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Brian Boyd posts on the Vladimir Nabokov Forum about the death of the great Nabokov scholar Gennady Barabtarlo:

Nabokov scholar Gennady Alexandrovich (“Gene”) Barabtarlo died on February 24, aged 70.

Even before the publication of his book Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin (Ardis, 1989)—still the go-to source for what for many is their favorite Nabokov novel, Nabokovians knew him as early as 1982 for his contributions to The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter (before it became The Nabokovian). He contributed to The Nabokovian in many ways, through notes, through the indexes he volunteered to prepare for the first 30 and then the first 50 issues, and as editor of the Annotations and Queries section from 1994 to 2001. […]

[Read more…]

Michael Erard, the journalist with a linguistics background who has often been linked to here at LH, has a typically knowledgeable and thoughtful essay for Mosaic about the quandaries involved in studying emerging sign languages:

Connie de Vos was sitting on her hands. It was 2006, her first stay in the Balinese village of Bengkala, and visitors had come every night to her house, sitting on the floor of the front patio, eating fruit- or durian-flavoured candies and drinking tea. About eight to ten people were there now, hands flitting in the shadows, chatting away in Kata Kolok, the local sign language: Where is the next ceremony? When is the next funeral? Who just died?

Kata Kolok was created in Bengkala about 120 years ago and has some special features, such as sticking out your tongue to add ‘no’ or ‘not’ to a verb. And unlike American Sign Language (ASL), in which people move their mouths silently as they sign, you also smack your lips gently, which creates a faint popping sound, to indicate that an action has finished.

“If you walk through the village at six, people start to take their baths, getting ready for dinner,” De Vos recalls. “You can hear this sound – pah pah pah – all through the village.”

A graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at the time, De Vos had come to Bengkala to be the first linguist to map Kata Kolok’s grammar and list all of its signs. At that time, she says, it was “kind of untouched”, having emerged in an isolated community with a relatively high number of deaf people. Like similar ‘village sign languages’ that were starting to be identified in the 2000s, it was rich research material. She knew that being first to describe it would be a feather in her cap.

But studying any phenomenon risks changing it.

I’m not going to try summarizing it; it is almost bound to make you rethink the subject. Erard has already gotten an LSA award, and he deserves another.

I was briefly derailed while reading Korsha Wilson’s excellent piece on restaurant criticism by an unfamiliar word: “The servers outfitted in white suit jackets designed by Tom Ford wheeling around silver gueridons and tableside flambe stations…” What was a gueridon? Turns out it’s “a small usually ornately carved and embellished stand or table”; the word is from French guéridon, “Gueridon, character in 17th century farces and popular songs.” (According to French Wikipedia, where you can see a number of images of gueridons, the farce character was “un jeune esclave noir” [a young black slave], which is certainly ironic in this context.) I love learning new words, and thought I’d pass this one along (though doubtless many readers are already familiar with it — everybody’s wordhoard is different).

Ben Dooley has an excellent NY Times obit of one of the most prominent translators of our time, Donald Keene; here’s an excerpt focused on how he acquired Japanese:

Born on June 18, 1922, in Brooklyn, Dr. Keene was a child prodigy. Entering Columbia on scholarship in 1938 at 16, he studied the classics of Western literature and honed his talent for languages on French and Greek. It was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with the university.

Two years later, at a midtown bookshop, he first encountered the literature that would define his life, purchasing a 49-cent translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s “The Tale of Genji,” an 11th-century story of courtly love affairs and other intrigues, often described as the world’s first novel.

The translation “was magical, evoking a beautiful and distant world,” he wrote of the encounter in a 2008 memoir of his relationship with Japan. […] Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Dr. Keene enlisted in the Navy, where he volunteered to study Japanese and began his formal education in the language at the University of California at Berkeley.

His first experience as a translator came in Hawaii, where he worked on routine military reports captured from Japanese units in the Pacific theater. A box of bloodstained diaries from enemy soldiers gave him an initial insight into the emotional lives of the country’s people, he wrote in his memoir, musing that they were “the first Japanese I ever really knew.” […]

Over his career, he translated many of the most important works of Japanese literature into lively and eminently readable English. […] All told, he published around 25 books in English and many more in Japanese and other languages — ranging from academic studies to personal reminisces. Taken together they display a level of erudition and scholarship that made him a giant in his field not just abroad but also in Japan. In 1985, he became the first non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Prize for Literature for literary criticism for his historical survey of Japanese diaries, later published in English as “Travelers of the Ages,” a book inspired by the bloody wartime journals he encountered while serving in the Navy.

I’ve now got three translations of The Tale of Genji; I really have to get around to reading it. Thanks, Eric!

David Robson (linked before at LH, most recently here) writes for Aeon about the linguistic phenomenon known as ideophones; he starts with a quiz about Japanese (e.g., does nurunuru mean ‘dry’ or ‘slimy’?) and continues:

One of the founding axioms of linguistic theory, articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 19th century, is that any particular linguistic sign – a sound, a mark on the page, a gesture – is arbitrary, and dictated solely by social convention. Save those rare exceptions such as onomatopoeias, where a word mimics a noise – eg, ‘cuckoo’, ‘achoo’ or ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ – there should be no inherent link between the way a word sounds and the concept it represents; unless we have been socialised to think so, nurunuru shouldn’t feel more ‘slimy’ any more than it feels ‘dry’.

Yet many world languages contain a separate set of words that defies this principle. Known as ideophones, they are considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences. Crucially, you do not need to know the language to grasp a hint of their meaning. Studies show that participants lacking any prior knowledge of Japanese, for example, often guess the meanings of the above words better than chance alone would allow. For many people, nurunuru really does feel ‘slimy’; wakuwaku evokes excitement, and kurukuru conjures visions of circular rather than vertical motion. That should simply not be possible, if the sound-meaning relationship was indeed arbitrary. (The experiment is best performed using real audio clips of native speakers.)

How and why do ideophones do this? Despite their prevalence in many languages, ideophones were once considered linguistic oddities of marginal interest. As a consequence, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have only recently started to unlock their secrets.

Being a journalist, Robson can’t resist the occasional overstatement (“Their results pose a profound challenge to the foundations of Saussurean linguistics”), but that’s a venial sin, and he provides lots of good examples. He also quotes Mark Dingemanse at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who turned up at LH back in 2008 when he was still a PhD student — I’m glad to see his blog, The Ideophone (“Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity”), is still around. There’s some interesting discussion of Japanese ideophones in this LH thread from a few years ago; e.g., minus273 said “Words like pikapika, cognate to non-ideophonic hikar– seem to imply that ideophones escaped the p > f > h sound changes. (Thanks, Kobi!)

This is excellent:

Here you can find a multilingual parallel corpus created from translations of the Bible. This an effort to create a parallel corpus containing as many languages as possible that could be used for a number of NLP tasks. Using the Book, Chapter and Verse indices the corpus is aligned (almost) at a sentence level. (There are cases where two verses in one language are translated as one in another)

Following a similar effort by Philip Resnik and Mari Broman Olsen at the University of Maryland (website) I have encoded the text of each language in XML files using the Corpus Encoding Standard

The following table contains the XML Bibles in 100 languages (all the languages that an electronic version was freely available online) along with information about each language from Ethnologue.

Another gem from bulbul’s Facebook feed!

Seán Mac an tSíthigh reports on a delightful development:

A Russian man has been appointed as an Irish language officer in a Kerry Gaeltacht and will spearhead attempts to revive the language there.

Victor Bayda, a native of Moscow, has taken up the post with Comhchoiste Ghaeltacht Uíbh Ráthaigh, a community organisation in the south Kerry Gaeltacht of Uíbh Ráthach. Mr Bayda is fluent in Irish and has been teaching the language in a Moscow university for more than ten years. He speaks up to ten languages including Dutch, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Swedish, French, German and Icelandic. He was awarded a PhD for a thesis that dealt with aspects of the Irish language.

Mr Bayda, who made the journey from Moscow to Kerry at the weekend, says he began learning the language while attending university, but that he was aware of its existence as a young teenager. He said: “I have had an interest in languages since I was 13, especially the Celtic languages. I had learned some Welsh and Scots Gaelic by the time I went to university. “It was then I discovered that Irish was available and I signed up for the course. I also picked up a lot of Irish from listening to the language on TG4 and Raidió na Gaeltachta. Then I had an opportunity to study in Trinity College where I first heard Irish as a living, breathing language.” […]

Mícheál Ó Leidhin of Comhchoiste Ghaeltacht Uíbh Ráthaigh says he understands why the appointment of a Russian as a language planner in a Kerry Gaeltacht might raise a few eyebrows, but that the committee is delighted that Mr Bayda accepted the offer. Mr Ó Leidhin said: “Victor is one of the finest Irish speakers you’ll ever meet. Completely fluent. He is highly qualified and possesses tremendous expertise in the whole area of language planning. These are skills we badly need in this area if Irish as a community language is to be saved. We are confident that we have found the right man.”

Of course, he might fit in easier if he changed the spelling of his surname to, say, Baighdagh, or at least Baída.

Henry Samuel reports on a slight budging on the part of the preservers of French linguistic tradition:

For centuries, members of the hallowed Académie Française – created in 1635 to “fix the French language, giving it rules, rendering it pure and comprehensible by all” – had refused to accept that words such as “professeur” (teacher) or ingénieur (engineer) be made “professeure” or “ingénieure” for women.

“The Immortals”, as académiciens are known, had repeatedly argued that to add an “e” to such male titles would “end up with proposals that are contrary to the spirit of the language”.

The cause appeared lost when Hélène Carrère d’Encausse became the Académie’s first ever female perpetual secretary in 1999 and announced she would be referred to as “Madame le secrétaire perpetuel”, in the masculine form. She also opposed “la ministre” (a female minister), preferring “Madame le ministre”. The argument was that gender had nothing to do with job title.

But the institution, which has faced recent accusations of linguistic sexism, has changed tack after placing its entire dictionary online for the first time this month.

Since then, Ms Carrère d’Encaisse has already given some ground, telling Le Figaro: “There are things that enter usage, such as ‘Madame la ministre’. ‘La ministre’ is not a problem.” However, she said she drew the line at “écrivaine” (a female writer) on the grounds that “it’s very ugly”.

But according to l’Express, the Académie will announce on February 28 its intention to include “feminised” versions of such occupations alongside the longstanding masculine nouns.

They even quote an actual linguist, Bernard Cerquiglini, to the effect that the Académie”s position had become “untenable.” (Thanks, Martin!)

Jemma Slingo has an interesting piece in Prospect, beginning with the observation that “Our lives are filled with texts, emails and instant messages […] It is strange, therefore, that novelists—who deal in dialogue and social drama—are on the whole not paying more attention to this new method of communication.”

This is not the case in all new writing. Sally Rooney embeds online chat in her prose to great effect, as does Ben Lerner in his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station. Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, set in the mid-90s, spotlights the weirdness of email, and Olivia Laing’s Crudo satirises our newfound obsession with screens.

Even these novels, however, reveal—deliberately or otherwise—how difficult it is to integrate text talk in a piece of fiction.

What is it about electronic utterances, then, that makes them so troublesome for novelists? Why are they a problem to be solved? […]

When a character talks to someone face-to-face or over the phone, novelists are free to imagine their tone of voice, accent, gestures, emphasis and body language. Spoken exchanges can be imbued with richness and texture. But when characters chat via screen, all they do is press “send,” leaving no room for authorial embellishment. The dialogue just lies on the page like a film script. […]

[Read more…]

Right after my wife and I moved to this neck of the woods, I made the rounds of the local bookstores, and my hands-down favorite was Troubadour Books, then in North Hatfield, just across the river; I wrote about my first visit back in 2007, featuring its generous and knowledgeable owner, Bob Willig. A few years ago I posted that Sam Burton of Grey Matter Books would be running the store (now in Hadley), since “Willig is blind and has been in bad health.” And this morning I was saddened to read his obituary in the local paper:

Bob was an expert on football, baseball, basketball, jazz, blues, barbeque, classic Jewish humor, Medieval philosophy, and the Beats. He was also a harmonica virtuoso, bibliophile, gourmet, bon vivant, raconteur, political radical, anarchist, world traveler, and even once studied to be a clown. […] He attended New York University, the University of Oregon and graduated from George Washington University with a degree in Comparative Religion and a minor in cinematography.

When Bob opened his bookstore, Troubadour Books (for Scholars and Holy Fools) in 1995 in North Hatfield, Massachusetts he built a collection that attracted scholars and buyers from California to England. He was famous for his book sales and always extended generous discounts to any who asked, with maybe a shot of Maker’s Mark bourbon from below the counter, just for good measure. […]

From his voracious reading and book collecting he built up a huge personal library reflecting his many interests from Dante to Ginsberg and from Dario Argento to Alfred Hitchcock. When his groaning shelves could hold no more it was time to open his own bookshop and he used his collection as the basis for his legendary bookshop, Troubadour Books.

Troubadour was more of an open house or salon than a typical store. Bob and Toni were always ready to sit and talk and share stories. Their friends were always dropping by. How they managed to run such a neat and tidy bookshop that was bursting at the seams at the same time was a wonder. They made it look easy, as if they were born to this life. When Bob began to go blind in 2012 Sam Burton purchased and merged Troubadour with his shop, Grey Matter, in Hadley, MA. His shop is still open and thriving and is a worthy successor to Bob’s legacy.

I personally wouldn’t have called it “neat and tidy,” but it was wonderful, and of all the bookstore owners I’ve known he may have been the very best. Alevasholem.