Like So-and-so is not [actually] So-and-so”, and emulating some aspects of intelligent behaviour, however expertly (or not, as here), is not intelligence.
Mark Twain, How the Animals of the Wood Sent Out a Scientific Expedition:
And even (reasonably) well-represented languages can throw a curveball, as I’ve found recently in a GT of a description of flax processing in Finnish.
S. Ja kyllä oli hienosti ruuhkaa Köyliönjärven jäällä, jossa tänään 13.3.2018 vieraili Huomenta Suomen toimittaja Mika Tommola tiimeineen. Huomenta Suomen videon voi käydä katsomassa täältä.
T. And yes, it was nicely congested on the ice of Köyliönjärvi, where today, March 13, 2018, the Finnish journalist Mika Tommola visited with his team. Tomorrow you can watch the Finnish video here .
Huomenta Suomi
(hyvää) huomenta: (good) morning!
huomenna: tomorrow
S. Klihtaus tapahtui saunassa tai riihessä. Ainoastaan kesäaikaan klihdattiin ulkona.
T. The clapping took place in the sauna or in the barn. It was only during the summer that people shouted outside.
klihtaus/lihtaus: processing (flax) using a lihta ‘swingle (implement used to separate the fibres of flax by beating them)’
So no clapping nor shouting, just swingling/scutching.
S. Häkilöitäessä erottuivat pitkät ja pehmeät aivinakuidut karkeammista ja lyhyistä rohdinkuiduista.
T. During hacking, the long and soft brain fibers stood out from the coarser and short herb fibers.
häkilöidä ‘to hackle’
aivina ‘heckled flax’
aivot ‘brain(s)’
rohdin ‘tow (short, coarse fibres)’
S. Museotaksvärkki
T. Museum taxi
taksvärkki
Borrowed from Swedish dagsverke (“day’s work”).
1. (historical) day’s work (full working day that a tenant farmer had to work for a landlord instead or in addition to a cash rent)
2. A quantity of work contributed to the Operation Day’s Work movement, usually shorter than a full working day.
3. (by extension, informal) free work (work done without compensation)
Source
https://museotaksvarkki.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/klihtaus-hakilointi-sivistely/
huomenna: tomorrow
Every time I see this word
Huomenna jo Helsingissä syödään marosii
These hallutinations were common for Google Translate when it first appeard in 00s. My favorite was translation of a piece about a crusifix by one of famous Italian Renaissance sculptors (was it Donatello?) recently discovered in a chapel, where it was in plain sight for centuries, from Italian to Russian. The original spoke about priests who cared about the crusifix (распятье). The Russian translation said, the priests were doing everything to распять Его, “to crucify Him”.
Classical machine translation vs. statistical was “crappy interlinear” vs. “smooth Russian text composed by Google”.
I tried an early translation software back in 1990s and attempted to translate a contract from English to Russian.
The first translated sentence was “The Seller agrees to sell himself and the Buyer agrees to buy himself…”
{thinking} OK, it was a bit funnier.
“The Seller agrees to be sold and the Buyer agrees to be bought…”
Or something like that.
The Se | ller agrees | to be sold | and the Bu | yer agrees | to be bought…
There was quite a famous example, which I thought someone would have brought up already, where a mention of a country in one language would be ‘translated’ into another country in another language – but sometimes, I think, a country which had a similar relationship to the country of the written language.
(If it wasn’t here, it must have been LL – here’s the one I was thinking of, with Austria in German becoming Ireland in English: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005492.html
And a more recent post about a slightly different substitution, but is probably where I remember following that link: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=32104)
Coincidentally I just came across an interesting, if slightly slanted, Wired article on automatic transcription in Maori: Māori are trying to save their language from Big Tech. It highlights some of the reasons why speakers might not be keen to cooperate with massive enterprises like this, useful as they are. (Looking up IARPA provides others: “Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) invests in high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.”)
Thanks, that’s an interesting article. There’s a slippery slope between “We want our people to benefit substantially from data based on their language” (which is admirable) and “We want our people to be the only ones to benefit from data based on their language” (which would be nuts); it doesn’t seem that’s what anybody’s saying in this case, but I often get a whiff of that from indigenous-rights statements. It’s like leftists who can’t see the difference between “unregulated capitalism is evil” to “making money off anything but one’s own physical labor is evil.”
@Jen: Austria in German becoming Ireland in English
Ionesco predicted it back in 1951 in La Leçon:
C’est pourtant bien simple : pour le mot “Italie”, en français nous avons le mot “France” qui en est la traduction exacte.
Couteau! Couteau!
Likewise “The French for London is Paris”, which GT actually used to do, along with Jeg bor in Kvinedal as I live in Hell.
Mon Dieu, comme c’est curieux! Moi aussi je suis originaire de la ville de Manchester!
(OK, that’s enough Ionesco. But he is my absolute favourite Romanian playwright.)
I discovered that Spain and China are one and the same country, and it is only through ignorance that people regard them as separate kingdoms. I advise everyone urgently to write down the word “Spain” on a sheet of paper; he will see that it is quite the same as China.
Gogol’s Madman clearly used Google Translate.
John C.: Jeg bor [i Kvinesdal] as I live in Hell
That’s interesting. Kvinesdal may be the most religiously religious of all religious communities on the south coast (but probably second after neighbouring Lyngdal).
(OK, that’s enough Ionesco. But he is my absolute favourite Romanian playwright.)
I believe he said once in an interview that La Cantatrice chauve was inspired by language textbooks with true yet useless sentences like “The ceiling is up.”
Speaking of which, there is a video by the French YouTuber Linguisticae about American English that starts off:
Et alors vous avez sûrement eu le droit au manuel avec le Big Ben avec James et Jenny, qui font les petits fous au Royaume Uni, qui discutent ensemble d’une manière si artificielle qu’on se demande s’ils ne sont pas des espions russes des sujets qui sont toujours centraux dans la société, comme le goût des œufs ou la couleur des jupes. Ils n’étaient pas super vegan, mais… C’était assez engagé, quelque part.
Specifically by an Assimil textbook. The one that begins with “my tailor is rich”.
Yes, apparently “my tailor is rich” specifically has been cited as the inspiration for La Cantatrice chauve. I knew it as one of the household English phrases in France, but didn’t realize that it had such an illustrious history.
If you ask “Where is Brian?” in France, everyone will automatically reply that “Brian is in the kitchen.” Gad Elmaleh has a whole routine around this. This canonically continues, “Where is Jenny, the sister of Brian?” “Jenny is in the bathroom.”
Another one is “It is raining today. Where is my umbrella?” though I couldn’t verify the exact original wording.
—This is a lamp.
—This is a teacher.
—Is this a lamp?
—Yes, this is a lamp.
—Is this a teacher?
—Yes, this a teacher.
—Is this a teacher?
—Nooo! This is not a teacher! This is a lamp!
—Is this a lamp?
—Nooo! This is not a lamp! This is a teacher!
(My father’s description of government-run French classes for foreigners in Paris.)
Vonce zere voz a vizard
He lived in Africa
He went to India
To get a lamp
(Popular kid’s song in my mother’s grade school in Jerusalem, based on the reader in English classes. You sung it while avoiding any appearance of a correct English pronunciation, so as not to look like you like the British Mandate government.)
My favorite from beginning Latin: “Ō Brūte! Me necās!”
After studying English in school for six years most Russians could say only one phrase – “London iz ze kepital of Greit Britan”.
Me necās!
So Brutus didn’t murder Caesar, but merely told a good joke that cracked him up (“you just kill me!”) History will need to be rewritten.
Maybe everyone here knows it, but they say that one Soviet ambassador to England (ok, to the court of St. James, but it is still Anglia for most people) had to be replaced because on first meeting the queen he blurted “Do you speak English?”
{note to self} if I am appointed ambassador to Vatican, first thing to ask the Pope – “Are you Catholic?”
—Nooo! This is not a lamp! This is a teacher!
Cf.: ” Le Gendarme à New York ” (youtube):
“My flowers are beautiful. My flowers are not beautiful.”
Well, I’ll be. French WP has an entry for “My tailor is rich” (with equivalents in other lands), and English WP has one for “La plume de ma tante” and for “My postillion has been struck by lightning”.
My postillion has been struck by lightning
In Hausa, karen mota, literally “motor dog”, is the person charged with stowing and retrieving passengers’ effects, and indeed the passengers themselves, on the lorries which are the normal mode of long-distance transport for those without vehicles of their own; during the trip he sits on top of the lorry. In other words, he’s a postillion. West Africa is both mostly flat and prone to thunderstorms. Lightning strikes on people, especially in higher positions, are not all that rare, and it is an actual hazard for a karen mota.
Postilions are a phrase book standard. It is like modern “in a taxi” or “in the airport” dialogues.
Come, make haste, postilion, I am in a hurry to arrive at, If you drive well, I will double the drink-money,
Ну! ступа́й прово́рнѣе, ямщи́къ, Я спѣшу́ доѣхать, Е’сли ты меня́ повезёшь поскорѣ́е,то приба́влю тебѣ́ на во́дку,
—
here.
P.S. aha, dvornik is a porter! Dvórneek.
Yes, I wanted to write about that too: that given the coachman’s position on top of the carriage, perhaps they risk very seriously in some regions:( It is a theory though.
@drasvi
The modern Russian recipient of a Trinkgeld/pourboire receives чаевые redeemable in cups of tea. Gorbachev would approve.
Odd. The only version I know is végétalien|ne.
That is, “postilion” is funny not because it is from a silly phrase book, but because it is from 19th century.
And it is not even funny. And as DE noted, not 19th century either. This all becomes comical, as soon as the book ceases to be anchored in experience. Ionescu, in turn, laughed without waiting till the book gets dated. (But I tend to defend Assimil: it plays with this absurdity too)
@PlasticPaddy, oh. I wondered why chayevye* are called so. But it did not occur to me that it is an euphemism.
—-
* a plural adjective with an incorporated pronoun from “tea”: “tea-related ones”. So tea-money would be a literal translation, actually. “Money” (den’gi) is plural…
I tried to find the book with the “drink-money” and failed. But this:
chābuk dō – Give me the whip. kahārōṅ kō bulā’ū – Call the palanquin-bearers.
…
Ho! porter, open the door.
Porter. give intelligence that strange gentlemen is come.
is wonderful too. Here, by John Shakespear.
I wondered why chayevye* are called so.
I’ve definitely encountered the more transparent form на чай “[to spend] on tea”, which at least makes that part of the derivation obvious. I hadn’t realized it was an euphemism either, but that makes sense.
John Shakespear
…apparently unrelated, or at least not known to be related, to Colin Shakespear of the rope bridges, despite the latter working in India. (The playwright William Shakespeare is not known to be related to either.)
Leicestershire? Maybe unrelated:/
But there was a leutenant Shakespear who went to Khiva in 1839 to convince the khan to free Russian slaves (and thus avoided masscacre of Englishmen that followed 2 years later).
And about him:
I did not know about the bridge builder:/
I did not know about the bridge builder
I should have linked the original reference.
Shakespear(e)? Bah! Two a penny!
We Eddyshaws/Eddershaws/Eddishaws, however, are all related. It is perhaps fortunate that none of us is famous.
Ho! porter, open the door.
My favorite phrasebook of that kind is Richard Jaschke’s English-Arabic Conversational Dictionary; when I wrote about it here, I quoted “Ho there! you! boatman! put me ashore,” but you can open it at any page and find delightful examples like (p. 122) “You must send a man with us to tend the beasts,” “We want the beasts for our disposal at will (lit., revolving hoof),” and “The horses are on the green to-day” or this tragic sequence from p. 137:
…and then put out the light…
Gulian’s Elementary Modern Armenian Grammar sticks in my mind for the excellent “England has a wise old queen.” Which upstanding British patriot abroad has not felt a desire at some point to inform the natives of this fact?
Bring me my things out of the saddlebags
I need a stable internet connection and two pistols. Actually one should try to use it as a form for science fiction. Like the Dictionary of the Khazars, just a language course.
Burmese Self-Taught has gems like “Do they shoe the ponies” and “You cannot hunt tigers without elephants”.
There’s a famous sf story in the form of a phrasebook, but (sigh) I forget the title and author.
I don’t know whether Mark Rosenfelder’s collection of weird phrasebook phrases has been mentioned here before.
[gouuory] pro Alexandre pissanye, y prossesara, y Pompee, de Hannibal y proguarot Carthanno, y prouuoy uodo Sipianno Lafricano sconna zemely
[let’s talk] about book of Alexander [the Great], about Caesar and Pompey, and Hannibal and about the city of Carthage and general Scipio Africanus
From Dictionnaire Muscovite by Captain Jehan Sauvage, 1586.
He no doubt met some very educated people in Archangelsk.
“England has a wise old queen.”
Previously on LH.
Do you practice safe sex? – could have started from von Harff:)
“marrat nyco frauwe sal ich by dir slaeffen.”
And the same for all other von Harff’s langauges…
@sfr
The word breaks are funny, especially voevode as two words ????
Harff.
An edition with the above spelling.
A manuscript with a different spelling.
Has a Breton dictionary too. And not quite blackletter, but still highly altered by scribes versions of Middle Eastern alphabets:)
I now remember seeing a page from Get by in Welsh, from which Zompist quotes the memorable “She has excellent breasts. / Mae bronnau ardderchog da hi.”
Inspiring purchase of the sequel, Get a Leg Over in Welsh.
I was told once that the Cowins [sic] are all related, and all Manx as well, the Chinese car brand Chery [sic] Cowin [sic] naturally excluded.
Get a Leg Over in Welsh
For natives, this is of course superfluous, as all Welshmen are irresistible to the opposite sex (Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, David Lloyd George*, Tom Jones, Harry Secombe …)
* There is a song about this**. It is estimated that 8% of the male population of Eurasia have Y chromosome lineages going back to Lloyd George.
** Sung to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It is popular at parties. Or after parties. When staggering home after an evening of being irresistible.
About Maori, the two questions that I asked myself were:
1. do I like that linguistic data becomes a commodity? It does, as soon as there are people who pay for it. You can’t sell for money what you have shared for free.
There is a list of things that I do not want to see commoditized. Prositution is the obvious example. But when people here discussed poetry in the terms of market and its demands, it was disgusting too*.
2. the “large” world will affect local “ecosystem”, just because it is large.
It is not colonialism, it is globalization. They mentioned this;
. It would mean entrusting …. to develop the very tools that will shape the future of the language.
But then:
And worst of all, it would mean that Māori would miss out on the economic opportunities created using the language that belongs to them, much like they didn’t see the economic benefits of the land that belonged to them. “We are guarding against history repeating itself,” …
If they have any specific concerns about “shping the future” and want to retain contorl over tools like speech recognition, it would be interesting to hear what concerns and what they are going to do about that. But they do not discuss it, only “worst of all, economic opportunities”.
‘ “We want our people to be the only ones to benefit from data based on their language” (which would be nuts);‘
cf.
Te Hiku is adamant that the only people who should profit from the Māori language are the Māori people, themselves.
Ah, I guess I missed that. Yup, nuts. It’s not evil to make money.
But when people here discussed poetry in the terms of market and its demands, it was disgusting too
Should poets starve?
She has excellent breasts
Presumably that is a response to the previous remark, “Don’t pester the girls in the next tent/
Peidiwch â phoeni’r merched yn y babell nesa“
On the useful-phrases front, I just ran across a good one (from Eastern !Xóõ) in this comment:
ǃqháa̰ kū ǂnûm ǁɢˤûlitê ǀè dtxóʔlu ǀnàe ǂʼá sˤàa̰
Give them their stinking genitals with the fat!
David L.: As I recall from the page I saw years ago, it’s part of a dialog wherein two gentlemen are discussing the attributes of a barmaid.
I’m going to make my first million distributing all the phrases discussed here inside of fortune cookies. ™®©™®©™®©.
“Lloyd George Knew My Father” suggests that this version is euphemistic, and that the anonymous author is Tommy Rhys Roberts, Q.C., the son of D.L.G.’s old law partner.
“I’m going to make my first million distributing all the phrases discussed here inside of fortune cookies.”
“my second million” would be more impressive:)
That too, but later.
a good one (from Eastern !Xóõ)
…that looks almost as if it’s supposed to be (part of) a pangram. Had anyone ever made a pangram in a Khoisan language?
They started working on it, years ago, and are about half-way there.
A few years ago one North (I think) American community wanted to take a patent on their (endangered) language, so that no one else could “use” it. They were rejected.
This sort of petition can only come from a community that has almost lost its language and is quite competent in the dominant language. During the height of the missionary period, missionaries assigned to this or that tribe were expected to learn the local language and translate the Gospels ASAP, and the local people were very pleased when the newcomers were able to communicate with them in their own language. Nowadays many people are upset when linguists end up more proficient in the local language than younger people who have not had the opportunity to learn it. (But many such people are now eager to learn, and usually appreciate the help of linguists).
Sounds about right:
Should poets starve?
Should women starve?
If we won’t create a market for sex and don’t authorize companies to work as agents, to buy and hold rights and sell services – all women will starve.
I don’t understand the comparison, in fact I don’t understand either term of it. Women, obviously, can and do work outside the sex market. Poets, of course, have to work to live, but they prefer to sell their poetry rather than give it away, which implies a market for poetry. What exactly (without analogies) is your objection?
What exactly (without analogies) is your objection?
If that question had been addressed to me, I would have objected that it’s like asking a pig to fly. Of course Miss Piggy did indulge in flights of fancy, so it’s not entirely off the table.
If that question had been addressed to me, I would have objected that it’s like asking a pig to fly.
I don’t understand this either. Why can’t people discuss this simple matter without resorting to opaque analogies? Poets want to sell their poems. This implies a market in poems. If you (not addressed to anyone in particular, just anyone who objects to the idea) dislike this, why? Should poets not get money for poems? Should everyone who writes a poem automatically (somehow) get a standard amount of money for it? I want to understand, and I don’t want to hear about sex and/or pigs.
In Hausa, karen mota, literally “motor dog”, is the person charged with stowing and retrieving passengers’ effects,
Some years ago someone here (probably you, David Eddyshaw) commented that Google Translate did a remarkably good job with Hausa. I checked, and it was true, so that text from the BBC’s Hausa broadcasts were completely intelligible. If I ever need to know what the chaps of Boko Haram are saying I can find out. This was at a time, six or seven years ago, when Google Translate’s efforts to translate French and Spanish were so bad that they were virtually useless. However, they have since improved a lot.
The CNRS and its institutes are using English more and more in their messages, some of which I can only understand by seeing what the French says.
An effect of teaching English to the whole world is that the whole world think they can write English. I’ve probably told before that when I was in Japan for the World Scout Jamboree in 2017, I couldn’t understand the English information material until I crossread the professionally translated French and Spanish versions.
but they prefer to sell their poetry rather than give it away
Не продаётся вдохновенье, Но можно рукопись продать
Pushkin is almost as universally applicable as Kozma Prutkov.
If I ever need to know what the chaps of Boko Haram are saying I can find out. This was at a time, six or seven years ago, when Google Translate’s efforts to translate French and Spanish were so bad that they were virtually useless.
That just shows that Hausa is so much more logical than these bizarre European languages (as any Nigerian can tell you.) I think it’s the Welsh substratum.
A few years ago one North (I think) American community wanted to take a patent on their (endangered) language, so that no one else could “use” it. They were rejected.
I wonder if this is related to the comment about Mapundungún that I made in the thread from 2008 mentioned above. Some incensed Mapundungún speakers sued Microsoft for translating their operating system into Mapundungún using an orthography different from the one they favoured. By a strange chance I first read about this dispute in a local newspaper in Valdivia, where I was staying at the time. Valdivia isn’t the centre of Mapuche life (which would be Temuco) but it’s reasonably close. Not that any of the people I know in Valdivia speak Mapundungún. I did know someone who made a serious effort to learn it, but she lived much further north, in Buin, close to Santiago.
People can be very passionate about using the “wrong” orthography. La Marseillaise, our local communist newspaper, which I buy each Saturday, has a page in Provençal each Saturday. Unfortunately they use the classical orthography, which makes Provençal look too much like Catalan for my taste — they even make the plurals of nouns with -s, if you can imagine anything so appalling. As I encountered the Mistralian orthography first I regard it as the one true way to write Provençal.
I was told once that the Cowins [sic] are all related, and all Manx as well
At first I thought that couldn’t be right because Manx names are supposed to begin with C or Qu. Hold on, I then thought, Cowin does begin with C, so it’s OK. Does it mean “son of Owen”?
Manx names are supposed to begin with C or Qu.
Has anybody here seen Kelly?
The science fiction story in the form of a phrasebook that you are thinking of may be “Useful Phrases for the Tourist” by Joanna Russ, first published in 1972 in the anthology “Universe 2”, edited by Terry Carr.
A few lines near the beginning:
That is my companion. It is not intended as a tip.
I will call the manager.
This cannot be my room because I cannot breathe ammonia.
I will be most comfortable between temperatures of 290 and 300 degrees Kelvin.
Waitress, this meal is still alive.
If this is not the story, I hope someone can point us to others like it.
It just occurred to me that Quine (as in Willard Van Orman) must be one of those Manx Cowin names.
The science fiction story in the form of a phrasebook that you are thinking of may be “Useful Phrases for the Tourist” by Joanna Russ, first published in 1972 in the anthology “Universe 2”, edited by Terry Carr.
That’s the one, thanks! I still have the anthology.
Randolph Quirk was indeed Manx, and rather better known to linguists than a boy called Quilliam that I was at school with 70 years ago. He (Quirk not Quilliam) was the Quain Professor of English language: I thought that might be another Manx name, but apparently not.
Sorry about the K. I realized I should have included K immediately after the 15 minutes grace period had elapsed.
A Manx Quilliam was first lieutenant on Victory at Trafalgar, that’s where I’ve come across the name. I’m pretty sure some Cowans are Scottish, though.
Another Quilliam was the first prominent British convert to Islam, according to Wikipedia.
Does it mean “son of Owen”?
Almost certainly, which is why I occasionally sign myself Eoghan mac Eoghain around here: Owen (or John) son of John, although my father was not John but Thomas (his older brother and his father were both John, pronounced Shawn). It is fair to say that the Eoghan/John equivalence is disputed.
Poets want to sell their poems.
I don’t think this is true, or at least it is not a revealed preference[*] of poets. Most of them get paid in copies of a printed work, or nothing at all online, and make their money as academics or longshoremen or computer programmers or copy editors or what not. Poets need to make a living and to have their poems read, but these are not necessarily tightly coupled: I read several decades back that the only poet in the U.S. who made a living from poetry alone was Rod McKuen (another version of Cowan/Cowan/Cowin, I suppose).
Here is part of “An Irishman’s Diary” from the Irish Times of 2010-04-10, Copyright Day in the U.K.
[*] Revealed preference theory is the idea that what you prefer is best (or least worst) measured by what you actually do. It is usually applied to consumer buying behavior, but can equally be applied to producer selling behavior. We do not observe that the less money, the fewer poems.
Lord Stanley converted “in or before 1859,” decades before Quilliam, and I seriously doubt he was the first.
I don’t think this is true, or at least it is not a revealed preference
Nonsense. Ask poets whether they’d rather be paid for their poems or not and let me know the results of the poll.
The surname Quilty comes from the Irish town, I imagine.
(Fun fact: when Nabokov came up with the name Clare Quilty, for the character in Lolita, he was not aware of Quilty in County Clare. So he said, much later.)
This is parallel to all the Welsh names beginning with b/p, of course, like Bevan, Bynon, Byron, Barry, Bithel, Bowen, Penry, Preece, Pritchard …
whether they’d rather be paid for their poems or not
1) I suspect that the implications of both choices are sufficiently nontrivial in practice that it actually might not be quite as blatantly obvious as it sounds like.
(For a slightly more practicalized version: would they prefer that their poems could be read for free but they didn’t get any money from that either, or that anyone who wanted to read their poems had to pay them a penny for doing that? I suspect that many would prefer the former.)
2) These days there’s (almost) always Patreon, and there are many writers (admittedly usually not of poetry, which might be significant in this context) who actually make enough money to live on from there.
Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach was a baker’s dozen sold for a shilling or 12 francs. Their value in filthy, earthy lucre is explicit.
The truth conditions for “poets don’t want to be paid for their poetry” and “poets write poetry even when there is no immediate monetary reward” are not identical…
Why can’t people discuss this simple matter without resorting to opaque analogies? … Should everyone who writes a poem automatically (somehow) get a standard amount of money for it?
Because it doesn’t seem like a simple question to us?
(Extrapolating from a survey of myself, to be fair.)
Money from whom? A communist government is the only answer that springs to mind, and then probably only for a particular kind of poetry (and possibly only when written by nominated people considered safe).
I mean, yes, if money fell out of the sky (safely) whenever you wrote four lines that rhymed, no doubt a lot of people would be in favour. If there were suddenly people queuing up willing to pay a price that would cover production costs and the poet’s living costs for whatever kind of poetry someone really wanted to write, no doubt a lot of people would be in favour. But both of those do seem to come under the heading of ‘pigs might fly’.
If we go back to ‘should poets starve?’, which seems to have been the first question, then I don’t think that poets should be *required* to starve, but if you mean to ask whether people should automatically be saved from any chance of starvation because of writing poetry, why poets?
Poets want to sell their poems. This implies a market in poems.
Does it? This is a genuine question, because I know nothing about economics, but I would have said that a market in X existed only if people wanted to BUY poems.
(I mean, there’s the old argument about doing something for free devaluing it to the extent that other people are then unable to make money from it, but someone else will have to take that on, because it makes me TOO CROSS.)
((As a keen amateur folk dancer and folk musician, I do kind of resent people wandering in to tell us that the thing we do just as ordinary people – socially and communally and interactively – should only be allowed to be done by a special elite who then make people like us pay a lot of money to do nothing except watch. I’m not sure this really applies to poetry – even poetry slams and singer-songwritering still depend on an audience in a way that social dancing and pub sessions don’t – but I probably can’t engage with the argument without foaming at the mouth.))
Disentangling myself from all the asides, it occurs to me that poetry that makes money is probably pop songs.
I was going to say it. About pop lyricists.
Jen,
The problem with amateur performances of any kind is that TV only shows top level professionals, so except for school aged performers whose parents and grandparents will make a point of attending and cheering up the children no matter what their skill level, amateurs tend to be devalued. But amateur performers are performing because they love participating, not because they crave the attention. Planning and rehearsing a public performance is an incentive to improve one’s skill, not a craving for applause.
In older times, “folk” dance was not something that only top level people did in front of a motionless public, it involved local groups, who often formed spontaneously. There are still many cultures where this is the rule, especially where the climate is such that many people can stay up late in the streets, enjoying the cooler temperatures conducive to enjoyable group activity. So, happy dancing and playing, ignore the (secretly jealous) devaluers!
Even in these Latter Days of the Law, when the spirit of Gradgrind stalks the land, there have been real poets popular enough to make a living out of it. John Betjeman (born to be Poet Laureate) springs to mind; not really to my taste, but unquestionably a “proper” poet, and in fact a considerably more profound one than he pretended, camping it up the way he did (the old slyboots.)
Believe it or not, back around the turn of the last century poets actually could make money from poetry. Newspapers paid a decent amount by the line, and magazines paid real money. It was popular, and people were willing to pay for it. I’m as aware as all y’all that this is no longer so, but it’s not inherently the case that nobody’s willing to pay for poetry. And when people are willing to pay for something, there’s a market.
And needless to say the question of professional poets being paid for their work should be entirely disentangled from the question of amateurs doing it for love. Nobody’s going to pay me for my renditions of rock songs or opera arias, but I do them anyway, for my own pleasure. That has no bearing on the market for music, any more than people enjoying writing poems has to do with the market for literature.
Perhaps my use of the term “market” is causing confusion. I do not imply the Marxist bugbear of a mustache-twirling Evil Boss Man whipping downtrodden workers (in this case, poets) to produce more while being paid less, I am simply using the term in its basic economic sense: when one person has something to sell and someone else wants to buy that sort of thing, there is a market. The market in poetry is severely depressed these days, but that is irrelevant to the concept. And I am (I repeat) quite sure that most people who write poems, if offered the chance to be paid by poetry lovers who love their poetry, would like engaging in that market exchange. Communist governments are neither here nor there.
Jen in Edinburgh: A communist government is the only answer that springs to mind, and then probably only for a particular kind of poetry (and possibly only when written by nominated people considered safe).
The necessity of writing “a particular kind of poetry” is one of the very first things satirized in The Master and Margarita. Ivan isn’t going to get published or paid unless his anti-religious poem follows the party line.
A communist government is the only answer that springs to mind
Here in the Gweriniaeth Pobl Cymru (GPC) we shall shortly (following our recent glorious triumph over the forces of Reaction) be making the composition of poetry compulsory for all citizens. Attendance at eisteddfodau will be mandatory. State pensions will be available for the authors of poems adjudged to have the most hwyl. Strict cynghanedd will be expected, except in cases of medically verified incapacity.
In Strugatskys’ Tale of Troika one of the aliens (they had a lot of them form different places) was professional reader of poetry. And when the eponymous Troika wished to equate it with literary criticism, they were informed that Konstantin Konstantinovich does not critic anyone, just reads their poetry and appreciates it (Russian doesn’t have this very fitting word and A and B used some appropriate circumlocution). His narrow specialty was amphibrach, which was considered especially difficult.
Ask poets whether they’d rather be paid for their poems or not and let me know the results of the poll.
That’s the point of revealed preference theory: if you want to know if the Great American Public prefers red jellybeans to green jellybeans, you don’t run a poll, you look at the sales figures. It’s not perfect, but it’s less imperfect than polling. As I said: is less poetry produced when poets are paid less? It’s hard to say for sure, but I strongly suspect the answer is no. They just go on writing and submitting to various little magazines and putting out slim volumes at their own expense just as before.
it’s not inherently the case that nobody’s willing to pay for poetry.
No, of course not: see Rod McKuen above. Greeting-card companies pay freelancers from $25 for single-use verses up to $300-$500 for multiple-use (meaning I suppose that they end up inside more than one card). Full-time greeting-card writers on salary average about $70,000 a year per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I bet there aren’t many of those any more. And the kind of poets I just mentioned probably don’t overlap with the slim-volume crew very much.
our recent glorious triumph over the forces of Reaction
Alas, it seems not.
Strict cynghanedd will be expected, except in cases of medically verified incapacity.
“The odd thing about revolution is that the further left you go politically the more bourgeois they like their art.” — Tom Stoppard’s Tristan Tzara in Travesties
I hate to correct JC, but I think you misunderstand the concept of revealed preference. What you describe is “inelastic supply” in econo-speak. To “reveal the preference” you have to offer poets to quit their day jobs and become a full-time poetry writers. Maybe they would prefer not to do it, I don’t know. What about poets who take university positions? Do you think they do it for the love of teaching or because these positions are (relatively speaking) sinecures that allow time for writing poetry? Also, I’ve never heard of “revealed preferences” on supply side, but maybe it is just my lack of economic education.
t I strongly suspect the answer is no. They just go on writing and submitting to various little magazines and putting out slim volumes at their own expense just as before.
1990s Russian joke.
Two directors of two Russian enterprises meet. One says to another:
– Imagine, I haven’t paid my workers for half a year, but they still continue to go to work as before.
– Hey, let’s charge an entrance fee!
In 2007, the NYT said of Mary Oliver that “at 71 she is, far and away, this country’s best selling poet. According to the list on poetryfoundation.org, the top fifteen bestselling poetry volumes in America as of mid-January include no fewer than five Mary Oliver titles.” She worked teaching in universities until she was 66. Ergo, you can’t make a living in the United States selling poems (nor probably elsewhere).
Authors of song lyrics don’t starve anywhere.
But perhaps they are not real poets.
“What you describe is “inelastic supply” in econo-speak”
I do not think it is what “elasticticity” is intended for.
But perhaps they are not real poets.
Under the proposed definition only they are real poets. I only can add that I am an amateur prostitute. Not in the sense that no one will pay, of course, but it is not how I earn for living.
I mean, we can say “we have inelastic supply of sunlight”, but really, astrono-speak makes more sense, if you insist on using long words without need.
People who write jingles for commercials are real poets too.
drasvi, I am not sure what you mean. Are you paying for supply of sunlight? And who has intentions for the word “elasticity”? Elasticity is a derivative of the log supply (or whatever it is you are defining the elasticity of) over log price if you need a precise definition.
In the old Mexican religion, daily supply of sunlight was not free at all.
You had to pay for it with human blood.
Ergo, you can’t make a living in the United States selling poems
Obviously, and I never said anything different. I said, and maintain, that if poets (meaning people who consider writing poetry their real calling, despite what they have to do to keep food on the table) had the choice, they would prefer to make a living from it, or at least get paid decently. It astonishes me that anyone could dispute this; either it’s just standard internet “You’re wrong!!! Now, what was it you said, exactly?” or you hang out with an entirely different species than I do.
Absolutely. And I’m sure Mary Oliver was happy to have the additional income and what it enabled her to do, even if it wasn’t her only income.
Mind you, I’m not outraged at the situation — the world has changed in various ways over the last century so that the market for poetry has collapsed, and the result is that poets need day jobs (often as professors, which probably isn’t great for their poetry), but hey, at least they can still write, and it’s not easy to see how things could be improved for them. Few of us would want to return to the social conditions of 1900.
Remember in another thread I gave a link to a page with biographies of a couple of dozens women poets from 19th century Kokand?
I hate to correct JC
No worries. People do it all the time, almost always because they are right and I am wrong. In this case I see why you talk about elasticity of supply, and you are not wrong. But the reason revealed-preference theory isn’t usually applied to sellers is the assumption that they only make what they think they can sell (whereas buyers want what they want and will buy it if they can afford it), and this is true for most of them. But artists and craftsmen, economically speaking, are people who make what they want to make and then try to sell them if they can. We learn their preference for making thing A rather than thing B based on how much they make and what the price differential is.
But you can’t have a market without greed:-/
How it is a market when:
– authors are interested in distributing poetry
– readers actively seek an opportunity to sponsor authors
?
P.S. I mean, I am what, the only reader here who ever wanted to do somethign for an artist he likes?
But you can’t have a market without greed:-/
Where “greed” = “desire to keep food on table.”
@languagehat, yes and no.
“Market”, “elasticity of supply” etc. – are names of patterns in group behaviour. We need them to predict events and they do not describe what the life is на самом деле.
For these patterns in group behaviour of human beings to arise, some conditions must be met. When people are collaborative rather than competetive, generous rather than greedy and what they share is the opposite of a commodity – it is just not a market.
—
There are more issues. We know what we need from a shoe. If we are naïve, we just want it to be comfotable and not to fall apart within a season. If we know more, we can look for something more specific, suitable for our feet and tastes. Shoemaker still can be creative: she can invent a way to achieve what I want from a shoe.
But do you want a poet to work hard trying to guess and satisfy your taste? It is the Opposite of what you want from a poet! Your relationships with poets are much more like human communication: your views can be taken into account, then it is a dialogue.
Most of what I find disgusting in mainstream art results from … someone’s attempts to calculate how to lick an average arse better.
SFReader: Authors of song lyrics don’t starve anywhere.
It’s because people who might not read poems still enjoy listening to (and sometimes singing) songs, and a lot of people are involved in getting songs sung, to tunes written by composers and performed by musicians. Then if all these parts of a song mesh so well that the song become popular, tthe song is recorded (with more professionals involved) and the record is bought by huge numbers of people, bringing money to all the ones involved, including the songwriter-poet.
One genre in which specialized poets and songwriters must have made some money at one time is religion. Several centuries ago a number of now well-known musicians wrote for the Catholic Church, both for congregations and for professionals, but lyrics were mostly traditional words in Latin, while the Victorian era saw a lot of hymns composed in English to use by Anglican choirs or congregations, and many of these songs are still used nowadays. Most of them are not of great artistic merit either in words or music, but people who have heard and sung them all their lives enjoy the comfort of traditional ones. In the hymn books, the names and dates of composition are indicated. As was often the case for publications of that period, women authors did not use their full names, although men did, so the abundance of initials rather than first names suggests that many of the religious songwriters were women.
When people are collaborative rather than competetive, generous rather than greedy and what they share is the opposite of a commodity – it is just not a market.
Yes, and I approve of that. As an anarchist, it is what I hope humanity will evolve towards. But now and for the foreseeable future, it is not how things work except in very localized circumstances. And it is never a good idea to ignore the real world in favor of one’s ideals.
The ceiling is up
Is this nonsensical? I mean, if you’re building, this would seem to be a useful expression when you’ve put up a ceiling. (Of course, I’m not a builder, so maybe it is nonsensical.)
Twitterer @incunabula, with what they say “may be the single best entry in any foreign phrasebook, ever.” Here. This is from a trilingual Opium War–era Chinese phrasebook (I didn’t transcribe the Chinese.)
While it does not have the wonderful dramatic quality of that snippet, this reminded me of when I was first learning Kusaal. A local teacher had a sideline in coaching newly arrived foreign medical staff in Useful Kusaal Phrases for Doctors; I treasure to this day a conversational template which went in part
Doctor: What is the problem?
[Patient: …]
Doctor: Lies! Tell me the truth!
In practice, I found that a less confrontational approach seemed to work quite well … but perhaps I was just too innocent, and the true diagnoses have forever escaped me.
But now and for the foreseeable future, it is not how things work
Capitalism is not a given; it hasn’t been around very long, is no longer working well even in its own terms, is probably not fixable and is certainly not going to endure indefinitely.
the ceiling is up
Long may it continue to be so!
Capitalism is not a given; it hasn’t been around very long, is no longer working well even in its own terms, is probably not fixable and is certainly not going to endure indefinitely.
All true, but I said “the foreseeable future,” and I don’t think we can foresee very far at all.
“My hovercraft”, etc.
Kenneth Rexroth once said the majority of the letters written by poets were begging letters to patrons, and this was more or less true of his own letters to James Laughlin at New Directions.
Y
I thought that the third item was to be memorized by a tourist not in order to be able to pronounce it but in order to recognize it in the mouth of a confronting official . After that there is no possible reply the tourist could use and live, so none is provided.
But “here” is the phrasebook, compiled not for the tourist trade but for the occupying armies! Pity the poor fishermen.
@John Emerson: Hence the poet McTeagle.
This is the book. It also has sample conversations interrogating an army deserter. Nothing as dramatic as the spy.