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Via bulbul’s Facebook feed, Ulrike Mosel’s Grammaticography: The art and craft of writing grammars (pdf) [from the book Catching Language: The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing]. It’s an interesting overview of the topic; I’ll quote some salient bits:

Probably every grammarian has had the experience that collecting and analyzing language data and writing a grammar are two different things: you think your analysis is perfect, you know how the language works, you might even speak it fluently, but when it comes to writing up the grammar you are faced with unforeseen problems. How are you ever going to get all you know about the language into a single book? […]

Although collecting data, grammatical analysis, and writing up the chapters of a grammar are different tasks, they cannot be entirely separated, because once you start writing, you will discover gaps or inconsistencies so that you need to collect and analyze additional data. I often questioned my capacity as a fieldworker when I realized that my data were not sufficient. But now I think that the reason also lies in the very nature of writing, because – at least to some extent – the process of writing shapes and reshapes your thoughts which inevitably leads to changes in your analysis. […]

The low prestige of text editions (if they were more highly valued, linguists would no doubt publish more) can be attributed to several factors:
1. the politics of mainstream linguistics departments, some of which do not even recognize descriptive grammars as Ph.D. theses;
2. the fact that linguistic typology concentrates on the investigation of grammatical phenomena which manifest themselves in single sentences;
3. the fact that many typologists work with large samples of languages which does not allow the time consuming in-depth study of texts.

For scientific reasons, however, this relegation of texts to marginal appendices is not justifiable. […]

In a world where specialists – and linguists are no exception – know more and more about less and less, it becomes increasingly important to develop methodologies of making specialized knowledge accessible to non-specialists. Only the identification, analysis and description of the essentials of the structure of languages will enable us to connect specialized knowledge of various linguistic areas and advance our understanding of language. For this very reason the old tradition of grammar writing is gaining more importance than ever.

Makes sense to me.

Another goodie from last year I’m just getting around to: Corinne Purtill analyzes The difference between a snafu, a shitshow, and a clusterfuck.

Let’s say the situation at work is not good. The project (or product, or re-org, or whatever) has launched, and the best you can say is that things aren’t going as planned. At all. It’s a disaster, though the best word for it is the one you drop over drinks with your team and when venting at home: it’s a clusterfuck. […] To appreciate what a clusterfuck is—and to understand how to avoid one—it is first helpful to clarify some of the things a clusterfuck is not:

A fuck-up. “A fuck-up is just something all of us do every day,” Sutton says. “I broke the egg I made for breakfast this morning. That was kind of a fuck-up.” Whereas clusterfucks are perfectly preventable, fuck-ups are an unavoidable feature of the human condition.

A SNAFU. While sometimes used as a synonym for minor malfunctions and hiccups, this slang military acronym—“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”—actually refers to the functionally messy state that describes many otherwise healthy companies (and many of our personal lives). A SNAFU work environment is usually manageable; one that is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair, another military legacy) probably isn’t. “When my students with little experience go to work at a famous company and it isn’t quite as they dreamed, I do ask them if it is FUBAR or SNAFU, and tell them SNAFU will describe most places they work,” Sutton said.

A shitshow. No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary describes a shitshow as a “situation or state of affairs characterized by chaos, confusion, or incompetence.” A clusterfuck may come to possess all those characteristics, but is more properly identified by the decisions that produced it than its outcome.

You’ll have to visit the link to discover the “three key factors that resulted in the kind of expensive, embarrassing, late-stage collapse that is the hallmark of a clusterfuck.” But it’s a good thing there’s an “allegedly” in “The ‘cluster’ part of the word allegedly refers to officers’ oak leaf cluster insignia”; it does no such thing. OED:
[Read more…]

Last year Karen Schousboe had a very lively review at Medieval Histories of what sounds like a controversial book, Beowulfkvädet. Den nordiska bakgrunden [The lay of Beowulf: The Nordic background], by Bo Gräslund. It begins:

In the 1980s a scandal broke out in Toronto. No longer a venerated poem of the Dark Ages, Beowulf was dated to the turn of the millennium and characterised as a very late Anglo-Saxon pastiche. Although metrical, linguistic, and palaeographic evidence was brought forward to staunch the postmodern erudition flowing from the medievalists – who had drunk from the poisoned chalice of Derrida, Baudelaire, and Kristeva – the standard bearers from Toronto nevertheless succeeded in banning the use of the text by historians and archaeologists. Under pain of shunning, students might no longer “use” the beautiful verses to illuminate the murky mead-hall.

Later, hard-core linguists were luckily able to turn the tide and reclaim the poem from this literary evisceration. Nevertheless, challenges have continued to mar the understanding of the epos and the cultural crucible, in which it was forged. Finally, this summer, a magisterial and erudite analysis by the archaeologist, Bo Gräslund, was published in Sweden outlining the material world and a probable background for the text.

Let it be said initially. Bo Gräslund is the grand old man of Swedish Archaeology. He has worked at the National Museum in Stockholm as well as taught as a professor at the University in Uppsala. Apart from this, he has served as head of the Royal Academy of History and Antiquity, the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Uppsala and several other august academies. To this should be added a very long list of publications. In his later years he has been occupied with outlining the events in the 6th century leading up to and following the climatic crisis AD 536 – 550. It is as part of this project, the study of Beowulf has been undertaken. Thus, Gräslund is not a perky young fellow with a fixed idea running wild on the fringes of the academic scene. He arrives at the scene with a solid ballast.

Further, the book is softly written, courteously and mildly. Yet, it delivers a decisive blow to the last 200 years debate and adds some well-argued propositions and hypotheses as to the what, where, when, and how of the Beowulf.

While I greatly enjoy that kind of take-no-prisoners review, I have to admit I trust it less than I would a boring, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other analysis; does anybody know enough about this to provide another perspective? At any rate, here’s a bit of linguistic argument:

In the second part of the book, Gräslund discusses the ethnonyms in the poem and argues that the main group, to which Beowulf belongs – the Geats – in all likelihood came from Gotland. Seafaring islanders, known also as wederas, the latter epithet has been consistently translated as wind, weather, or storm. However, much more likely, writes Gräslund convincingly, the prefix in weder-geatas refers to Proto-Germanic wedrą, meaning ram – Old English weder, Old High German wetar, Old Norse veðr etc. It so happens, that rams were significant symbols of the people from Gotland, as witnessed in documents, sagas, and in the official seal.

Gräslund concludes that “the poem was composed in a volatile and dangerous situation in the mid-sixth century.” (Incidentally, we discussed its first word back in 2013.) Thanks, Trevor!

I don’t usually link to either Twitter or single visual jokes, but I couldn’t resist this (sent me by Michael Hendry), tweeted by Amro Ali (@amroali) and labeled “The ‘happy’ Arabic language family and that one rebellious son (via Moroccan nat. memes, fb)”. Do your homework and straighten up, Darija!

Yury Bit-Yunan and Robert Chandler have a long and convincing LARB article refuting the idea that the great Vasily Grossman, author of Life and Fate (which I reviewed here), was a dissident persecuted by Stalin. It’s detailed and hard to summarize; here are a few paragraphs to give the idea:

Once again, however, we find the writers of memoirs invoking Stalin’s personal hostility toward Grossman. In 1966, Ilya Ehrenburg published the third volume of his influential memoir People, Years, Life. In it he wrote, “The star under which Grossman was born was a star of misfortune. […] I was told that it was Stalin himself who deleted his story The People Immortal from the list of books nominated for the prize.” And he goes on to say that Stalin must have hated Grossman for “his love of Lenin, for his genuine internationalism.”

And in 1980, in a memoir published in Paris, Natalya Roskina, a younger friend of Grossman, both disagreed with Ehrenburg and repeated his central assertion. “It was certainly not love for Lenin,” she writes, “that was the reason for Grossman being constantly in disgrace. It was exclusively the fact that Grossman never sought Stalin’s love.” She continues, “It was Stalin who deleted the novel from the list of laureates.”

Roskina does not say who told her this; it is likely, though, that she has borrowed from Ehrenburg, just as Taratuta borrowed from Lipkin. And this helps us to see that it is Ehrenburg’s memoir that lies at the origin of this myth of Stalin’s personal animosity toward Grossman. Ehrenburg was the first memoirist to claim that Stalin hated Grossman — and he almost certainly did this with the best of motives. By asserting that Grossman loved Lenin and was hated by Stalin, he could have been hoping to pave the way for an eventual Soviet publication of Life and Fate — if only in a bowdlerized version; Ehrenburg was politically shrewd and he rarely acted without some ulterior motive. And in 1986, 20 years after Ehrenburg, Lipkin resuscitated the idea of Stalin’s personal hostility toward Grossman — though in connection with Kolchugin rather than The People Immortal. He too was doing what he could to further Grossman’s reputation. Ehrenburg, however, was trying to salvage Grossman’s standing in the Soviet Union, while Lipkin was trying to promote his reputation abroad. And so, whereas Ehrenburg writes about Grossman’s love of Lenin, Lipkin makes out that Kolchugin was seen as a “Menshevik,” i.e., dissident and anti-Stalinist, novel.

Incidentally, in the course of reading the essay and looking things up, I learned that Glück Auf, the title of Grossman’s first novel, is (Wikipedia)

the traditional German miners’ greeting. It describes the hope of the miners: “es mögen sich Erzgänge auftun” (“may lodes [of ore] be opened”) which is short for “Ich wünsche Dir Glück, tu einen neuen Gang auf” (“I wish you luck; open a new lode!”).

I never would have guessed!

Samuel Tafresh writes for the Ajam Media Collective about a fascinating subject:

Reading Hamlet in Persian or seeing the play on the Iranian stage, one is struck by how little the characters resemble the 16th century Englishmen most audiences are familiar with. Hamlet and Ophelia might be called Siyavash and Mahtab, while Denmark might resemble Tehran. Over the last 129 years in Iran, Shakespeare and his characters have undergone a startling transformation in the process of translation and adaptation, one affected at each step by the movements of Iranian politics and the identities of the translators. […]

Shakespeare’s works have cultivated such a variety of interpretations partially because his works were not introduced in a single, authoritative form. When the plays reached Iran they were written in Arabic and French as well as English. If one wanted to read a Shakespeare play in 19th century Iran, Arabic or French was much more accessible than English. Prior to the existence of any Persian translation of Shakespeare, Azerbaijani and Armenian-language productions took place in Tabriz. Iranian tourists saw Shakespeare performed on Russian stages and wrote about productions in their travelogues and diaries. As a result of this multitude of influences, the English text didn’t possess an authority Iranian translators and directors were beholden to. Instead, Persian renditions of Shakespeare reflected translators’ relative freedom of interpretation and demonstrated the plays’ flexibility, allowing Hamlet to become Siyavash and many other unexpected transformations to occur.

The first Persian translations of Shakespeare took place as Western-style theatre was being introduced to Iran by Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar. Nasir al-Din Shah visited Europe on diplomatic trips in 1873, 1878, and 1889. […] In 1882, Nasir al-Din Shah established a theatre hall at Dar al-Fonun University and in 1885 ordered the creation of a translation bureau at the royal court in hopes of bringing to Iran the theatre he’d enjoyed in Europe. Nasir al-Din Shah considered adapting local theatre for the Western stage, but at the time many felt that traditional Iranian theatre couldn’t easily be adapted to this format. […]

Hosseinqoli Mirza Saloor, the eldest son of the ruler of Hamadan and eventual ruler himself, was the first to translate Shakespeare into Persian in 1900 in his translation of The Taming of the Shrew (Majliseh Tamashakhan: Be Tarbiat Avardaneh Dokhtareh Tondkhuy). As a Qajar educated in France, Saloor translated from French rather than the original English. Shakespeare would not be translated from English until 1914 when Mirza Abolqasem Khan Qaragozlu, or Nasir al-Mulk, began his translation of Othello. […] It was only in Nasir al-Mulk’s retirement, when Ahmad Shah Qajar came of age and was able to rule, that he turned to Shakespeare translation. While Nasir al-Mulk’s role in government was by far the greatest of the early Shakespeare translators [sic: something seems to have gone wrong here — LH], the group is defined by politicians and diplomats who witnessed or participated in the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution that overthrew the Qajar monarch.

There’s much more at the link, including some great photos (not to mention a video clip of the Titowak Theater Group performing Ibrahim Poshtkuhi’s Hey! Macbeth, Only the First Dog Knows Why It Is Barking!). Thanks, Trevor!

I saw a reference to a “dado” in a description of a painting and realized that, although I’d seen the word occasionally, I had no idea what it meant; fortunately the OED updated its entry in March 2016, so I can present an up-to-date report for those who are as vague about it as I. The senses:

1. Architecture. A flat-faced plain block forming the portion of a pedestal between the base and the cornice; the face of such a block; = die n.1 4a. Now somewhat rare.
1664 J. Evelyn Acct. Archit. in tr. R. Fréart Parallel Antient Archit. 124 [The Pedestal] is likewise call’d Truncus the Trunk..also Abacus, Dado, Zocco, &c.
[…]

2. Architecture and Interior Decorating. Originally: wooden panelling running along the lower part of the wall of a room, made to resemble a continuous pedestal, and typically reaching up to waist height; spec. the flat surface of the panelling between the skirting and the cornice. In later use more generally: the lower part of the wall of a room, typically reaching up to waist height, when decorated differently from the upper part. Cf. wainscot n. 2.
1741 B. Langley & T. Langley Builder’s Jewel iv. 21 To proportion the Tuscan Cornice to a Room of any Height. Divide the Height, from the Floor or Dado, in 5, and the upper 1 in 5.
[…]
1995 K. McCloud Techniques of Decorating (1998) 18/3 The high dado of wooden panelling and the parquet-effect wood floor combine to make a cradle of colour.

3. North American. Woodworking and Joinery.
a. A tool used for cutting a channel or slot across the grain in the face of a piece of wood, esp. to allow for the insertion of another piece of wood. Now rare.
1825 Providence (Rhode Island) Patriot 19 Oct. (advt.) Joiners’ and Carpenters’ Tools… Dados.
[…]

b. A channel or slot cut across the grain in the face of a piece of wood, into which the edge of another piece is fixed; = housing n.1 5.
1875 J. D. Edwards Carpenter’s Man. 90 The groove itself is also called a dado.
[…]
2012 Joinery Tips & Techniques i. 8/2 Rabbets, grooves and dados can be ‘through’ (run entirely across the board..), or stopped at either of both ends.

[Read more…]

Last year we discussed an overheated article about the imminent death of the Icelandic language; now Caitlin Hu has a Quartz piece (with linked video) on the same topic:

For centuries, the Icelandic language has held off influences from foreign lingua franca [sic; should be “lingua francas,” no italics — LH] like Danish and English. But today, there is a new threat: technologies that can only be operated in foreign languages, even at home. Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, for example, does not understand Icelandic (although Google Translate does, thanks to an Icelandic engineer who worked at the California-based company, according to legend). […]

The tiny country has a three-prong plan to save its language. By law, Icelandic must be taught in schools, and new citizens must pass a fluency test. The country’s Language Planning Department creates Icelandic words for new and foreign terms, with the aim of rendering borrowed words unnecessary. And the state plans to spend the equivalent of $20 million (link in Icelandic) over the next five years to support public and private initiatives to build Icelandic-language technologies.

The threat is real, and two of the three steps make sense, but the second one is stupid: borrowed words do not threaten the existence of a language. Obvious case in point: English, which is so full of loans you have to work to compose a sentence that’s free of them. If anything, trying to force people not to use the words that come naturally to them will decrease the likelihood the language will survive. Why is this crackpot idea so irresistible to politicians and other ignoramuses? Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, the linked video is interesting and only five minutes long; thanks, Bathrobe!

One of the people quoted in the video is Ross Perlin, a linguist who is Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance and who has featured at LH more than once (e.g., 2014, 2016); the Alliance has published a map of 637 languages of New York City. It’s got some odd entries (nobody speaks Old Church Slavonic or Koine Greek, even in NYC), but it’s fun to explore (use the + button). (Via MetaFilter.)

I’m reading the Strugatskys’ За миллиард лет до конца света [Definitely Maybe]; I’m enjoying it greatly, and one of the things I’m enjoying is being exposed to unexpected items of linguistic interest. It starts with our hero, Malyanov, sitting around his messy apartment trying to put off feeding his cat Kalyam; the doorbell rings and a guy delivers a package, which turns out to be an expensive collection of wine and food sent by his absent wife. Then a woman shows up with a letter of introduction from his wife, and they open a bottle of riesling and start talking, more and more animatedly. When the riesling runs out they open a bottle of “каберне” [kaberne], presumably cabernet sauvignon; when a neighbor shows up at the door, Malyanov (by now thoroughly drunk) invites him in and opens бутылку „Бычьей крови“ — a bottle of “Bull’s blood.” This rang a faint bell, but I had to look it up to learn that Эгерская бычья кровь is the wine known to English-speakers by its Hungarian name, Egri Bikavér, “Bull’s Blood of Eger.” Hung. bika ‘bull’ looks like it must be related to Russian бык [byk] ‘bull,’ but apparently not — the Hungarian word is from a Chuvash-type Turkic language and ultimately from Proto-Turkic *buka, while бык is from Proto-Slavic *bykъ, “likely of onomatopoeic origin.”

Furthermore, when the neighbor (a friend) shows up, Malyanov thinks “Огромный мужик, как гора. Седовласый Шат.” [A huge guy, like a mountain. Gray-haired Shat.] “Седовласый Шат” is a quote from the Lermontov poem Спор [The argument], in which Mount Kazbek and “Mount Shat” disagree about whether the East is a source of danger, and Lermontov says in a footnote that the latter is another name for Mount Elbrus. Since it’s in the Caucasus, that mountain has a variety of names; the English Wikipedia article has only Karachay-Balkar Минги тау, Miñi taw or Mın̨i taw [mɪˈŋːi taw]; Kabardian Ӏуащхьэмахуэ, ’Wāśhamāxwa or Ꜧuas̨hemaxue [ʔʷaːɕħamaːxʷa]; Adyghe Ӏуащхьэмафэ, ’Wāśhamāfa or Ꜧuas̨hemafe [ʔʷaːɕħamaːfa]; and Hakuchi Къӏуащхьэмафэ, Qʼuas̨hemafe [qʷʼaːɕħamaːfa], but the Russian one adds Turkic Джин-Падишах [Dzhin-Padishah ‘Ruler of Djinns], Abkhaz Орфи-туб [Orfi-tub ‘Mountain of the Blessed], Georgian იალბუზი [Ialbuzi ‘Mane of Snow’]… and Shat, possibly from Karachay-Balkar chat ‘gully.’ Just a sample of the onomastic complexity of the Caucasus!

Or so Viorica Marian says in this Scientific American piece:

Psycholinguistics is a field at the intersection of psychology and linguistics, and one if its recent discoveries is that the languages we speak influence our eye movements. For example, English speakers who hear candle often look at a candy because the two words share their first syllable. Research with speakers of different languages revealed that bilingual speakers not only look at words that share sounds in one language but also at words that share sounds across their two languages. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word marker, they also look at a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp is marka.

Even more stunning, speakers of different languages differ in their patterns of eye movements when no language is used at all. In a simple visual search task in which people had to find a previously seen object among other objects, their eyes moved differently depending on what languages they knew. For example, when looking for a clock, English speakers also looked at a cloud. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, when looking for the same clock, looked at a present, because the Spanish names for clock and present—reloj and regalo—overlap at their onset.

The story doesn’t end there. Not only do the words we hear activate other, similar-sounding words—and not only do we look at objects whose names share sounds or letters even when no language is heard—but the translations of those names in other languages become activated as well in speakers of more than one language. For example, when Spanish-English bilinguals hear the word duck in English, they also look at a shovel, because the translations of duck and shovel—pato and pala, respectively—overlap in Spanish.

She goes on to describe similar findings for American Sign Language and finishes with suggested implications (“Not only is the language system thoroughly interactive with a high degree of co-activation across words and concepts, but it also impacts our processing in other domains such as vision, attention and cognitive control”). It’s all very cute, but I find it hard to believe; I can easily conceive that researchers get the results they’re looking for in such experiments. On the other hand, I am a known curmudgeon, and far too lazy to actually click through to the studies and evaluate them for myself, so I’m putting it out there for others to chew over. (Thanks, Trevor!)