languagehat.com

A reader writes: “I thought that this fellow, Jeremy Fowler, deserves a little publicity. He and his little team have shepherded the Wîkîferheng into something great, far superior to the Wiktionaries of other languages with more speakers and the force of unitary nation-states behind them—a remarkable achievement for a language that has been oppressed and even outlawed for so long.” This brief article by Nasir Elî says:

Fowler has learned Kurdish for 10 years, but over the past eight months he has studied on a daily basis. He now lives and works in Duhok at Form Foundation and has begun to write an online Kurmanji dictionary for people who want to learn the most-spoken Kurdish dialect. Fowler’s family has even enrolled their daughter at a local Kurdish school.

“It is an honor to have a student coming from Britain and study Kurdish while most of our people want to learn English,” the principal of Zagros School, Zirak Mohammed, told Rudaw.

And here’s a longer piece about the dictionary in which Fowler seems to be going under the nom de plume Ibrahim Kocher:

Wikiferheng, a web-based free content dictionary, does not only include definitions for words in Kurdish but also includes idioms and proverbs commonly used in Kurdish as well as their meanings. “For example, I often say, ‘I am busier than the groom’s mother.’ This is a beautiful idiom, a colorful expression. If you search for that idiom on Wikiferheng, it will define the phrase,” Ibrahim tells Kurdistan 24. “The search will also provide the English variation of the idiom, such as, ‘I’m fighting fit,’ or, ‘I’m fit as a fiddle.’”

Ibrahim has made significant progress in creating an extensive database of definitions as well as idioms and proverbs in the past four years since his project began. He has also provided two platforms for the online dictionary: one through the web, and another through an app.

Congratulations to all involved!

A Literal Map of the United Kingdom (click to enlarge) does what the post title says, giving you the etymological meaning of the county names — Cornwall is “People of the horn,” Hampshire is “Hamlet by the water meadow” (gazing at Ophelia’s drowned body, no doubt). Thanks, JC!

I can’t remember another author with whom I’ve had such a fraught relationship as Andrei Bitov. He was one of the Soviet writers I had never read but for whom I had an anticipatory respect because of what I’d read about them; others were Olesha, Trifonov, Rasputin, and Sokolov. All four of the latter have fully justified that respect (I’ve written posts on them at LH), but Bitov has been a mixed bag. I greatly enjoyed his early short story «Большой шар» [The big balloon], about a little girl who falls in love with a red balloon and against all odds brings it safely home, but his later, longer stories featured an evidently autobiographical protagonist and, as I wrote here, they began to irritate me:

I soon got fed up with his single-minded solipsism. It seemed like every story was about a boy or young man who had an obsessive love for an older woman who showed him amused tolerance, and had endless scenes of the hero walking around (preferably at night) meditating bitterly on his sufferings.

But, as I said there, I reread «Жизнь в ветреную погоду» [Life in Windy Weather] and appreciated it considerably more, and I approached his most famous work, the 1978 novel «Пушкинский дом» [Pushkin House], with great anticipation — it had, after all, been called a “sumptuous masterpiece” and compared to Nabokov. But I found it increasingly hard to get through, and I’m not sure how the fault is to be apportioned between me and the author.

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Ian Austen’s NY Times obit starts off in lively fashion:

In Canada, it’s possible to find a man lounging on a chesterfield in his rented bachelor wearing only his gotchies while fortifying his Molson muscle with a jambuster washed down with slugs from a stubby.

But until Oxford University Press hired Katherine Barber as the founding editor of its Canadian dictionary in 1991, there was no authoritative reference work to decode contemporary Canadian words and meanings. (That sentence describes a man on a sofa in a studio apartment wearing only underwear while expanding his beer belly with a jelly doughnut and a squat brown beer bottle.)

Austen goes on to describe Barber’s work on the dictionary:

Before Ms. Barber was hired to assemble a team to create the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, there had been no research-based attempt at codifying the country’s form of the English language to create a general-use dictionary. At that time, Canadian dictionaries were minimally adapted versions of American or British texts.

The group consulted dictionaries of regional Canadian dialects as well as specialized dictionaries like “A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles,” a scholarly collection published in 1967 that traced Canadian English back to its origins but did not include Canadian pronunciations, Canadian spellings of words common to most varieties of English, or many words that were then contemporary.

To hunt for Canadian entries and the distinct Canadian meanings of words, Ms. Barber partly relied on a technique long used by Oxford. She assembled a small army of freelance “readers,” who pored over catalogs, newspapers, magazines and almost anything else they could find for distinctive Canadian words. Ms. Barber always traveled with a notebook to record words on posters and signs that struck her as possibly Canadian. […]

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Mitch Anzuoni’s heartwarming story of fan translation (see this post for another):

Usually, a Google Sheet is the site of bureaucratic misery and numbing digits; the exact sort of place you wouldn’t want to find yourself on a weekend night. Yet there I was: five hundred rows deep, carefully entering Japanese text I had extracted from the decompiled source code of a twenty-four-year-old .exe file. With me was a cadre of volunteers from around the world offering possible translations nearly as fast as I was pasting in characters. “能力 – skill level,” someone commented. “Ability,” wrote another. 好きな本 was decided as “favorite book”; 耐震工事, “seismic retrofitting.”

These are but a few choice elements of 本屋物語, a bookstore simulator created by the Japanese videogame developer Kairosoft in 1997 (the title translates literally as “Bookstore Story,” or more poetically, “BookStory”). I came across the game recently while searching for book-related sims. While sims (videogames that simulate activities) have been enjoying a genre renaissance lately, there’s still a decided lack of book-related titles, and so I was delighted to discover BookStory, with its charming yesteryear graphics and nostalgic UI elements.

Eager to share my discovery, I tweeted “Someone absolutely needs to translate this Japanese used book store simulator from 1997” with a link to the freeware download on Kairosoft’s site. Some retro gaming accounts picked up the tweet and suddenly I had the attention of several thousand newly minted BookStory fans who also yearned to play this beguiling game. […]

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Garen Torikian writes for Electric Literature about how he came to translate from Armenian:

I had the great privilege of growing up in a house with several floor-to-ceiling shelves bursting with books. So far as I remember, they were largely ornamental, but I have a hard time believing that they went unread: my parents were not the hoarding type. One day, shortly after graduating college, stuck at home and with nothing else to do, I began to really look at the books for the first time. Non-fiction bestsellers like I’m OK—You’re OK sat next to memoirs owned by every Armenian household, like Black Dog of Fate. Tucked between such books, I came across Gostav Zarian’s The Traveller & His Road, published in Armenian in 1926 and translated by Ara Baliozian in 1981.

It has a truly wretched cover—forest green ink on a plain beige backdrop—and I would’ve reshelved it had I not read Baliozian’s introduction:

Next we find [Zarian] in Istanbul, which was then the most important cultural center of the Armenian diaspora, where in 1914, together with Daniel Varoujan, Hagop Oshagan, Kegham Parseghian, and a number of others, he founded the literary periodical Mehian. This constellation of young firebrands became known as the Mehian writers, and like their contemporaries in Europe—the French surrealists, Italian futurists, and German expressionists—they defied the establishment fighting against ossified traditions and preparing the way for the new.

Until that moment, the idea that an Armenian literary tradition existed had never crossed my mind. Students of literature have all but memorized the various networks of influence between different writers and artists, but whoever has not achieved sufficient popularity remains the other on the outside. I became very excited at the idea of Zarian’s literary works running alongside the rest of the 20th-century canon. On top of that, he had learned how to wield the language he had forgotten at the age of 25 while living in Europe. I held in my hands an irrefutable testament that the obstacle of one’s diasporic status could be overcome. […] After reading The Traveller & His Road, I acquired all of Baliozian’s translations; after exhausting the list, I became a literary translator myself. […]

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The European Review of Books has a kind of busy website for a sedate old codger like me (LH is well into its second decade of unchanged minimalism), but I like this mission statement:

Great essays can resonate in more than one voice. The ERB seizes a linguistic paradox: the ubiquity of English can animate the multilingual. Global English – a post-American English, a low common denominator – lets a magazine reach beyond, al di là di, ötesinde, jenseits. Pieces written in Greek or Arabic or Italian or Polish or Dutch – or, or, or – will be available in English and in the original. A good essay, after all, is something you want to read twice.

(If you’re wondering, ötesinde is Turkish; it’s based on öte, for which Wiktionary gives no etymology.) And this is only their “campaign website”; they say here:

The full ERB will comprise three book-length print issues per year, and online pieces every week. […] We will prioritize the essay, that cocktail of aspiration and humility, and we want writers—old, young, aspiring—who will flourish in that open form. Every good essay is a pilgrimage to somewhere or other. But we’ll reach beyond the essay, too: poem, travelogue, rant, parody. Anecdotes, interviews, profiles, afterthoughts. The ERB will be multilingual, but how to make multilingualism beautiful and alive? It’s a thrilling design riddle.

Check ’em out.

In my dual capacity as linguist (manqué) and copyeditor (retired), I have often had occasion to ruminate here and elsewhere on the tensions involved in trying to correct copy to be printed while not actually believing in traditional concepts of what’s “correct.” Jonathon Owen, a linguist/editor who blogs at Arrant Pedantry (“Examining language rules and where they come from”), has a post that expresses my feelings on the subject perhaps better than I’ve ever done:

A while ago at work, I ran into a common problem: trying to decide whether to stop editing out a usage I don’t like. In this case, it was a particular use of “as such” that was bothering me. To me, “as such” is a prepositional phrase, and “such” is a pronoun that must refer to some sort of noun or noun phrase, as in “I’m a copy editor; as such, I fix bad writing.” In this sentence, “such” refers to the noun phrase “a copy editor”; in other words, it means, “I’m a copy editor; as a copy editor, I fix bad writing.”

But most of the time when I encounter it nowadays, it’s simply used to mean “therefore” or “consequently” (for more on that, see this post I wrote several years ago for Visual Thesaurus). And when I encountered it on that day, I changed it, as I always had before. But this time, I kept thinking about what makes a usage right or wrong and how we as editors decide which rules to enforce and which ones to let slide.

“As such” may be a simple transitional adverb for most people, but I still reflexively look for a noun phrase for that “such” to refer to. And I do this even though I know I’m in the minority. I can look at the evidence and see that the shift has happened, but it hasn’t happened in my own mental grammar.

And I think this tells us a lot about why it’s so hard for us to change our minds about usage. Knowing that I’m in the minority hasn’t magically changed how the phrase works in my head. Some things are so habitual that it’s hard to root them out. And of course there’s more than a bit of snobbery at work too—the adverbial use of “as such” sounds less educated to me, so I don’t have much incentive to give up my meaning for the new one.

He goes on to discuss the question “What makes a particular usage correct?” and to say “I don’t believe it’s possible to come up with any reliable test for deciding which rules to enforce and which to abandon,” ending with this passage:
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Zack Zwiezen has a nice piece in Kotaku:

Fans working with experts have translated all of the Kanien’kehá:ka dialogue that appears in the Vinland section of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Around the halfway point or so of the massive Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Evior takes a trip to Vinland, an area of coastal North America. During her time in Vinland she meets the Kanien’kehá:ka, or the Mohawk people. She doesn’t understand their language and the game doesn’t provide a translation, so unless you speak the language, you’ll be just as lost as Eivor. However, the native people you meet are speaking a real language and Ubisoft worked closely with a Kanien’kehá:ka language consultant to make sure they got it right. So translating this dialogue would provide us an interesting new insight into how these people reacted to Eivor and what they thought about the situation.

The Assassin’s Creed superfans over at Access The Animus decided to do just that. The group worked with Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center to help properly translate all of the Native American dialogue featured in the game. Access The Animus also helpfully provides some extra context for some of the dialogue, showing how it is connecting to Assassin’s Creed Rogue and Assassin’s Creed III.

I don’t do video games, but that’s pretty cool. (Hat tip to Slavo/bulbul on FB.)

Also, the first edition (2002) of the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization by Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva can be downloaded free at ResearchGate.

I’ve chuckled at Jack Winter’s brilliant “How I Met My Wife” (originally in the July 25, 1994, New Yorker; archived) a number of times over the years, but apparently I’ve never posted about it, so here it is:

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I’d have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn’t be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.

Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or a sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion.

So I decided not to risk it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of.

I was plussed. It was concerting to see that she was communicado, and it nerved me that she was interested in a pareil like me, sight seen. Normally, I had a domitable spirit, but, being corrigible, I felt capacitated—as if there were something I was great shakes at—and forgot that I had succeeded in situations like this only a told number of times. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings.

Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. Wanting to make only called-for remarks, I started talking about the hors d’oeuvres, trying to abuse her of the notion that I was sipid, and perhaps even bunk a few myths about myself.

She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory character who was up to some good. She told me who she was. “What a perfect nomer,” I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.

Thanks, Jack!