languagehat.com

I recommended an Ann Patchett story last year, and since then my wife and I have read her novel Commonwealth, which I wholeheartedly recommend, and we’re now on her earlier State of Wonder, which we’re enjoying but are still somewhat perplexed by. It’s about Dr. Marina Singh, who ventures into a remote part of the Amazon jungle to find out what happened to her colleague and friend while visiting a tribe called the Lakashi. I thought this passage was worth posting here:

The Lakashi women were singing now. […] “Do you know what they’re saying?” Marina asked.

Nancy shook her head. “I catch a word every now and then, or I think I do. We had a linguist with us for a while. He had been a student of Noam Chomsky’s. He said the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting, that all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected and then split apart. It made me wish we had a language that was a little bit more obscure so we might have kept him. He made us some charts with phonetics so we can put together some basic phrases.”

I can’t for the life of me tell whether Patchett has any knowledge of the subject. On the one hand, “the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting” and the “single grammatical base” could be a sly dig at Chomskyan indifference to linguistic variation and the claim that all grammars are basically the same, but “in this region of the Amazon” and “variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected” ruin the effect and suggest an interest in local differences and history that isn’t exactly a hallmark of MIT linguistics, although of course a student of Chomsky’s could perfectly well have such an interest. On the whole, I’m guessing Patchett just used Chomsky because he’s the most famous linguist around, but it was a startling thing to encounter in a novel.

Kiki Siregar writes for Channel NewsAsia about a guy who loves languages and writing systems:

Diaz Nawaksara grew up during the rise of the Internet and telecommunications. When the 30-year-old went to college, he decided to study information management, focusing on storing information through computational methods. But as modern as his educational qualification sounds, his job nowadays involves something very ancient: Preserving Indonesian scripts that are as old as 500 years. “I started in 2012 by studying the Javanese script first,” Nawaksara recounted, referring to the native language of those from Indonesia’s and the world’s most populated island of Java.

Today, he can read and write over 30 ancient Indonesian scripts. He understands fluently about half of the languages associated with these scripts. […] Once an English tutor and a tour guide, Nawaksara is now a freelance researcher who works to preserve ancient Indonesian scripts as well as history. […]

His attempt to read and write Javanese script came by chance. […] Upon completing his studies, he moved to Yogyakarta in central Java to work as a tour guide and English tutor in the city often dubbed as the cultural capital of Indonesia. One day, he went to a local flea market and discovered an ancient Javanese manuscript. He was intrigued by it and decided to purchase it even though he could not read Javanese script. It turned out to be an ancient legislation manuscript of Yogyakarta’s sultanate during the Dutch colonial times. The manuscript was known as rijksblad. Coincidentally, his girlfriend was Javanese and could read the manuscript. She taught him how to read it. […]

It marked the start of his quest to find other manuscripts and learn different old Indonesian scripts. “Since then, I started collecting more Javanese ancient books. A year later, I stumbled upon an older script named Kawi script,” he told CNA. Kawi is considered the ancestor of Javanese script and is thought to be related to Indian scripts which evolved sometime during the 8th to 16th century. In order to enhance his understanding, Nawaksara visited temples and museums that exhibited the script.

Nawaksara has since travelled all over Indonesia to find ancient manuscripts and study the scripts. He said this led him to a better comprehension of history. There are over 600 ethnicities in Indonesia and knowing some ancient scripts leads to a better understanding of how the various ethnicities in the country are related and even stretching to neighbouring countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, he said. […] Nawaksara now wants to digitalise the scripts he knows so they will not get lost in time.

Good for him! (Via the Log; at the end, there’s a link to the story in Bahasa Indonesia.)

By the way, if you like exploring the world vicariously, Radio Garden lets you “Explore live radio by rotating the globe.” I’ve currently got it set to Radio Nataan in Dapaong, Togo; I don’t know what language they broadcast in, but the music is great.

As an editor by profession, I can’t help noticing typos, and of course the local paper is full of them (like all local newspapers, it’s barely hanging on, so I can’t really blame them for not keeping a proofreading staff, but it’s irritating nonetheless). Today, though, there was one that should hang in a museum. In a story about how just a year ago the UMass basketball team had its season called off just as they were looking around the Barclays Center to prepare for their game, the following sentence occurs:

They watched Fordham and George Washington tangle in an opening round game in a largely empty arena, a site that would become commonplace over the next year.

The typo “site” for “sight” is extremely common, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it directly following a phrase denoting an actual site (“a largely empty arena”). It would be an excellent test of reading ability, either for human or AI.

I can’t believe I’ve never linked to mapologies before, since they specialize in maps showing the words for things in different languages (the latest is “The names of Donald Duck’s nephews”), but better late than never; what drove me to post was Hand and arm in several languages (“An etymology map with a handful of words”), which shows words for HAND in bold black type and words for ARM beneath them in gray, with language families divided by color. In the box on the upper right explaining the colors, they give proto-forms for each, e.g. “Proto-Nakh *ko.” Very cool. And the only comment so far is “In dagestan in avar language Kwer and Rougk,” which is downright helpful.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has been posting Big List updates pretty much daily (and he’s started a Patreon, if you want to support his good work), and the latest two are so interesting I thought I’d share them here.

jinx:

A jinx is a person or thing that carries bad luck with it. The origin of the Americanism is not quite certain, but it most likely comes from the name of a character in a very popular play at the turn of the twentieth century. The major dictionaries, however, all give tentative etymologies relating to the bird known as the wryneck or jynx because of its use in magic and casting spells. But the avian etymology has significant problems, and there is a clear trail of lexical evidence leading from the play to the word jinx that has been uncovered by researcher Douglas Wilson.

The play is Little Puck, produced by and starring comic actor Frank Daniels and written by Archibald C. Gunter. It debuted in New York in 1888 and, although today it is all but forgotten, it was tremendously successful, with touring companies and revivals throughout the United States of the next two decades. Among the cast of characters was this role, originally played by actor Harry Mack:

Jinks Hoodoo, esq. a curse to everybody…..Harry Mack

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jinks was commonly used as the name of comical characters in theater and in jokes.

Jinks Hoodoo quickly caught on as a nickname for someone who brought bad luck. […]

jody:
[Read more…]

Tom Almeroth-Williams writes for University of Cambridge Stories about “a treasure trove of women’s intellectual history”:

The astonishing collection comprises 47 books and pamphlets owned and annotated by the philosopher Mary Astell (1666–1731), viewed by many as “the first English feminist”. Astell’s hand-written notes reveal, for the first time, that she engaged with complex natural philosophy including the ideas of René Descartes. […]

In the early eighteenth century, only a minority of British women could read in English, let alone in French. But even more unusual is the extent of Astell’s scientific understanding which this precious collection makes clear. Catherine Sutherland, Deputy Librarian at Magdalene, who made the discovery says: “Women’s book collections from this period are so rare but it’s even more amazing to find one being used to advance a woman’s career as a writer. Magdalene’s collection represents the nucleus of Astell’s library, including the books that influenced her most.” […]

[Read more…]

Barry McGuire writes for the Guardian:

As Noongar kids in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of Kellerberrin, we grew up with blue-eyed comic book superheroes and black-and-white TV shows about cowboys and Indians. […] Then Bruce Lee came along. He was a hero different to all the other heroes. I first saw Bruce Lee, brave, powerful and lightning-fast, when his 1971 debut film The Big Boss came to the Kellerberrin drive-in. […]

A few short decades later, I’m proud to be part of a project in which Bruce Lee fights for justice and speaks to us in our own language here on Noongar Boodjar in south-western Australia. Lee’s 1972 movie Fist of Fury is being redubbed for a new audience as Fist of Fury Noongar Daa, an all-Noongar version to be screened at the 2021 Perth festival. It’s set in 1910 and I speak Noongar instead of Cantonese as a friend of Bruce Lee’s character Chen Zhen who fights to avenge the death of his master and for China’s honour against foreign colonial aggressors. […]

The Perth festival artistic associate, Kylie Bracknell, adapted and directed Hecate, the all-Noongar Macbeth at the 2020 festival as part of the 10-year Noongar Shakespeare Project to promote Noongar language to the world. […] With Fist of Fury Noongar Daa, many of the Noongar artists from Hecate have turned from The Bard to The Bruce for the 2021 Perth festival.

Fist of Fury Noongar Daa was inspired by Navajo Star Wars, a 2013 Navajo-dub of the original Star Wars film. Working with huge cultural figures like Bruce Lee and Shakespeare as well as Star Wars is an effective way to make people sit up and pay attention to what you’re doing. This is a language reclamation project nestled inside an Australian-first dub in a language spoken by only 2% of the entire Noongar population. […] Through Fist of Fury Noongar Daa, our language is now living in a different area of life but it is the same vibration. When I saw the first footage in our language, I giggled so much. It took me back to sitting at the Kellerberrin drive-in, but thinking, “Hey, this time this is my language and I understand it.”

I love projects like this. Thanks, Bathrobe!

From Online Etymology Dictionary’s FB post:

The ides of March approach. What’s the past tense of “beware?”

Century Dictionary explains, “Like be gone, now begone, be ware came to be written as one word, beware, and then was classed by some authors with the numerous verbs in be-, and inflected accordingly; hence the erroneous forms bewares in Ben Jonson, and bewared in Dryden.”

But calling any usage “erroneous” consigns you to history’s dustbin. Better if Caesar had waswared the people who had told him he should have bewent.

Fave comment (from Helen Pollock): “Bejaysus! ????” (Of course there’s a commenter who has to spell out that “‘Beware’ is an imperative form. […] It wouldn’t have a past tense.” Thanks, Captain Obvious!)

Helena Smith reports for the Observer on yet another moral panic about foreign incursion on precious linguistic purity:

Usually, Professor Georgios Babiniotis would take pride in the fact that the Greek word “pandemic” – previously hardly ever uttered – had become the word on everyone’s lips. After all, the term that conjures the scourge of our times offers cast-iron proof of the legacy of Europe’s oldest language. Wholly Greek in derivation – pan means all, demos means people – its usage shot up by more than 57,000% last year according to Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers.

But these days, Greece’s foremost linguist is less mindful of how the language has enriched global vocabulary, and more concerned about the corrosive effects of coronavirus closer to home. The sheer scale of the pandemic and the terminology spawned by its pervasiveness have produced fertile ground for verbal incursions on his mother tongue that Babiniotis thought he would never see. “We have been deluged by new terms and definitions in a very short space of time,” he told the Observer. “Far too many of them are entering spoken and written Greek. On the television you hear phrases such as ‘rapid tests are being conducted via drive-through’, and almost all the words are English. It’s as if suddenly I’m hearing Creole.”

With nine dictionaries to his name, the octogenarian is the first to say that language evolves. The advent of the internet also posed challenges, he concedes, but he has never opposed adding new words that translated and conveyed technological advances. “I included them in the Lexicon,” he says of his magisterial 2,500-page dictionary of modern Greek language. “But where possible, I also insisted that if they could be replaced by Greek words they should. I came up with the word diadiktyo for the internet and am glad to say it has stuck.” […] “For Greeks, language has always been a sensitive issue,” says Babiniotis. “I know what I say troubles some, but it is the duty of a linguist to speak out.” Babiniotis’s protestations have been fodder for cartoonists and the butt of debate. But he is not alone.

The emergence of “Greenglish” – Greek written with English letters – as an unofficial e-language since the arrival of the internet has also sparked alarm. Facebook groups have emerged, deploring the phenomenon. “A lot of youngsters use it to message one another because they think it’s easier,” says Susanna Tsouvala at the Polyglot Bookstore, which specialises in foreign language textbooks in central Athens. “Spelling’s easier and they don’t have to use the accents required in Greek, but ultimately it’s going to be our language’s loss.”

For many, book publishers have become the last line of defence. At Patakis, one of the country’s most established publishers, inclusion of foreign words in any work is carefully monitored. “Books are guardians of the language,” insists Elena Pataki, whose family-run firm publishes books for all ages. “We recently published a business book about family-owned enterprises and made a conscious choice to limit references to foreign terms.”

OK, in the first place, “Greece’s foremost linguist” is absurd. Not only should English journos not be in the business of anointing foreign scholars as “foremost,” Babiniotis isn’t a linguist at all — he’s a philologist, lexicographer, and former Minister of Education and Religious Affairs (God save the mark). Actual linguists don’t go around pontificating about the horror of loanwords. (Artemis Alexiadou is an example of an actual Greek linguist; she doesn’t practice my kind of linguistics, but she’s definitely in the field.) In the second place, book publishers carefully monitoring inclusion of foreign words is ridiculous: you’re going to wind up producing books in a language no one speaks, just like in the bad old days of katharevousa. And in the third place, there’s nothing wrong with loanwords, amigo. They’re just words. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Ben Brumfield writes at From the Page about a problem dear to this editor’s heart:

When we transcribe handwritten text, we make mistakes. We misread words with difficult letters; we accidentally modernize a word with archaic spelling; we skip a line. Everyone does it, and even though we humans don’t make as many mistakes as computers do reading handwriting, that might be small comfort for people who are trying to do their best at a difficult task. Is it possible to classify the kinds of mistakes we make when we transcribe?

[…] 21st century crowdsourcing volunteers are not the first people to copy text from a handwritten exemplar to a new medium; typists, printers, clerks, and scribes have been doing nearly the same thing for thousands of years. Editors and other textual scholars in classics, biblical studies, and medieval studies have had to work with differences between copies of the same text, determining which variant might be an error and which might be original (or conjecturing an original if both variants look wrong). Over centuries, they’ve created an extensive literature analyzing scribal errors, classifying them and identifying probable causes. Could we learn from them?

Martin Worthington is an Assyriologist who has asked the same question. In Principles of Akkadian Textual Criticism, he introduces the conclusions of textual scholars from other disciplines to his own field, describing each type of scribal error and looking for examples from Mesopotamian documents. For the most part, he finds that the classifications apply accurately, even though scribes wrote clay tablets instead of parchment or paper. Scribes were most likely to make these errors when working with unfamiliar kinds of texts or when they were sleepy, but errors also occurred when the original was damaged or the style of handwriting was unfamiliar.

Computers are not cuneiform, but I think that we all might be subject to the same kinds of forces, so let’s dive into Worthington’s framework.

Worthington’s classification includes Errors of letter similarity (subdivided into Mis-readings and True typos), Errors of word interpretation, Interference by internal narration (“When we read someone else’s writing, we carry their words in our head on the way to the keyboard. It’s easy for our internal narration of the text to change it to the wording, spelling, or punctuation we’d use instead of that used in the original”), Eye-skip (saut du même au même), Word-skipping (lipography), Haplography (when something is doubled in the original, but we only transcribe it once), Dittography (when we repeat a word or phrase that only occurs a single time in the original), Polar errors (when the original says “hot”, but a copyist writes “cold”, or replaces “big” with “small”), Errors of attraction, Synonym Substitution, Dialect Normalization, Cut-and-Paste Errors (when a transcriber saves effort by copying repeated text that actually varies in tense or spelling), and Hypercorrection (when our transcriptions “correct” errors we perceive in the original which were not actually errors). Ben says “My own experience as a transcriber convinces me that Worthington’s classification scheme is applicable to modern users of web-based transcription software as much as to Mesopotamian scribes working with clay tablets,” and I’d have to agree. Thanks, Leslie!

Also, RusTRANS is “actively seeking essays for a new, Open Access volume which is aimed at stimulating and consolidating scholarship about the global imprint of Russian literature in translation”:

Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context (2023) is intended to constitute the first geographically coherent, culturally inclusive, and theoretically consistent model of the distribution and influence of translated Russian literature on global cultures from 1900 to the present day. Given that many leading studies in this field have privileged Russian cultural transmission in Britain and/or Russian influence on British writers[…], the editors particularly invite new scholarship on the transmission of Russian culture and on intertextualities between specific Russian writers and non-Anglophone literatures.

I found out via Muireann Maguire’s FaceBook post; see here for more details. If you know someone who might be interested, pass it on; that’s definitely a book I’d like to read.