languagehat.com

Sara Minogue reports for CBC News:

New research on a trove of 13th century moccasins is shedding light on how the Dene language may have spread across North America. The distinctly subarctic Dene moccasins were discovered in the Promontory Caves in Utah nearly 100 years ago. They’re believed to be evidence that some Dene people left northwestern North America and successfully resettled in what is now the American southwest. Dry conditions in the cave preserved what would usually be perishable goods, including about 350 moccasins and thousands of animal bones. Most of the moccasins were made from locally gathered materials, but recent chemical analysis found one outlier: an ankle tie that came from a bison believed to have lived 700 to 800 kilometres further south.

Jessica Metcalfe, an assistant professor of anthropology at Lakehead University, used data based on the archeological remains of other ancient bison to determine that the animal lived off plants that would have only grown in a much warmer climate. Further chemical analysis ruled out the idea that the bison wandered north, or that the leather was obtained through trade. She believes the leather shows that the people who lived in the cave were travelling long distances and returning, “probably for the purpose of scouting.”

Metcalfe says this is “the first time past human migrations have been reconstructed using chemical traces in footwear.” Her analysis, published earlier this month in the journal American Antiquity, puts the subarctic Dene group closer to the homelands of the Navajo and Apache than has previously been documented. Dene languages, also known as the Athapaskan languages, are one of the most widespread Indigenous languages in North America, but there is little in the archeological record that explains how the languages spread, and why there are two distinct groupings nearly two-thousand kilometers apart.

(Dene is the common word for ‘people’ in the Athapaskan languages.) I’ll be curious to know what those Hatters who know more than I about Native American linguistic history make of this. Thanks, Trevor!

OUPBlog has a quiz to plug Ralph Keyes’ book The Hidden History of Coined Words; I got fewer than half the answers right, but didn’t feel bad about it because by and large it’s not the kind of thing you can expect to know unless you’ve read the book. But it’s fun, and you’ll learn stuff.

Also, remember this post about Alice Gregory’s New Yorker article “How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language?”? One of the things that annoyed me didn’t get mentioned in the post, and I was glad to see this letter about it in the new issue:

I appreciated how Alice Gregory, in her article about the history and the future of the Penobscot language, critiques the colonialist underpinnings of linguistics and language preservation (“Final Say,” April 19th). But, as someone with a background in linguistics, I felt that her argument was undercut by exoticized descriptions of Penobscot, which she portrays as “melodic, gentle, and worn-sounding” and “especially visual, efficient, and kinetic.” Virtually all languages have variations in tone or pitch, and tonal languages such as Mandarin might sound particularly “foreign” to an English speaker. Yet it seems problematic to describe a conversation in Penobscot as being “like a choir lesson” if the goal is to promote the language’s use in daily life. Gregory also observes that “single words can express full ideas” in Penobscot, but this quality, called “synthesis” by linguists, is not dissimilar to the agglutinative aspects (in which strings of suffixes and prefixes can be added to a single word) of languages such as Turkish, Hungarian, and Japanese—or even to German’s compound nouns. These languages are rarely described poetically. Though there is nothing wrong with finding a language beautiful, we should be wary of giving credence to the idea that mystical-sounding or aesthetically pleasing languages are worthier of preservation and revitalization.

Julia Clark
Los Angeles, Calif.

You tell ’em, Ms. Clark.

Thatching Info.com is one of those delightful sites that assembles masses of detail about some subject unknown to most people today:

The information available here, is the result of over three decades of practical experience, plus more than a dozen years of research; into the history and various working methods, employed in the craft of thatching. The research included an eighteen thousand mile trip around most of Britain. Thus this site covers thatching throughout the Island of Britain and the islands around it, from Shetland to Sark, with a few excursions to other lands…

Of course what caught my attention was this, in the following paragraph: “there is a large glossary to help you.” And so there is, A Glossary of Thatching Names and Terms:

As well as a list of the technical terms and names, used throughout this site; I have also included other names, which are not mentioned in the text. Hopefully allowing this glossary to also act as a basic reference, to the myriad nomenclature found in the craft. Also included are terms from the dialects and languages, of the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland…. […] Alternative names are in brackets. Other glossary entries are in italics. (I have not cross referenced all the various names, for a Thatching Spar, due to the many terms, used to describe this humble article….

The main list runs from A Frame (Principal Rafter) “The largest timbers, in a normal roof construction” to Yoke (Jack or Groom) “A forked stick, used to carry a Burden of Yealms on to a roof,” including such savory terms as Biddle (either “A wooden frame, with pair of spikes set in the top” or “Yet another name for a Legget or Bat”), Flaughter Spade (“A form of breast plough”), Tekk (“The name, used in Shetland, for Oat Straw”), and Witch’s seat (“a large flat stone set in a chimney”); then there follow lists of terms from the Channel Islands (“Gllic: Thatch”), Cornwall (“Teyz: Thatch also a Roof, suggesting they were one and the same for a long time”), Wales (“Gwrachod: A tied underlayer of thatch”), and Scotland (“Fraoch: Heather or Ling”).

Finally a couple of Gaelic proverbs…

Is tr’om sn’ithe air tigh gun tughadh… Rain drops come heavy, on a house unthatched.

Tigh a tughadh gun a sh’iomaineachadh… Thatching a house without roping it. (Is to surely labour in vain!)

And of course there are plenty of informative images.

In 2008 I posted about Sarah Ruden’s then-new translation of the Aeneid; now there’s a fresh contender, by Shadi Bartsch [I messed up the names in the first version of this post — sorry!]. Stuart Lyons’ brief review at Classics for All convinces me that if I actually buy another version, it will be Ruden’s:

B.’s new translation has been praised by an American professor as ‘probably the best version of the Aeneid in modern English’. Pacy and often colloquial, with occasional italics for emphasis, much of it reads like prose. A passage in 11.85-88 illustrates the differing treatments […] B., eschewing initial upper-case letters, translates:

‘Wretched Acoetes, weak with age, was led
along. He beat his chest with fists and clawed his face,
falling prostrate on the ground. Next came chariots
spattered with Rutulian blood [and Pallas’ warhorse … ]’

The enjambment of ‘led / along’ is jarring. It distorts Virgil’s architecture and leads to the unidiomatic two-syllable expression ‘with fists’. Nor does B.’s ‘falling prostrate on the ground’ do justice to sternitur et toto proiectus corpore terrae. B. reduces Virgil’s four lines to three and a half before her text merges mid-line into a new period.

Enjambment and compression pervade B’s translation. […] Such preferences give this result as Dido’s story reaches its climax (4.296-300):

at regina dolos (quis fallere possit amantem?)
praesensit, motusque excepit prima futuros
omnia tuta timens. eadem impia Fama furenti
detulit armari classem cursumque parari.

‘But Dido sensed the trick (who can deceive
a lover?) and the launch they planned. Now everything
seemed suspect, even if it wasn’t. That same impious
Rumor told the desperate queen the fleet prepared
to sail.’

Here, motusque excepit prima futuros surely means ‘she was the first to get wind of his future movements’; armari is omitted, as is the English ‘that’, which elegance demands be inserted after ‘queen’.

Generally, B.’s translation is accurate, but there are lapses, e.g. quattuor a stabulis praestanti corpore tauros (8.207) become ‘seven perfect bulls’.

Frankly, I was already recoiling at “much of it reads like prose,” but the details (more at the link, of course) put the nail in the coffin. Translating is hard, and newer is not always better.

Back in 2009 I posted a translation of a Bunin short story, Книга [Book], because I loved it and there were no English versions online; now I’m doing the same for another Bunin story, Пингвины [Penguins]. I sometimes pick up my fat Bunin collection and flip through to find a story I haven’t read when I don’t feel like tackling a new novel yet; a couple of weeks ago my eye fell on the odd title Пингвины at the top of p. 1114 in the table of contents and I thought I’d give it a try. It was so unusual and gripping it wouldn’t let go of me, and I finally had to translate it (and wound up memorizing a good chunk of it in the process). It’s perhaps a slight spoiler to say it’s an account of a dream, but that quickly becomes apparent; the thing about dreams in fiction is that they’re usually either tediously Freudian or pointless echoes of something in the main narrative — if your hero is being beset by enemies, I don’t need to wade through a dream about a bear attacked by hounds, thank you very much. But this has nothing in common with such fictional dreams; it’s self-contained, and its purpose seems to be to give as vivid a picture as possible of what dreaming is actually like, at which it succeeds brilliantly. The sudden changes of locale and of mood, the uncertainty, the intrusions of the inexplicable: it’s all there. (Gurzuf and Bakhchisarai are towns in the Crimea; Pushkin wrote poems about both.) And the ending is very funny.

The Russian text is here, or if you prefer the old spelling (as it was published in his 1931 collection Божье древо [Southern wormwood]) here. Obviously I had to make a lot of difficult translation choices; I’ll just mention that I rendered карагач [karagach] etymologically as “black elm” (I don’t think there is such a term in English) because, as my wife pointed out, if I had “karagach” it would just be a meaningless lump in the English text, whereas the Russian reader at least knows it’s a tree. For general context on these short plotless stories, I’ll quote a perhaps relevant bit from the note on Книга [Book] here: “Бунин всю жизнь был убежден, что художник должен все им виденное и пережитое записывать” [Bunin all his life was convinced that an artist should write down everything seen and experienced by him]. And I’ll also quote something vitalir wrote on flibusta: “Люблю Бунина. Может быть Россия Бунина для меня и есть град Китеж, не знаю. […] Блядь, народ, как можно не прочитать Бунина?” [I love Bunin. Maybe Bunin’s Russia is the city of Kitezh for me, I don’t know. … Fuck, people, how can you not read Bunin?]
[Read more…]

Another great passage from Judith Flanders’ A Place For Everything via Joel at Far Outliers:

Arabic dictionaries also used nonalphabetical methods of organizing. The Mukhaṣṣaṣ, or The Categorized, by Ibn Sīda (d. 1066), was divided, as its title states, by subject or topic, beginning with human nature and continuing on to physiology, psychology, women, clothes, food, and weapons. Al-Khalīl Ibn Aḥmad (d. 791), in his Kitāb al-‘ain, The Book of [the Letter] ‘Ain, used sounds to organize his work: he listed entries in an order of his own, where each sound group was followed by subcategories based on how many consonants a word contained. …

These mainly nonalphabetical developments contrasted with the works of Hebrew scholars, who tended toward alphabetical order simultaneously with (and occasionally a little ahead of) their Christian contemporaries. At the end of the eleventh century, Nathan ben Jehiel (c. 1035–c. 1110) produced his Sefer ha’Arukh, The Set Book. Ben Jehiel, who had been born in Rome, spoke Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Persian, and Syriac, and he drew on his knowledge of these languages to produce an alphabetically ordered book of root words occurring in rabbinic literature. It became one of the best-known dictionaries of its type—more than fifty copies survive—as well as being one of the first Hebrew books to be printed, in Rome sometime before 1472.

Many of these works, both in Arabic and Hebrew, and the scholarship that had produced them, became accessible to scholars in Western Europe for the first time as these languages began to be more widely translated into Latin. … That so many of these works returned to the West via Arabic was significant, for earlier Arab scholars had frequently added substantially to the originals, including details of their own work, which was far in advance of much of Western thought at the time.

The Western rediscovery of the classics had two results, one somewhat abstract, one concrete. More generally, the awareness of how many great works had been entirely unknown before the lifetimes of these new readers, and of how many more had been permanently lost, produced a sense that the current generation needed to ensure that this recaptured knowledge, as well as all the works produced under its influence, were preserved for future generations. Further, it created a drive to ensure that the details contained in all these new works could be found easily—in other words, readers wanted not merely to read the books, but to refer to them: they wanted search tools.

These recently translated manuscripts also brought to the West other elements that are crucial for our story. Educated European readers now became increasingly familiar with foreign alphabets. In Italy and France in particular, Hebrew had routinely been transliterated into the roman alphabet when manuscripts were copied; in the rest of Europe, the Greek alphabet had sometimes been used, but less and less as time went on. In Europe, apart from Spain, where Arabic was in common use, Arabic too had been almost always transliterated into the roman alphabet. By contrast, some in the British Isles were familiar with Old English runes, known as futhorc, or with the Irish writing system known as Ogham. Many more would have recognized, and used in conjunction with the roman alphabet, the Old English runic letters such as thorn (Þ, þ) and wynn (Ρ, ρ). For these reasons, “foreign”-looking letters were more familiar and less unnerving in the British Isles, and so Latin and Hebrew letters were both used, as they were from the ninth century in Germany, a regular destination for highly educated monks from Ireland and Britain.

Victor Mair at the Log reports on an interesting Japanese compound verb that seems to be an adequate substitute for English profanity; he’s discussing this headline from “Japan’s hard-right, anti-China Sankei newspaper”:

「中国よ、消えうせやがれ」 フィリピン外相、“禁句”使って怒り爆発

“Chūgoku yo, kieuseyagare” Firipin gaishō “kinku” tsukatte ikari bakuhatsu

“Hey China, fuck off!” Philippines foreign minister uses taboo word in angry explosion

Mair writes:

The first three characters are the rough equivalent of “Hey China!” (“Chūgoku yo”). So far so good. It gets even better, though, because the delightfully nuanced verbal phrase “get the fuck out” gets translated as a compound of three verbs: “kie-use-yagare.”

[Read more…]

A reader sent me a link to this post by André Barbosa from Portuguese Language Blog:

“Pois não” is an expression used by Brazilians as well as by the Portuguese and means “yes”, “of course”, “sure.” It’s curious, however, that this expression contains the adverb “não” (not) and means just the opposite.

“Pois não” comes from another expression: “Pois não haveria de (+ infinitive verb)”. Here’s an example on how to use it:

– João, você pode me emprestar o seu carro? (João, could you lend me your car?)

– Empresto Maria, pois não haveria de emprestar? (Yes Maria, for sure.)

“Pois não haveria de emprestar” (Wouldn’t I lend it? – literal meaning) means that João will lend his car to Pedro for sure. It’s like João assumed the obligation to do that and disapproved not doing it.

It is common in Brazil for salespeople to greet shoppers by saying “pois não?”

A curious expression; compare “yeah no.”

I have occasionally run across the weird and wonderful word zhuzh /ʒʊʒ/; it turns out the OED has entries for both noun (“Style, glamour; a stylish or glamorous appearance or effect”) and verb (“To smarten up (someone or something); to make (something) more stylish, attractive, or exciting”), both updated just last December. The latter has the full etymology, which is intriguing:

Etymology: Of uncertain origin. Perhaps ultimately an expressive formation (compare e.g. whoosh v., swish adj., and use in similar senses and constructions of e.g. zing v. and zap v.).

Compare from a similar date the related zhuzh n., zhuzhy adj., although the relative priority of the three words is unclear.

The etymology of this word, and of the related noun and adjective, is uncertain and disputed; a number of suggestions have been made, but none of them is entirely unproblematic or confirmed beyond doubt by the available evidence.

Derivation from a Romani verb in the sense ‘to clean’ or a corresponding adjective has been proposed (compare e.g. Hungarian Romani shuzo, British Romani yuzho clean, pure), but this presents both phonological and semantic difficulties, and supporting evidence appears to be lacking.

Dict. South African Eng. connects the present word and the corresponding noun and adjective with South African English slang terms for ‘excellent, smart, attractive’ derived from regional pronunciations of Jewish adj., which appear to have been motivated by the high reputation of Jewish tailors and tailoring (perhaps compare quot. 1968 at zhuzh n., apparently in the sense ‘clothing’). However, this is difficult to reconcile with the earliest documentation for zhuzh v. and related words, which suggests a British context, and no evidence has been found for a corresponding sense or pronunciation of Jewish adj. outside South Africa.

That early noun citation is:

1968 B. Took et al. in B. Took & M. Coward Best of ‘Round the Horne’ (2000) 4th Ser. Episode 4. 192/1 Julian. Let’s have a vada at his zhush. Mr. Horne. Clothing. That’s translator’s note.

The first verb cite is slightly later:

1970 P. Burton Lang. of their own: Polari, West End Homosexual Slang (typescript) (O.E.D. Archive) p. ii A zhooshy quean is a grand quean, to zhoosh up is to get ready.

As for the possible Romani derivation, my Цыганско-русский и русско-цыганский словарь (кэлдэрарский диалект) has vužó for ‘clean,’ which just goes to complicate things. And I posted on Polari way back in 2003.

Last year I posted about Judith Flanders’ A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order; now Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts, and I thought this one was piquant enough to repost here:

In Europe, … where alphabetical order was used, in many cases it was considered not as a tool of reference but as one of recall, a way of imprinting a series of items onto the memory in a culture that continued to rely heavily on oral transmission. It may be for this reason that the second-century Sentences of Sextus, 123 maxims on how to live a philosophically good life, were arranged in alphabetical order. Or it may not have been: once again, all we have are later copies, which might well have been reordered. (And, in addition, the named author, Sextus the Pythagorean, is unlikely to be the actual author of the work.) We know this type of reordering was routine. Fables by an author named Babrius, some of which are today collected under a generic authorship as Aesop’s Fables, survive in copies that were organized by the first letter of the opening word of each fable. Yet an Oxyrhynchus fragment of the same fables, dating from the second century, shows that at least one earlier version was not in this order. The purpose of the reordering may well have been to help listeners remember the stories so that they, in turn, could retell them. For memory was a recurring component of alphabetization: the Greek grammarian Athenaeus listed eighty-one species of fish in first-letter alphabetical order, “in order that what is said may be easier for you to remember.”

(I have complained about fish names more than once, e.g. here.)