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Bathrobe sent me this article by the splendidly bearded Keith Kahn-Harris about the multilingual messages on the warning message slip found inside Kinder Surprise eggs:

As someone who adores languages I don’t understand, for a long time I have been obsessed with this small sheet of paper—an obsession culminating in the publication of my new book The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language. At first, I saw the warning message sheet as a feast of linguistic diversity. It includes 34 languages, everything from Albanian to Azerbaijani, in multiple scripts. There are “small” languages, like Estonian (spoken by about a million people) and massive ones, like Chinese and English.

I was intrigued, but disappointed to find that the piece contained only his Deep Thoughts and no actual examples. Happily, a little googling turned up The Message: An ever-expanding list of translations:

On this page, I have collated the translations and versions of what I call in The Babel Message, ‘The Message’ – the warning message found on the piece of paper found inside Kinder Surprise Eggs.

Below you can find the complete list of translations of the Message, including both the ‘Official’ versions found inside the Kinder Surprise Eggs and the ones commissioned for The Babel Message. The book does not include every Message I have found or commissioned so there is plenty of exclusive material here that you won’t find elsewhere, including alternate translations. In some cases, I have included supplementary explanations and translation glosses that were too lengthy to fit into the book.

Which is fun. The one thing that’s missing is a quiz, but fortunately there is an equivalent that I reported on in 2004 in The Languages of McDonalds. And not only can you still take the quiz (I had the same problem I had eighteen years ago with the Scandinavian languages, though when the language you guess is close enough to the real one the quiz gives you a do-over, which is sporting), but in one of the comments J. Cassian said “I remember a similar multi-linguistic warning I found in a Kinder egg once.” It’s all connected. (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

Back in 2003 I posted a very funny Charles Simic quote which I got from the long-defunct blog Giornale Nuovo (and I always feel a pang when I think about those blogs that inspired me in my early days of blogging); just now, providing archived links for that post, I liked what misteraitch had to say so much I thought I’d repost it here (minus the bulk of the list of poets he owned, for which visit this link, and the Simic, for which see my first link):

Where Did the Poetry Go?

Right poetry is full of virtue-breeding delightfulness. – Sir Philip Sidney.

At one time or another I’ve owned books of poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Charles Baudelaire, John Berryman, […] and W.B Yeats. Plus others I’ve doubtless forgotten, not counting numerous anthologies, virtually all of which I’ve read and more or less enjoyed, some of which I’ve loved and treasured, and a couple of dozen of which have survived my several changes of taste, circumstance, and address, and are still on my shelves today. The sorry fact of it is though, that I seldom read poetry any more.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. – William Wordsworth.

I never try to write poetry any more either. For years I strove, in hour after hour of frustrated creative endeavour, to distil a few shining lines of the stuff. The worthwhile results of this work, alas, would scarcely fill both sides of a single sheet of A4, let alone a slim volume of verse. Yet it was not dissatisfaction with the quality of my efforts that brought them, very gradually, to a standstill, rather some ebbing away of my desire to partake of poetry’s essence – a loss of appetite, perhaps.

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty. – Edgar Allan Poe.

I spent the larger part of my first proper pay-cheque on poetry-books, which seemed to me at that time a more urgent necessity than buying myself one good pair of shoes. These days, I must concede, my priorities have reversed, and the shoes would come first.

Writing a poem… is reaching out into the unexplained areas of the mind, in which the air is too thickly primitive or too fine for us to live continually – Thom Gunn.

So, I wonder, where did the poetry in me go? Did it evaporate away with my youth like some volatile spirit, never to return? Is it in abeyance, a Muse in sullen exile? Or has it merely cooled and congealed into prose?

All of this applies to me as well — in my mid-twenties I was obsessed with poetry, writing it every day (some of which I still think is not bad) and reading it far more than the linguistics books and articles I was meant to be reading for my never-finished dissertation. And of course it’s not just me and misteraitch — that progression, or evaporation, is familiar enough to be a cliché. Is lyric poetry really just an attempt to get laid?

David Ian Klein writes for the Forward about a publishing milestone:

Throughout the world, only about 60,000 people speak Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish. But the historic language of Sephardic Jewry is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. And what is believed to be the only print Ladino publication in the world, El Amaneser, reached a milestone last week when the Istanbul-based publication cranked out its 200th issue.

“What the editors of El Amaneser have accomplished is no small feat,” said Bryan Kirschen, an American and professor of Ladino at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “Ladino has a long-standing print culture and this monthly paper is a remnant of a thriving past and a hopeful future.”

Though the number of Ladino speakers is rapidly shrinking, with the last generation raised with Ladino as their mother tongue born in the 1940s, younger people are breathing new life into the language, said Karen Şarhon, editor of El Amaneser, which translates to “The Dawn.” And the pandemic has given those with an interest in Ladino more opportunities to study it, she said, with more online classes and Zoom meetups that put Ladino speakers and wannabe speakers around the world in touch with each other. […]

[Read more…]

Anatoly Vorobey posts (in Russian) about a Kazakh poem by Zhursin Erman (or Ermanov) called Дилемма (Dilemma), whose last stanza reads:

Арбаса нәпсі-ыбылыс,
Алаңдай берем ұлып іш.
Көңілге неге сыймайсың
Көзіме сыйған құбылыс?!

Google Translate helpfully provides a Latinized version:

Arbasa näpsi-ıbılıs,
Alañday berem ulıp iş.
Köñilge nege sıymaysıñ
Közime sıyğan qubılıs?!

And renders it into English as:

The cart is sexy,
I’m worried about the stomach.
Why don’t you like it?
A phenomenon that catches my eye ?!

(Anatoly quotes the Russian GT version, which seems to be based on the English — at any rate, it says the same thing.) But Yandex Translate does something quite different:

“I don’t know,” he said,
I’m worried about my son’s underwear.
Why won’t you be pleasing,
phenomenon that catches the eye?!

(Here I’ve translated from the Russian, which you can see at the first link; угодить ‘please, oblige’ normally takes an object marked by preposition or dative case, but neither is present here so I’ve rendered it “be pleasing.”) Ça donne à réfléchir.

Dave Black posts about Hawaiian Pidgin:

If you ever move to the Islands, you will need a guide to Hawaiian Pidgin expressions. Here’s my list. I was born in Honolulu in 1952. I moved to Kailua in 1955. I lived in Kailua until I left for Biola in 1971. We used all of these expressions while growing up, but some we used more than others. In this list, expressions in bold type are those for which we NEVA WEN use the corresponding English equivalent, so you will want to learn these first. If you have time to only learn one expression, learn “pau.”

Pau means ‘done’ — or, to give the more thorough list of equivalents in the online Hawaiian Dictionary s.v. pau, “Finished, ended, through, terminated, completed, over, all done; final, finishing; entirely, completely, very much; after; all, to have all; to be completely possessed, consumed, destroyed.” (It says “PNP pau,” where PNP is apparently Proto-Nuclear-Polynesian.) Some of the entries are well-known outside of Hawaii (Da kine ‘whatchamacallit,’ Lanai ‘patio,’ Wahine ‘woman’), others not so much (Ono ‘delicious,’ Pilikia ‘trouble’). I was particularly struck by Buggah ‘person’ and Howzit ‘hello,’ both of which have straightforward etymologies (bugger, how’s it) but which I am somehow surprised to find a basic part of Hawaiian pidgin. Thanks, David!

The esteemed ktschwarz, who is doing an admirable job of paying attention to OED updates, writes at Wordorigins:

Yarmulke was briefly mentioned in the old thread on 1903 words. It’s from Yiddish, which got it from Polish, but where did Polish get it? (Note that while the Jewish practice of wearing religious headgear is older, the association of the word yarmulke specifically with Jews is surprisingly recent, only since the 19th century.) […] That Turkish origin is repeated in many English dictionaries. It’s not unprecedented: in the 17th century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had a border with the Ottoman Empire, fought a series of wars with it, and absorbed some Turkish words into Polish. However, in 2019 the OED revised yarmulke and decisively rejected the Turkish origin, choosing an origin from Latin instead. Here’s what they say:

Etymology: < Yiddish yarmolke, probably ultimately < post-classical Latin almucia, armutia hood, cape (see amice n.²), via Polish jamuɫka, jarmuɫka skullcap (mid 15th cent. in Old Polish as jaɫmurka, jeɫmunka, with an apparent extension by -ka, a Polish suffix forming nouns).
For borrowings of the Latin word into other languages, compare also mutch n. and perhaps mozetta n.

Compare Russian ermolka (1800 or earlier), Ukrainian jarmulka, jarmurka, Belarusian jarmolka, all in the sense ‘skullcap’, all probably < Polish.

An alternative suggestion, deriving the Polish and Yiddish words, via the East Slavonic languages (compare Old Russian emurluk′′ raincoat (1674)) < Ottoman Turkish yağmurlyk raincoat (see gambalocke n.), poses formal, semantic, and chronological problems.

[Read more…]

It’s time once again for Ben Zimmer’s annual Tucker Award post: “After another fucking exhausting year, it’s time once again for Strong Language to recognize the annual achievements in swearing.”

Best Fucking Swearing of 2021

We’ve run the numbers, and the pinnacle of profanity in this pandemic-weary year occurred in September when McSweeney’s published an instant classic by Wendy Molyneux entitled, “Oh My Fucking God, Get the Fucking Vaccine Already, You Fucking Fucks.” […]

Best Fucking Swearing on Television (Non-Fiction)

We might be a tad biased, but nothing on our televisions in 2021 could outdo the Netflix documentary series The History of Swear Words, the first season of which debuted in January. With Nicolas Cage hosting and Strong Language’s own Kory Stamper as one of the talking heads, how could you go wrong? […]

Best Fucking Swearing in the Movies

(Beware, Matrix spoilers ahead!) The long-awaited sequel The Matrix Resurrections has some surprise appearances by characters from earlier in the franchise, like the Merovingian, aka the Frenchman (played by Lambert Wilson). In 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded, the Merovingian explains why he chooses to speak French: “I have sampled every language, French is my favorite. Fantastic language. Especially to curse with. Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d’enculé de ta mère. It’s like wiping your ass with silk. I love it.” (Google Translate renders the French line as “God damn fuck you motherfucker motherfucker shit,” which lacks some nuance.) […]

Best Fucking Swearing for Civil Liberties

It’s always cheering to see the right to swear upheld as a civil liberty in the courts, and it’s especially cheering when a cheerleader is at the center of the legal action. In a case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, Brandi Levy prevailed against administrators at her public high school in Pennsylvania, who suspended her from cheerleading after she posted a photo on Snapchat with the message, “Fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, fuck everything.” But while it was rightly hailed as a free-speech victory, the case exposed how major U.S. media outlets continue to dance around profanity, even when it’s undeniably newsworthy.

Fuckin’ A! Lots more at the link, of course. (Tucker Awards previously at LH.)

I was planning to write my review of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Роман [Roman] today because I expected to finish the book yesterday. As it happens, I finished it a day earlier because I skimmed the last hundred or so pages in a few minutes, but I’m writing about it today anyway, because I had to catch my breath and figure out what I wanted to say about this enchanting, boring, disgusting, maddening piece of fiction. I’m still trying to figure it out, and I’m hoping that the process of writing will help me clarify what I think.

It’s not the first Sorokin I’ve read; that would be his famous 1991 short story Кисет [The tobacco pouch], in which a touching but clichéd reminiscence of a WWII veteran looking for a woman who gave him a tobacco pouch during the war descends into gibberish (I saw a reference to it on Anatoly Vorobey’s site a couple of decades ago and gobbled it up), and that’s Sorokin’s gimmick in a nutshell: present some pleasing cliché and violently deconstruct it. I completely understand why a lot of people can’t stand Sorokin; some hate the clichés, while others are repelled by the violence, which frequently involves torture, coprophagy, cannibalism, and the like. But for me the clichés are redeemed by the brilliant presentation (Sorokin is a superb stylist capable of any sort of pastiche), and as for the violence, well, as he points out, the characters aren’t people, they’re just words on paper, and what happens to them is about literature and language, not suffering human beings. Of course that’s a bit disingenuous, since it’s a rare reader who can entirely divorce a literary character from the humanity the character is constructed to mimic, but it’s also true, and I can handle the results. Except…

Well, let me describe the book in enough detail to give you an idea of it; this will necessarily involve spoilers, so click through to the rest only if you don’t care about that. (I should mention that this, the last of his major works to be rendered into English, is said to be forthcoming from Dalkey Archive in Max Lawton’s translation, and I’ll also point out that the Russian text I linked to above is on Sorokin’s own site — he generously presents his work for all to read freely if they don’t want to cough up for a printed copy.)
[Read more…]

Slavomír Čéplö aka bulbul writes on Facebook:

Some more good stuff from the Dragoman book: p. 161-162 contains a reference to a book titled Peregrinations written by a certain Jean Palerne and published in Lyon in 1606. Among other things, it contains a glossary of useful terms (p. 522 onwards) in French, Italian, vernacular Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Slavic. Not all columns are filled and so the first Slavic term we get is “Maistre – Maestro – X – X – Gospodaro” and of the useful phrases towards the end, we only get “Caco stoite” (< “Kako stojite”) as the equivalent of “Come state” (p. 540-541).

The true value of the book lies in the final page, p. (5)554, which contains two lists of insults (“inivres”), one in Turkish (apparently addressed to Christians) and one in Arabic, both with French equivalents. Some are familiar (“giaour”, “quiopec” < “köpek”, quelb”), the rest, less so. I, for one, would love to have the whole list explained and annotated. Stephen, maybe if we engage the Hatters?

It took me a minute to figure out that “inivres” = “injures.” (You can run into it in early English texts as well; from Langford’s Meditations of Ghostly Exercise in Time of Mass: “See now that yow lykwysse forgyff all Inivres . displeasures . wronges and occasyons . for the Lowe of hym that thus meikly and mercefully Dyd forgyff hys trespasurs.”) At any rate, it’s an interesting challenge; what, for instance, is “brequiday” ‘cuckold’?

I recently came across the word adelgid, which means (per Merriam-Webster) “either of two aphids (genus Adelges) with a white woolly coating that have been accidentally introduced into North America” and (per the OED) “Any of various homopteran bugs constituting the family Adelgidae, closely related to aphids, which feed on the sap of coniferous trees, often form galls, and at certain stages of the life cycle are covered with a white, wool-like waxy secretion.” But my concern is not with the bugs but with the etymology. M-W says:

adelgid ultimately from New Latin Adelges, probably irregular from Greek adēlos unseen

Which struck me as odd. But the OED (entry created December 2011) says something quite different:

Etymology: < scientific Latin Adelges, genus name (J. N. Vallot 1836, in Mém. de l’Acad. des Sci., Arts, et Belles-lettres de Dijon 227); probably < -adelges (in either Phytadelges, family name, or zoadelges, both 1832 in Duméril: see note) + -id suffix³. Compare scientific Latin Adelgidae, family name (1931 or earlier). Compare French adelge (Vallot 1836).
Duméril derives scientific Latin Phytadelges and zoadelges < ancient Greek ἀδελγεῖν to suck, but this form is not attested in Greek; there may be some confusion with ancient Greek ἀμελγεῖν to milk, to suck up (moisture), to drink.

I wish scientists would routinely explain where they get the words they’re coining (and learn the classical languages if they want to use them)!

Incidentally, I found the word while reading the New Yorker — it’s in Ian Frazier’s annual New Year’s “Greetings, Friends!” doggerel. But Frazier either didn’t know how the word was supposed to be pronounced (/æˈdɛldʒᵻd/) or chose to ignore it, because his verse stresses it on the antepenult:

May every forest soon be rid
Of the woolly adelgid.