languagehat.com

Youssef Rakha, an Egyptian novelist, poet, and essayist, writes for New Lines about the less decorous aspects of modern Egyptian literature; some excerpts:

The Arabic word for literature, “adab” also means decorum — implying that good language and good manners are ultimately the same thing. But, aside from the delicate feelings and refined tastes so abundant in [Salah] Jahin’s work, the Arabic literary canon has always had another strand, rich in profane scenes and blasphemous references. That kind of writing tears away the veil of propriety and derives its power from obscenity. In modern times it became a truer expression of fraught reality than decent, respectable literature ever could be. And there is no better example of that than the short, tragic life of [Naguib] Surour whose poetry shocked Egyptians through the 1960s and 1970s.

Surour was a lifelong dissident, repeatedly arrested and tortured for his views. […] Misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, he was beaten and “treated” with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). It was six months before his friends could locate him.

Up to this point Surour had been flamboyant and outspoken but not especially foul-mouthed. When his marital crisis came to a head, though, he started writing a series of “rubaiyat” (quatrains) — simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking — that flaunted the worst swear words in Egyptian Arabic […] He continued adding verses until 1974, by which time it had turned into a 6,000-word tirade with the offensive title “Kuss Ummiyyat” — combining “umm,” the Arabic word for mother, and “kuss,” a vernacular term for vagina (which the poem used repeatedly).

[Read more…]

My wife asked me where the phrase mixed bag came from, and even as I was racing for the dictionaries she called out “I’ll bet it’s from hunting.” Unsurprisingly, she was right (though it wouldn’t have occurred to me); OED (entry updated September 2002):

a. An assortment of game killed while hunting. Cf. bag n. 9.

1867 S. W. Baker Nile Tributaries Abyssinia xvi. 417 There was an immense quantity of large game, and I made a mixed bag of elephants, hippopotami, buffaloes, rhinoceros, giraffes, and great numbers of the large antelopes.
1895 Littell’s Living Age 24 Aug. 500/1 The chance of a small mixed bag, perhaps including some of the rarer wild fowl.
2002 Woodcock Scent in uk.rec.shooting.game (Usenet newsgroup) 30 Jan. We had a mixed bag of woodcock and snipe during the day and widgeon during the evening flight.

b. A diverse or heterogeneous assortment of people or things. Also figurative.

1919 F. M. Duncan Insect Pests iii. 48 It will be with quite a mixed ‘bag’ of foes that the enthusiastic hunter [sc. a gardener] will return.
1925 Econ. Jrnl. 35 617 It is a mixed bag: ephemeral narratives.., short essays [etc.].
[…]
1989 Dirty Linen Spring 12/2 The musicians on this recording are a mixed bag of English and Indian players.
1994 Denver Post 8 Feb. a1/2 President Clinton’s 1995 budget plan delivered a mixed bag of gains and pains to Colorado yesterday.

Interesting (though not surprising) that the hunting sense is still in use; though they only take the figurative sense back to 1919, a quick Google Books search found William Senior’s Mixed Bag: A Medley of Angling Stories and Sketches (1895), which certainly suggests it wasn’t only in literal use then.

Via Alex Foreman’s Facebook post, a YouTube clip (less than a minute long) of native Irish speaker Peig Sayers speaking English. Alex says:

This puts into perspective what I really mean when I tell people that Indian English (which now does have full native speakers) is just as much a part of English as Irish or Welsh English, and is similar to them in having substrate effects from other languages.

This is a recording of Peig Sayers speaking somewhat broken English. Sayers was not only a native Irish speaker but part of a generation which still contained Irish speakers who spoke English imperfectly (believe it or not the last documented monolingual Irish-speaker who spoke no English only died in 1998.)

You can tell that much from her syntax. But listen to her accent. It is not native Hiberno-English phonology of any kind, but it has enough in common with heavily Irish-influenced varieties of Hiberno-English that, if I heard somebody speaking with this *accent* today using native-like syntax, I doubt I would take them for a non-native English speaker. English spoken with a heavy non-native accent by an Irish speaker can still, pronunciation-wise, fall within my sense of “what English-speakers can sound like”.

There may come a time in a few centuries where a lot of the distinctive features of Indian English have been naturalized in the same way, so that phonological transfer from Indian languages (which now strikes Americans or Britons as signs of imperfect English learning) sounds to them like nothing more than deep regionalism.

It’s a wonderful sound, and I wish the clip lasted longer.

Back in 2005 I said “Second-guessing the Swedish Academy’s often bizarre choices and omissions for the Nobel Prize in literature is a time-honored game,” and one of the prime examples of omission is Leo Tolstoy, who lived for a decade after the institution of the prize and was never awarded it. I confess I’ve always enjoyed rubbing their nose in that myself (from a distance, that is; I’ve never actually met the Academy). Now I learn, from Dmitry Bykov (whose thoughts on the subject can be read here, in Russian) that it was his own choice. I’ll quote the English-language account by Kristin Masters here:

[…] In 1902, Tolstoy was again passed over for the prize; the Nobel committee awarded it to Theodor Momms[e]n. Losing out on the prize didn’t seem to bother Tolstoy much. In fact, he said “it saved me the painful necessity of dealing in some way with the money…generally regarded as very necessary and useful, but which I regard as the source of every kind of evil.” Despite Tolstoy’s own conciliatory reaction, the furor continued. A Swedish newspaper published an editorial in 1902 calling the the Nobel committee “unfair craftsmen and literature amateurs.”

Three years later Tolstoy published Great Sin [the long essay «Великий грех», supporting the theories of Henry George about the “sin” of landed property]. […] The Russian Academy of Sciences decided that the work truly enhanced Tolstoy’s standing as a writer, so they decided to nominate him again for the Nobel Prize. The nomination letter was approved by all of Russia’s outstanding academic institutions and was accompanied by a copy of Great Sin.

But Tolstoy still genuinely wanted nothing to do with the prize. The moment he learned of the nomination, he took up a pen for himself. Tolstoy wrote to his friend Arvid Jarnefelt, a Finnish writer. He entreated Jarnefelt, “If it was meant to happen, then it would be very unpleasant for me to refuse from it. That is why, I have a favor to ask. If you have any links in Sweden (I think you have), please try to make it so I would not be awarded with the prize. Please, try to do the best you can to avoid the award of the prize to me.” Whether Jarnefelt intervened or the committee had designs of its own, Tolstoy didn’t win the prize. Giosuè Carducci did.

[Read more…]

My wife and I watched It Happened One Night in the Criterion edition (a gift from my brother) and enjoyed it as much as we had when we saw it many years earlier — it fully deserved its sweep of the top Oscars and its reputation as one of the greatest of all rom-coms. But what brings it to LH is something I don’t remember noticing before. When the hero and heroine are making their leisurely way north, at one point they put up for the night at a sort of proto-motel called an “auto park.” I wasn’t familiar with this phrase, and it’s unknown to the OED (“No results found for ‘auto park’”), but it clearly had some currency — a Google Books search turned up ads using the term as well as this quote from Pamela J. Brink’s Only by the Grace of God, describing a road trip c. 1936: “The best thing about our trip was staying in new lodging called an auto park or motel.” Does anybody know anything about the history of this quaint expression?

In the words of the pathetically brief Wikipedia article, “George Dalgarno (c. 1616 – 1687) was a Scottish intellectual interested in linguistic problems.” You can get more information at the charmingly defensive Dictionary of National Biography entry by George Goodwin (1888):

Among other eminent men he knew Ward, bishop of Sarum, Wilkins, bishop of Chester, and Wallis, Savilian professor. Yet not the slightest notice of him is taken in the works either of Wilkins or of Wallis, both of whom must have derived some very important aids from his speculations. To Dalgarno has been erroneously ascribed the merit of having anticipated some of the most refined conclusions of the present age respecting the education of the deaf and dumb. […] Dalgarno may also claim the distinction of having first exhibited, and that in its most perfect form, a finger alphabet. He makes no pretensions, however, to the original conception of such a medium of communication. […] Nearly twenty years before the appearance of his ‘Didascalocophus’ Dalgarno had published another curious treatise entitled ‘Ars Signorum, vulgo Character Universalis et Lingua Philosophica,’ &c., 8vo, London, 1661, from which it appears that he was the precursor of Bishop Wilkins in his speculations concerning ‘A Real Character and a Philosophical Language’ (1668). Dalgarno’s treatise exhibits a methodical classification of all possible ideas, and a selection of characters adapted to this arrangement, so as to represent each idea by a specific character, without reference to the words of any language. He admits only seventeen classes of ideas, and uses the letters of the Latin alphabet, with two Greek characters, to denote them.

But really, the place to read about him is Arika Okrent’s magnificent In the Land of Invented Languages, which I reviewed back in 2009; she discusses him on pp. 45-50:
[Read more…]

Mark Liberman at the Log has a post responding to the following plaintive comment by Rick Rubenstein:

Are there any proven therapies available for folks like me who, despite seeing the light decades ago, can’t keep from wincing at “violations” of prescriptivist rules ingrained (mostly self-ingrained) during childhood? I want to be totally unfazed by “The team with the bigger amount of people has an advantage,” but man, it’s hard. (Not actually serious, but it’s certainly true. Unlearning is tough.)

Mark says:

The short answer is “I don’t know”. But see below for some obvious ideas, which amount to “analyze the situation” and “get used to it”.

Follow the link for the “obvious ideas,” which are good ones; the basic problem is that to be cured you have to want to be cured. If you’re like Rick and know that your peeves are just a personal glitch that you’d be better off without, there’s hope for you, but a great many peevers (I strongly suspect they constitute a substantial majority) have no interest in the accuracy of their views and resent being told they’re wrong. It does no good to say “language is arbitrary” or “change is natural and inevitable” or “this form you’re complaining about has been in use for centuries”; they are deeply invested in knowing that they are right and those other guys are wrong, and therefore they are better than those other guys. I’m afraid there is no general cure, any more than there is for the (doubtless related) drive to be the boss of other people; all we can do is try to help the occasional victim who realizes they have a problem.

And of course no amount of therapy will entirely rid the victim of their peevery; years of study of linguistics and two decades of running this blog have not cured me of flinching when I see contrary-to-fact “may have.” But it’s good to be reminded of one’s failings — it keeps one ’umble.

Nathaniel posts at Tumblr about an interesting phenomenon. He quotes copperbooms:

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

Then he prismatic-bell says:

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

[Read more…]

Laudator Temporis Acti posted this amusing passage from R.D. Dawe’s Repertory of Conjectures on Aeschylus (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1965):

One reason why so much endeavour is spent on conjectural emendation is because it is surrounded by an aura artificially created by its own practitioners. Those who think that it constitutes the crown and summit of all scholarship have only to glance in the following pages to see what drunken angles that crown can assume.

I enjoyed it but wasn’t planning to post it myself; it made me curious, however, so I tried Google Books and discovered the preview included the entire introduction, which is well worth your time. He starts by quoting Wecklein (at length, in Latin), whose Appendix conjecturas minus probabiles continens is his precursor in listing worthless conjectures for textual emendation, and continues:

I mention the prospective editor. The earth does not of course groan beneath the weight of those who will greet the publication of this book as removing the last obstacle between themselves and a fresh (i.e. Wilamowitz rehashed) edition of Aeschylus. But the text of this author is so very problematic that it is difficult to discuss any aspect of his art for long without being compelled to touch on textual problems; and it is my hope that this book may shorten by weeks or even months the preliminary labours of a wider circle of scholars, those who are dedicated to advancing our understanding of Aeschylus in whatever way most attracts their interest.

[Read more…]

Looking up a verse from the Psalms in Church Slavonic (for the curious, it was Psalm 41:6, beginning “Вскую прискорбна еси, душе моя?,” which is 42:5 in Western Protestant numbering, KJV “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?”; see this LH post for вскую ‘why’), I was introduced by Google to the STEP Bible. It has an amazing variety of languages, from Abau to Zou; that link takes you to the ESV Genesis, where if you hover over a highlighted word you get the original Hebrew and a summary of occurrences in the Bible. The Church Slavonic Elizabeth Bible (1757) doesn’t have the old letters, abbreviations, and accents of the POMOG site I generally use, but you can copy and paste from it, which is a huge advantage. And I suspect it will come in handy for all sorts of languages. For you to enjoy and explore (to quote John Nowacki, the morning classical-music guy on our local PBS station).