languagehat.com

It seems fitting that today, when we learned about Godard’s death (NYT; more links and appreciative comments at chavenet’s MetaFilter post), I watched his mysterious, glorious, gorgeous Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love), which, as Richard Brody said, should have had the impact of Breathless and Every Man for Himself (a new “first film” every twenty years) except that nobody went to see it despite rave reviews. At one point the main character, Edgar (played by Bruno Putzulu), asks someone “Do you think about death? Your own death?” It’s clearly something Godard thought about a lot, and apparently he chose his own. Repose en paix.

I wanted to mention some amusingly vague quotes used in the movie and a couple of minor errors in Richard Brody’s discussion of it. Starting with the latter, Brody says the dialogue beginning “Jean wants money because the hotel is failing” is said by Berthe (the woman Edgar falls in love with, played by Cécile Camp); it is not, it is said by the grandfather (Jean Davy). And he translates the title of Robert Bresson’s 1975 book Notes sur le Cinématographe as Notes on Cinematography — a common and understandable mistake, but by cinématographe Bresson meant neither ‘cinematography’ nor ‘cinematographer,’ he meant cinema itself in its higher form: “movies as an art,” if you will.

As for the quotes (all Godard movies are full of quotations, acknowledged and otherwise), at one point Edgar responds to a mention of Tristan Bernard with “Ah, he’s the one who said « Quand on voit Le Havre, c’est qu’il va pleuvoir. Quand on ne le voit pas, c’est qu’il pleut déjà ».” (When you see Le Havre [from Deauville], that means it’s going to rain. When you don’t see it, that means it’s already raining.) I looked it up and discovered it’s been attributed to everyone from the Duc de Morny to Simone Simon to Jean Gabin to “un jardinier normand”; another source calls it “un vieux dicton,” which is probably the safest description. “The measure of love is to love without measure” is attributed to St. Augustine, but the internet attributes it also to Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis de Sales (frankly, it sounds like one of those “inspirational” sayings that might as well be attributed to Hallmark). Towards the end, Edgar says “Quand je pense à quelque chose, je pense à autre chose, toujours” (When I think of something, I always think of something else), which is a useful way of thinking; Google tells me it’s a quote from Marcelline Delbecq. And during another of Godard’s beloved nighttime drives lit by the reflections of headlights, Edgar says to Berthe “C’est étrange comme les choses prennent du sens quand elles finissent” (It’s strange how things acquire meaning when they’re finished). Now we must say that of Godard’s filmography.

1) We discussed this issue back in 2018 (Janet Freeman: “In my editing experience, when you have two ‘the’s’ competing for the same space — ‘in the The New Yorker’ — style often calls for keeping the generic one and dropping the one in the title”; Articles and articles: “In cases when the name is used as an adjective, though, no cap: ‘the Times reporter So-and-So’”), but it still annoys me greatly, and the Times appears to be violating its own guidelines (if Articles and articles is correct), so I’m going to complain about it again: the Crime & Mystery column in this week’s NYT Book Review (or, to give the name in its full glory, The New York Times Book Review), we find “I felt like The New York Times reporter who shows up to interview Kick late in the novel.” There is no excuse for that capitalized The; here, the article is modifying “reporter.” If you insist on your stupid The, what you have to do is change the structure: “I felt like the reporter from The New York Times who shows up to interview Kick late in the novel.” Ah has spoken!

2) I have discovered that there is a Sartre short story called in English “Erostratus.” The description in Wikipedia begins: “A story about a misanthropic man who resolves to follow the path of Herostratus and make history by means of an evil deed—in this case, by killing six random people (one for each bullet in his revolver).” (As a side note, I find that kind of “existentialist” story idea supremely silly.) But if he’s following the path of Herostratus, why is he called Erostratus? Presumably because the French original is “Érostrate,” but that’s an artifact of the inconsistent French attitude towards rough breathings:

Érostrate ou Hérostrate (en grec ancien Ἡρόστρατος / Hêróstratos qui signifie littéralement Armée d’Héraᵃ) est l’incendiaire du temple d’Artémis à Éphèse, considéré par beaucoup comme l’une des Sept merveilles du monde du monde antique.
[…]
ᵃLe nom propre s’écrivant en grec avec un êta initial aspiré, il peut aussi être transcrit en français Hèrostratos comme l’écrit A. Bailly, ou Hèrostrate.

There is no such inconsistency in English; rough breathings are always rendered with h-, and the story has to be either “Érostrate” (if you choose to keep the fancy French form) or Herostratus, the only acceptable English equivalent. Shame on whichever translator made that indefensible decision!

Conrad Brunstrom, “an eighteenth-centuryist. Born in London, based in Ireland, fixated by Canada,” writes about the accents in the “new staggeringly expensive Second Age Tolkien adaptation”:

But there’s also been some disquiet over here about the “Irish” accents conferred upon the Harfoots (proto-Hobbits) in the series. […] These Harfoots remind me a bit of Ewoks. I can imagine them taking out imperial stormtroopers with their amusingly rustic woodland booby traps. They are adept at camoflage. And they have sort of Irish accents. Of these accents let it be said that Lenny Henry’s is not the worst. With the gargantuan budget at their disposal, it is clear that inability to afford a qualified dialect coach is not the reason for the erratic vocal stylings of many of these Harfoots. It is rather that these actors perfected an “accent” that satisfied the director and producers. It’s the sort of accent that has no real existence on this island but has a particular “universal” semantic value.

And I suppose what we’re worried about is that there’s an “accent” that is identified globally as “Irish” that somehow still means “primitive”. Since we’ve heard hobbits speak in Peter Jackson movies, the vague assumption is inculcated that once upon a time the shaggy itinerant Harfoots were Irish but they had evolved past that by the Third Age. There’s an undoubted association of Irishness with “pastness” which connects with disturbing teleologies. Although this “Irish” accent is deployed affectionately in the sense that everyone is supposed to like the Harfoots, we are left wondering what is it that the wide world loves Ireland “for”? What do they want from us? Do they want this country to remain the repository of a “backward” pre-industrial set of values?

[Read more…]

Eliot Gelwan, “60-something clinical psychiatrist and unrepentant counter-culturalist and contrarian,” has a nicely designed website with a page which features quirky takes on his name. His surname is unusual, and he’s written about trying to find out about its origin(s) (“As the part of the world from which my ancestors emigrated shifted back and forth between Slavic and Germanic dominance, between Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, so too did the rendering of family names. I would have to pursue the Gelvans, the Gelmans, and even the Hellmans and who knows what else for relatives”), but on the first-linked page he confines himself to this jocular quote:

“a-gelwan: To stupefy, astonish; stupefacere, consternare: ‘-Ðá wearþ ic agelwed’, ‘then I was astonished’, Bt. 34, 5; Fox 140, 9.”
–Bosworth and Toller, Online Anglo-Saxon Dictionary

Naturally, I wondered if that OE verb had left traces in later English, and the OED turned up two: begallow “To frighten or terrify” (only citation: c1320 Sir Beves in Ellis Spec. II. 171 That horse was swift as any swalowe, No man might that horse begallowe) and gally “To frighten, daze, scare, startle” (first citation 1608 W. Shakespeare King Lear ix. 44 The wrathfull Skies gallow, the very wanderer of the Darke, and makes them keepe their caues). The latter has the longer and more prestigious history, but I like the prefixed form begallow; it sounds scarier.

Joel at Far Outliers is posting a series of excerpts from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, which I really must get around to reading (I love his books on Greece, Mani and Roumeli — see this post), and a couple of recent posts provide glimpses of German dialects in the mid-1930s. From Hitching a Ride in Swabia, 1934:

The driver opened the door and reached down a helping hand, with the words “Spring hinein!” When I was beside him in the steamy cabin he said “Du bist ein Schneemann!”—a snowman. So I was. We clanked on. Pointing to the flakes that clogged the windscreen as fast as the wipers wiped, he said, “Schlimm, niet?” Evil, what? He dug out a bottle of schnapps and I took a long swig. Travellers’ joy! “Wohin gehst Du?” I told him. (I think it was somewhere about this point on the journey that I began to notice the change in this question: “Where are you going?” In the north, in Low Germany, everyone had said “Wohin laufen Sie” and “Warum laufen Sie zu Fuss?”—Why are you walking on foot? Recently the verb had been ‘gehen.’ For ‘laufen,’ in the south, means to run—probably from the same root as ‘lope’ in English. The accent, too, had been altering fast; in Swabia, the most noticeable change was the substitution of -le at the end of a noun, as a diminutive, instead of -chen; Häusle and Hundle, instead of Häuschen and Hündchen, for a little house and a small dog. I felt I was getting ahead now, both linguistically and geographically, plunging deeper and deeper into the heart of High Germany . . . . The driver’s Du was a sign of inter-working-class mateyness that I had come across several times. It meant friendly acceptance and fellow-feeling.)

And from Impressions of Bavarians, 1934:
[Read more…]

Helen Santoro writes in the NY Times (archived) about her difficult birth and unexpected development:

In my first few hours of life, after six bouts of halted breathing, the doctors rushed me to the neonatal intensive care unit [… and] rolled my pink, 7-pound-11-ounce body into a brain scanner. Lo and behold, there was a huge hole on the left side, just above my ear. I was missing the left temporal lobe, a region of the brain involved in a wide variety of behaviors, from memory to the recognition of emotions, and considered especially crucial for language. […] They told [my mother] I would never speak and would need to be institutionalized. […]

But month after month, I surprised the experts, meeting all of the typical milestones of children my age. I enrolled in regular schools, excelled in sports and academics. The language skills the doctors were most worried about at my birth — speaking, reading and writing — turned out to be my professional passions.

My case is highly unusual but not unique. Scientists estimate that thousands of people are, like me, living normal lives despite missing large chunks of our brains. Our myriad networks of neurons have managed to rewire themselves over time. But how?

[Read more…]

I’m reading Nicole Eustace’s Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History and deserved it — it’s very well written, tells a gripping story, and shines a new light on colonial history, focusing on a murder case in 1722. I’ll quote here a passage from Chapter 2 explaining the odd-sounding titles by which Taquatarensaly (also called Tioquataraghse, among other spellings), who played a vital role in events, was known:

Pennsylvanians’ uncertainty about how to describe Taquatarensaly’s function reflects their basic unfamiliarity with Indian ways. As a descendent of the Susquehannock Indian Nation, also known as the “Mingos,” Taquatarensaly is heir to a long tradition of Native American diplomacy. Native peoples of the American southeast have a specific title for a man who smooths relations between peoples by taking up membership in more than one society. Such a man acts simultaneously as a war captain who protects his people and a spokesman able to intercede for both his own people and for any other peoples who formally adopted him as one of their own. They refer to such people by the title “Fanimingo.”

English settlers have at least a glancing awareness of the term, mentioned in a letter written by a colonist named Thomas Nairne in 1708. According to Nairne, it is usual for a family in want of protection to choose “some growing man of esteem in the wars” and “claim him for the head or Chief of their family.” The man so chosen is addressed thereafter as “chief” and honored with presents. In return, he is “to protect that family and take care of its concerns equally with those of his own.” Nairne indicated that an analogous procedure could be used by “two nations at peace” who could designate a fanimingo to go between them. Each is to “chuse these protectors in the other” and, between them, these representatives are “to make up all Breaches between the 2 nations” should any occur. Such a go-between identifies equally with his family or nation of origin and with the one that ritually adopts him.

[Read more…]

Via Charles Bernstein’s Facebook post (which has images), I learn about an amazing example of private language creation:

Decades in the making, Javant Biarujia’s 1000+-page Taneraic dictionary has just been published in a private, bamboo-bound edition. I write about this work in “Poetics of the Americas” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (1999). Taneraic is an ideolect invented by Biarujia, a poet who lives in Australia. The monumental dictionary includes guides to pronunciation and grammar.

Biarujia (a Taneraic name) has a website, Tanerai, where he provides language materials as well as some background in the post Introduction to Taneraic:

Welcome to Taneraic (or tanerai — I coined the English cognate “Taneraic” as an assimilated form) on the Web! The first Website devoted to my private language, or langue close, as I prefer to call it, designed and set up by my very good friend, Charles. Just like the language itself, we are starting modestly, but I envisage the site will grow as I am able to supply material to Charles for him to put on the Net. The site will include translated works, original works, a step-by-step grammar and structure of Taneraic, a vocabulary (I have published a 200-page dictionary of Taneraic, so I’ll be looking at ways of putting it — or an expanded version of it — onto the site), and interactive activities from visitors to the site. (Eventually, I would like to invite interested Taneraicists, for that is what you are if you regularly visit this site, to help build vocabulary, using Taneraic affixes and compounding laws, leaving me with the radicals, or root-words.)

I describe Taneraic as a “hermetic” language after the style of Mallarmé or Stefan George: a private pact negotiated between the world at large and the world within me; public words simply could not guarantee me the private expression I sought. Taneraic was born of the unconscious (“The unconscious is structured like a language.” — Jacques Lacan); of an inchoate poetic personality; of conflict between artist and middle-class upbringing; of variant sexuality. English, my native tongue, would have submerged me in its long, magnificent yet etiolated history — and prejudices. I needed the immediacy of a marginal language, a creole, so to speak, arisen out of need, and adaptable yet of central importance. A language whose culture was that of a single individual.

You will doubtless have questions (e.g., “Why put a hermetic private language into the public arena?”), and many of them will be answered at the link, which I encourage you to investigate. The latest post, Nainougacyou by C R Strebor, is about “Nainougacyou, the Taneraic Dictionary,” and has a couple of images — to quote the post, “the binding is adorable and the cover is a lovely textured blue with gold printing on the spine.” I continue not to really understand the impulses behind the creation of artificial languages, but I have come to respect them and the people who give them such devotion (see this 2009 post).

This is one of those posts where I have to get something off my chest, so bear with my grousing. I just watched Godard’s Nouvelle Vague for the third time (the first two were several decades ago), and liked it even more than I remembered, doubtless because I’ve been immersing myself in his movies and am better aware of what he’s up to. Before I grouse, let me give you a brief description. The plot, unusually for a Godard movie, is straightforward and can be understood while you watch; stripping away the subplots and minor characters, here it is (quoting the relevant bits of the Wikipedia article):

La Contessa Elena Torlato-Favrini […] is a wealthy Italian industrialist living in a sprawling estate near Lake Geneva, Switzerland. […] At the film’s opening, Elena goes for a drive by herself and encounters Roger Lennox […], an apparent drifter. Elena’s trajectory is brought to an abrupt halt as she stops to help Roger, who has evidently been forced off the road by a truck and is severely incapacitated. […] Elena decides to take a motorboat across the lake to visit some friends. Roger obediently drives the boat, and stops when Elena wants to get in the water, but refuses to join her, citing his inability to swim. […] Roger falls into the water as Elena gets back into the boat. Elena watches him drown and does not help, appearing indifferent to his plight.

The servants and Raoul quickly attempt to cover up any existence of Roger but almost immediately there is a new crisis: a man identical to Roger, calling himself Richard Lennox and claiming to be Roger’s brother, appears. He claims to know about the boating incident and is apparently using that as leverage to take over one of Elena’s companies. Where before the figure of Lennox was passive and docile, he is now shrewd and aggressive; it is Elena that now becomes pliant.

The power struggle reaches a climax in a recapitulation of the boating scene. Now it is Lennox who decides to take the boat out (this time a rowboat), and it is Elena who falls into the water, apparently unable to swim. Richard, at first as indifferent to Elena as she was to Roger Lennox in the same situation, abruptly takes Elena’s hand and saves her.

[Read more…]

Via JHarris’s MetaFilter post:

AIT, the Agency for Instructional Television (WIKIPEDIA), was one of a number of organizations who made programs that PBS stations would air midday, for teachers to record for later use. One of these was the inexplicable Wordsmith, that explored the roots of words. Host Bob Smith, standing on a gameshow-like set with his 70s attire and mustache, takes foam balls with syllables on them out of a machine, opens them up to show inside is printed their meaning, then puts them back into the machine, which makes a sci-fi noise. Then Sesame Street-like short clips demonstrate its meaning. While it moves slow, it’s still kind of interesting! A number of episodes survive, as well as some other programs from AIT, in the Indiana University Moving Image Archive.

It is really as ’70s as it is possible to be, and it does indeed move slow, but it’s a great idea and presented in an enjoyable way. The first episode I tried was Body I, where Bob started with a ball reading HAND; he says “Its meaning isn’t hidden: “hand” means ‘hand’!” and opens the ball to reveal “hand” inside. Then he has his sidekick slice open the MANU ball to show that it too means ‘hand’; he gives examples of words using that “word cell,” including manufacture, manual, and manuscript (accompanied by images and potted histories). Of course, I got stuck on wondering where hand comes from; the OED (updated June 2013) says:

Etymology: Cognate with Old Frisian hand, hond (West Frisian hân), Old Dutch hant (Middle Dutch hant, Dutch hand), Old Saxon hand (Middle Low German hant), Old High German hant (Middle High German hant, German Hand), Old Icelandic hǫnd, Old Swedish, Swedish hand, Old Danish hand (Danish hånd), Gothic handus, Crimean Gothic handa; further etymology uncertain and disputed.
Further etymology.

Perhaps ultimately < the same Germanic base as the strong verb reflected by Gothic -hinþan (in frahinþan to take captive, ushinþan to make a prisoner of war), Old Swedish hinna to reach, arrive at (Swedish hinna), and the related words Gothic hunþs body of captives and Old English hūð plunder, booty, Old High German hunda plunder, booty; further etymology uncertain.