languagehat.com

Peggy McInerny writes about a Nahuatl program for the Latin American Institute:

The language of the Aztecs, Nahuatl [pronounced na’ wat], is alive and well today in Los Angeles. Beginning and intermediate classes in modern Nahuatl are offered at UCLA, with an advanced class slated to launch next year.

A few miles due north at the Getty Museum, historians and art experts are collaborating with Italy’s Laurentian Library on a long-term project to create an online, annotated version of one of the greatest works ever written in Nahuatl: the Florentine Codex. A virtual encyclopedia of Nahua culture compiled by a dedicated Franciscan friar in the mid-16th century, the work has never been accessible to the general public — much less to descendants of the Aztecs living in Mexico.

Last fall, an entire scene of a U.S. television show was shot in Spanish and modern Nahuatl, marking the first time that the Aztec language had ever been heard on an American broadcast. This coming September, a charter school in Lynwood will offer Nahuatl classes to its middle school students, courtesy of a UCLA graduate student. And that’s not to mention a dedicated native speaker who has been teaching Nahuatl classes for 26 years in a local church in Santa Ana (see KPCC story).

Standing at the confluence of most of these linguistic streams is UCLA historian Kevin Terraciano, director of the Latin American Institute. A genial professor with a dry sense of humor, Terraciano was instrumental in making Nahuatl available at UCLA, beginning in fall 2015. It was Terraciano who translated English dialogue into Nahuatl for an American Crime episode during the show’s current season. (He later coached the actors, who had to learn their parts phonetically, at the actual shoot.)

There’s some interesting stuff there about the history of the language (“Nahuatl was still the majority-spoken language in the Valley of Mexico at the end of the colonial period […] Despite the fact that 90 percent of the population died over a 100-year period as a result of one epidemic after another, indigenous peoples were still the majority of the population of Mexico by the end of that period”). Thanks, Trevor!

Timur Baytukalov has created what looks like a useful site for language learners, EasyPronunciation.com; he says:

I created this website with phonetic transcription converters – https://easypronunciation.com/en/. They can convert text into IPA phonetic transcription. I already support seven languages (English, Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian). Russian and French converters have embedded audio recordings.

Some levels are for paid subscribers, but basic levels are free; it looks worth checking out.

Over at the Log, Victor Mair posted about the latest silly governmental attempt to control language, in this case Erdoğan’s campaign against foreign influences in Turkish; he quotes an article in The Economist:

Mr Erdogan started by ordering the word “arena”, which reminded him of ancient Roman depravity, removed from sports venues across the country. Turkey’s biggest teams complied overnight. Vodafone Arena, home of the Besiktas football club, woke up as “Vodafone Stadyumu”. Critics wondered what the Turkish language had gained by replacing one foreign-derived word with another. […]

Because so much abstract vocabulary had come from Arabic and Persian, this in effect created a new language. From one generation to the next, the country’s cultural history was cut off. Mr Erdogan seems to want to turn the clock back, complete with imperial nostalgia and resentment towards the West. In 2014 he proposed introducing mandatory high-school classes in Ottoman Turkish, which survives today only among linguists, historians and clerics. The plan was shelved after a popular backlash.

The offensive against Western loanwords will probably meet a similar fate. In an interview, the [Turkish Language Institute]’s head, Mustafa Kacalin, clarified that it would apply only to “bizarre” foreign words incomprehensible to most Turks. The limits became clear in Mr Erdogan’s own speech on May 23rd, in which he denounced loanwords by using a loanword. They were not, he said, “sik” (“chic”). Many Turks no doubt consider the whole thing a load of bosh—from the Turkish bos, “nonsense”.

As Thomas Shaw says in the comments, the quotation from The Economist misspells the Turkish: “it should be şık and boş. Also Erdoğan, of course […].” (In the following comments, Y thought for a moment he was at the Hattery, which was amusing.) We discussed Atatürk’s original Turkish language reform back in 2012.

Dauvit Horsbroch, of the Scots Language Centre, has a video lecture (just under 20 minutes) on the Scots language (“leid” in Scots) that’s a fascinating experience for an English speaker; the more you listen the more you understand, and it’s a linguistically informed talk about language — what’s not to like?

Via MetaFilter, where Happy Dave (“I’m Scottish, speak Scottish English day-to-day, occasionally dot my sentences with Scots words and have academic connections to the Scots leid folks through my wife”) has the following informative comment, responding to someone else saying “I don’t know anything about this guy, but I knew people who spoke Scots and they didn’t sound much like that”:

Just a note on this – this fella is a Scots language (leid) specialist, so he’s speaking a pretty formalised form of Scots with deliberate substitution of words, including some that are pretty much archaic/extinct in everyday speech. There’s an attempt to document and make consistent some of the spellings etc and I believe this is the form of Scots the Scottish Parliament uses when producing documents in Scots.

However, a lot of people slide between broad Scots (and its sub-dialects like Doric) and Scottish English, sometimes in the space of sentence, all day every day. And there are not, so far as I know, any Scots speakers (even those who speak to to the exclusion of all else) who do not speak Scottish English. If you speak Scots, you also are capable of speaking Scottish English, although the reverse is not always true.

The people you knew may have have been speaking a different regional sub dialect of Scots, or a less formalised version with less archaisms, or Scottish English with a smattering of Scots words.

Well, it’s not really about interviewing translators, it’s about interviewing coders, using translators as a stand-in: What if companies interviewed translators the way they interview coders? by Jose Aguinaga. But how can I resist something that has questions like “how did the Arabic invasion in the Iberian Peninsula between the years of 711 and 1492 affected the Spanish language?” and

So next question: the words “pater”, “father”, “Vater”, are from Latin, English, and German respectively; we can see in some cases the “p” evolved to a “v”, but in others evolved to a “f”. The words “piscis”, “fish”, and “Fisch”, in the other hand–

and a demand to translate ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΠΑΙΔΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΕΠΙΒΙΟΝΤΟΣ on a whiteboard?

Via MetaFilter (where the discussion, of course, is entirely about coding except for somebody who pointed out the error in the Arabic invasion question).

I recently discovered the existence of what looks like a very interesting Russian-lit blog, The Bloggers Karamazov (“The Official Blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society”); I discovered it in the most flattering possible way, by their asking me if I would mind if they republished my post Dostoevsky’s Stepanchikovo. I said that of course I wouldn’t, and they have done so in their latest post (accompanied by a nice Levitan painting of a village). My thanks to them for supporting my obsession with Russian lit!

R. Devraj of the excellent blog Dick & Garlick has posted about an interesting bit of poetry:

भाखा बहता नीर: language is like flowing water

I’m not too sure where I came first across this line of Kabir’s, which describes his views on language in a pithy epigrammatic style, contrasting the dead Sanskrit of the ancient religious texts with bhakha or bhasha (literally ‘language’), the colloquial living language of his time which he used in his own verse.’संस्करित है कूप जल, भाखा बहता नीर’ it reads: Sanskrit is like stagnant water in a well, but bhakha, the true language of the people, changes constantly and cannot be bound by rules, like flowing water. That’s a lot to say in just six words, and I’m curious what the second line of the couplet could be. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find it online. If any reader can provide it, I’ll be most grateful.

I know what it is to need one’s curiosity satisfied, so I thought I’d repost the question here and hope someone can answer it. Also, I’d like to be able to quote the couplet, which is very relevant to my interests!

Stan Carey at Sentence first has a great post about the mess that is the text of Joyce’s Ulysses:

The length and complexity of Ulysses, and the difficulties of its publication, mean that many subtly different versions of the text exist. The first legal edition in the US, which became its standard edition for decades, was based on a pirated copy, for example.

Typographical errors arose inevitably from multiple sources; complicating things further is the fact that some ‘errors’ were deliberate but wrongly ‘corrected’ by printers or editors. And then there were all those rewrites and updates by the author while the thing was being serialised. And afterwards.

So there is no ideal, ‘master’ text; in fact Joyce scholars fight over the best way to decide what this even means.

He provides some interesting quotes from Jeri Johnson‘s essay “Composition and Publication History,” starting with Leopold Bloom’s seeing his name misprinted as “L. Boom” in a list of attendees to a funeral; Johnson notes that the original French edition of Ulysses

mistakenly ‘corrected’ the fictive Dublin typesetter’s mis-set ‘L. Boom’, just as they mistakenly deleted the mistakenly reported ‘Stephen Dedalus’. Joyce correctly reinstated these errors in the Errata lists. […]

When earlier in the day, Bloom (this time in the guise, not of L. Boom, but of Henry Flower) reads Martha Clifford’s billet-doux, he encounters more ‘bitched type’: ‘I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. … So now you know what I will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not wrote’. Her substitution of ‘world’ for ‘word’ teases the imagination: we notice, perhaps for the first time, that ‘world’ contains ‘word’ (plus a floating ‘l’ – the one gone missing from ‘Boom’?), the two being inextricably joined in this book. […]

Her second mistyping, ‘if you do not wrote’, floats into Bloom’s mind a paragraph later: ‘I wonder did she wrote it’. The odd thing about this mistake is that Joyce the author wrote ‘write’. It was either the typist or the typesetter who ‘wrote’ ‘wrote’. Joyce did not notice it until several proofs of this episode had been pulled and had repeatedly repeated ‘wrote’. When he did notice it, Joyce the writer wrote Bloom’s ‘I wonder did she wrote it’, thus opening wide his authorial arms to embrace the typesetter’s mistake. As Stephen Dedalus says later: ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’. Errors, it seems, are volitional even when made by someone else. […]

We trust, that is, that despite their erroneous status ‘L. Boom’, ‘world’, and ‘wrote’ communicate meanings that lie outside the scope of narrow rectitude. Ulysses repeatedly reminds us that certitude aligns itself with bigotry, racial hatred, blind nationalism, egotism, violence. … Joyce’s alternative authority is one which recognizes the inevitability of error, exercises a healthy scepticism, and yet happily embraces the new world occasioned by the fall, the lapses.

I like that last paragraph a lot.

Catherine Porter reports for the NY Times on what sounds like a very worthy promising project, Canada’s first Haida-language feature film, Edge of the Knife:

With an entirely Haida cast, and a script written in a largely forgotten language, the film reflects a resurgence of indigenous art and culture taking place across Canada. It is spurred in part by efforts at reconciliation for the horrors suffered at those government-funded residential schools, the last of which closed only in 1996. […]

Fewer than 20 fluent speakers of Haida are left in the world, according to local counts. For the Haida themselves, the destruction of their language is profoundly tied to a loss of identity.

“The secrets of who we are are wrapped up in our language,” said Gwaai Edenshaw, a co-director of the film, who like most of the cast and crew grew up learning some Haida in school but spoke English at home. […]

Mr. Edenshaw was a co-writer of the script for the 1.8 million Canadian dollar ($1.3 million) film, which is set in Haida Gwaii — an archipelago of forested islands off the west coast of Canada — during the 1800s. It tells an iconic Haida story of the “wildman,” a man who is lost and becomes feral living in the forest. In this version, the wildman loses his mind after the death of a child, and is forcibly returned to the fold of his community in a healing ceremony.

The script was translated into two remaining, distinct dialects of the language: Xaad Kil and Xaayda Kil. None of the stars are conversant in either dialect. The crew held a two-week language boot camp in April so cast members, who also have little or no acting experience, could learn to pronounce their lines before filming started in May. […]

The film would seem cripplingly ambitious if not for the record of the executive producer, the Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk. He made his name with “Atanarjuat” (“The Fast Runner”), which depicted an Inuit folk epic and starred untrained Inuit actors speaking their traditional language, Inuktitut.

That film won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, and is still considered one of the best Canadian films of all time.

I saw Atanarjuat and can confirm that it is absolutely terrific, so I have high hopes for this one. We discussed Haida poetry here (with Robert Bringhurst himself appearing in the comment thread) and the language here (where marie-lucie said “Sapir thought that Haida belonged to [Na-Dene], but more recently this has been considered very unlikely, and Vajda’s work makes it even more improbable”). Thanks, Eric!

I’ve just started Turgenev’s novel Накануне (On the Eve) — I’ve reached the 1860s! — and in the first few pages, in the course of a conversation between the young friends Bersenev and Shubin, the latter, lying on his stomach and observing the goings-on in the grass, says:

Меня больше всего поражает в муравьях, жуках и других господах насекомых их удивительная серьезность; бегают взад и вперед с такими важными физиономиями, точно и их жизнь что-то значит! Помилуйте, человек, царь созданья, существо высшее, на них взирает, а им и дела до него нет; еще, пожалуй, иной комар сядет на нос царю создания и станет употреблять его себе в пищу. Это обидно.

What strikes me most in the ants, beetles, and other gentlemen of the insect kingdom is their astonishing seriousness; they run back and forth with such grave expressions you’d think their lives actually meant something! For heaven’s sake, a person, lord of creation, a higher being, is looking at them, and they could care less. What’s more, some mosquito might sit on the nose of a lord of creation and start using him for its food. It’s insulting.

Fortunately, thanks to my strictly chronological path I had just read Turgenev’s famous lecture Гамлет и Дон-Кихот [Hamlet and Don Quixote], and the memory of this passage was fresh in my mind:

Если бы мы не боялись испугать ваши уши философическими терминами, мы бы решились сказать, что Гамлеты суть выражение коренной центростремительной силы природы, по которой все живущее считает себя центром творения и на все остальное взирает как на существующее только для него (так комар, севший на лоб Александра Македонского, с спокойной уверенностью в своем праве, питался его кровью, как следующей ему пищей; так точно и Гамлет, хотя и презирает себя, чего комар не делает, ибо он до этого не возвысился, так точно и Гамлет, говорим мы, постоянно все относит к самому себе).

If we were not afraid of frightening you with philosophical terminology, we would have said that Hamlets are the expression of the fundamental centripetal force of nature, according to which every living thing considers itself the center of creation and looks on everything else as existing only for it (so a mosquito, sitting on the forehead of Alexander of Macedon, with quiet conviction of its right to do so, fed itself on his blood as its proper food; just so does Hamlet — though he despises himself, which the mosquito does not do, because it has not raised itself to that point — just so does Hamlet, we say, constantly relate everything to himself).

It’s fun to see Turgenev using the same image in such different contexts! I presume the mosquito is the one that is supposed by some to have infected Alexander with his fatal disease.