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Mark Liberman’s latest Log post features an amazing aspect of Google Translate; watch the brief video and enjoy the comments exploring it. As commenter كتشف said, “I think this rabbit hole goes on forever.”

I know we just recently enjoyed the distinctive Kerry accent, but I can’t resist bringing you this RTE News story about farmer Mikey Joe O’Shea, who is upset about the theft of some of his sheep. (Don’t bother making “Ewe-ro” jokes; Twitter is way ahead of you.) Thanks, Trevor!

I’m reading Vera Tolz’s Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (you can read a review by Denis V. Volkov here [pdf]), and I found this passage (on p. 37) of interest from a linguistic point of view:

In the 1870s, Russia’s size and underdeveloped systems of communication began to be depicted in the Russian press as an obstacle to the consolidation of the Russian national core. Russia, it was argued, was far too large and diverse for people to be able easily to identify with the state (otechestvo) as a whole. The proposed solution was to start national integration by fostering people’s particular affinity to their so-called ‘small native homeland’ (malaia rodina)—the region and the immediate locality where they lived.

The footnote says “In the discussion of the relationship between local and national identities, authors constantly use the expressions ‘rodina’ or ‘malaia rodina’ to refer to a particular locality and the word ‘otechestvo’ to describe Russia in its entirety.” I confess I had thought of otechestvo and rodina as pretty much synonymous, with the latter having more emotional force (“Родина-мать зовет!”); this use to mean ‘small homeland’ reminds me of French pays. A little later Tolz refers to the comparable German Heimat movement of that period; we don’t really have a comparable word in America — being more urbanized, we talk about one’s hometown. At any rate, I was wondering if the Russian use she describes still seems valid to my Russian-speaking readers.

ScienceDaily reports on a project “to document and archive the aroma associated with old books”; on the one hand, it seems ripe for mockery, but on the other hand, as a confirmed book-sniffer I can’t help but find it intriguing:

A ‘Historic Book Odour Wheel’ which has been developed to document and archive the aroma associated with old books, is being presented in a study in the open access journal Heritage Science. Researchers at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage created the wheel as part of an experiment in which they asked visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral’s Dean and Chapter library in London to characterize its smell.

The visitors most frequently described the aroma of the library as ‘woody’ (selected by 100% of the visitors who were asked), followed by ‘smoky’ (86%), ‘earthy'(71%) and ‘vanilla’ (41%). The intensity of the smells was assessed as between ‘strong odor’ and ‘very strong odor’. Over 70% of the visitors described the smell as pleasant, 14% as ‘mildly pleasant’ and 14% as ‘neutral’. […]

Cecilia Bembibre, heritage scientist at UCL and corresponding author of the study said: “Our odour wheel provides an example of how scientists and historians could begin to identify, analyze and document smells that have cultural significance, such as the aroma of old books in historic libraries. The role of smells in how we perceive heritage has not been systematically explored until now.”

Further research is, needless to say, needed. The study is “Smell of heritage: A framework for the identification, analysis and archival of historic odours,” by Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič. Thanks, Paul!

Gerardo Licón’s KCET story on pachucos, young Mexican-Americans in the WWII era, is excellent and taught me a lot about a culture of which I had only foggy and cliché-ridden ideas. What makes it LH material is the following paragraph:

This brings us back to the question regarding why pachucos in Los Angeles seemed to speak more [African American] jive than pachuco caló [slang]. It is because Mexican Americans in Los Angeles were greatly influenced by other groups in the U.S. compared to the Mexicans that were more recent arrivals to Los Angeles, especially from the border area of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Border cities have a greater degree of language mixture (something akin to Spanglish) than cities further inland as well. At that time, El Paso was the primary point of entry for Mexicans into the U.S. The slang name of El Paso was “El Chuco.” Many Mexicans would cross into the U.S. and go to El Chuco, or in Spanish slang, “Pa’l Chuco.” When young Mexican Americans took trains along the Southern Pacific railroad, through Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles for wartime employment opportunities, they were referred to as pachucos. They brought their form of border Spanglish to Los Angeles with them. Mexican American zoot suiters native to Los Angeles spoke more jive; migrants from El Paso spoke pachuco caló with more of a Spanish-language and Spanish slang influence. This is also why when reporters asked Mexican citizens, after the Zoot Suit Riots, where pachucos had come from, many said they came from El Paso.

Naturally, I was dubious about this derivation, and sure enough, when I looked it up in AHD I found a different etymology:

[American Spanish, person from El Paso, pachuco, possibly alteration of payuco, yokel, from Spanish payo, peasant, perhaps from Gallego Payo, Pelagius (considered a typical peasant name).]

And googling brought me this webpage by the redoubtable Barry Popik, whose first paragraph reverses Licón’s causation:

El Paso is infrequently called “El Chuco” or “Chuco Town”/”Chucotown.” The term comes from the word “pachuco,” a Mexican Spanish Caló dialect word of disputed origin, dating from the 1930s-1940s.

After that it has as many citations and theories as you could possibly want.

Lameen Souag recently posted at Jabal al-Lughat about an intriguing teaching method:

I haven’t done much language teaching in my life, but as a person who likes learning new languages, I’ve seen a fair range of different teaching methods applied, from only speaking the target language to saying almost everything in English. But the approach used in Simon Bird‘s “#LilMoshom” series of Cree-teaching videos was new to me, and very interesting. Take a moment to watch some of them before reading further [links omitted click through to Lameen’s post for them]

There are a lot of strong points one could comment on – the CGI, the subtitles, and the humour, for instance – but what particularly draws my attention is the way he combines the two languages. To introduce the words he’s teaching, he usually speaks in English – but he doesn’t just gloss, much less lecture (contrast, say, the more conventional approach used in this Ojibwe video series). When speaking in English, he throws in Cree discourse particles and sometimes even content words, gives the sentence a distinctly non-mainstream English intonation pattern which I assume reflects Cree, and even pronounces the English with a Cree accent. In different contexts, the maker of these videos speaks English like any other Canadian academic, so this appears to be a deliberate teaching strategy. The beauty of this is that, before the learner can even formulate a full sentence, they’re already getting a chance to acquire some aspects of language – discourse structure and intonation – that are super-important for actually making yourself understood, yet play a minor role or get left out entirely in many traditional curriculums and textbooks (not to mention grammars!).

Have you ever encountered such a teaching method? If so, did you find it effective?

I’ve never heard of such a thing, but it seems like it could work, and I’m curious to know my readers’ thoughts.

Gail Hairston, a PR person for the University for Kentucky, writes about a linguist with a great job:

Throughout Andrew Byrd’s successful career in academia, he has pushed to understand ancient languages to a depth no one has before. His goal was to understand how languages spoken thousands of years ago actually sounded. […]

He and his wife Brenna Byrd, also a linguist and assistant professor of German at UK, helped the video game creators Ubisoft bring to life “Far Cry Primal”, which involved warring tribes in 10,000 BCE. Ubisoft wanted realistic conversations among the prehistoric Homo sapiens, so the Byrds partnered their skills. While he created the words and their sounds, she relied on her award-winning skill at teaching foreign languages to teach the game’s actors to speak the languages realistically.

After the video game was manufactured, it wasn’t long before another opportunity was offered to Byrd.

This one came from television’s National Geographic Channel. Producers wanted the UK linguist to help create verbal languages for a new series to be called “Origins: The Journey of Humankind.” Futurist Jason Silva hosts this visually arresting new series that offers a twist on conventional historical documentaries as it explores the big question of how humans “got from there to here,” in the evolution from apes to astronauts. […]

Byrd remembered an early conversation with the producers, “First, they said they were fans of my work in ‘Far Cry Primal,’ then they asked me if I could create languages in different time frames, even different parts of the world.”

“What about 2,000 years ago, Europe?”

“Yes, sure,” Byrd answered.

“4,000 years ago?”

“Yes.”

“How about 14,000 years ago in Eurasia and northern Africa?”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about those regions, but yes, I can make an educated guess that will be reasonably close,” Byrd said.

“Southern France, 25,000 years ago? Australia, 50,000 years ago?”

“Those languages would be based on very little actual data, but I can make a good attempt,” he said.

The producers were more than happy with that answer, and now Byrd’s work can be found in virtually every episode of the new series.

Needless to say, I’m more than dubious about these sort-of-reconstructed languages, but hey, it’s only TV, and at least an actual linguist is involved. (I posted about Byrd’s website The *Bʰlog in 2014.) Thanks, Trevor!

Having reached the year 1859 in my long march through Russian literature, I’m reading Turgenev’s Дворянское гнездо [A Nobleman’s Nest, also tr. Liza and Home of the Gentry], which has been called his “most characteristic, least controversial and most popular” novel. So far I’m finding it a bit of a slog, since it’s consisting mostly of long introductions to the family histories of each character, but I trust Turgenev and am willing to wait and see where it goes. At any rate, I thought I’d post this passage, which is of obvious LH relevance:

Despite all his adroitness, he found himself almost constantly on the verge of destitution, and left to his only son a small and unsettled fortune. On the other hand, he had, in his own way, taken pains with his education: Vladimir Nikolaich spoke French splendidly, English well, and German badly. That’s as it should be: for respectable people, it is shameful to speak German, but to make use of a German word in certain circumstances, for the most part humorous, is permissible; c’est même très chic, as Petersburg Parisians put it.

Несмотря на всю свою ловкость, он находился почти постоянно на самом рубеже нищеты и оставил своему единственному сыну состояние небольшое и расстроенное. Зато он, по-своему, позаботился об его воспитании: Владимир Николаич говорил по-французски прекрасно, по-английски хорошо, по-немецки дурно. Так оно и следует: порядочным людям стыдно говорить хорошо по-немецки; но пускать в ход германское словцо в некоторых, большею частью забавных, случаях — можно, c’est même très chic, как выражаются петербургские парижане.

Donnerwetter!

Ragnar Jónasson “explains how rendering the great English thriller writer into his own language taught him how to write fiction himself”:

I was 17 when I started working on my first Icelandic translation of an Agatha Christie novel. I had been reading her books for years and had already translated a few of her short stories for Icelandic magazines, but I was astonished when her publishers offered me the opportunity to translate a whole novel. I was even more delighted when they agreed to let me start with Endless Night (little did they know that my suggestion was because it contained far fewer pages than any other Christie novel I had come across).

I would never have guessed that 15 years later I would be writing myself, and have 14 translated Christie novels to my name. Through college, law school, and even when I had started full-time work as a lawyer, I never stopped translating her. Each new title was another chance to immerse myself in her writing and to learn from her as much as I could. And translating her gave me the confidence to write a novel of my own. Christie was not just an inspiration for my writing, but a support.

I’m posting it mainly for this paragraph:

One memorable challenge came when I was translating Lord Edgware Dies, which took me 10 years because of one almost impossible hurdle: a particular two-word clue, which to me felt inextricably bound to the English language. The words used in English sounded different in Icelandic, dissolving the clue entirely. In the end I resorted to simply referring to the English words as well, after trying dozens of alternative methods (for those interested in knowing the clue, read chapter 29).

It’s almost enough to make me pick up Christie again. (I read through my brother’s collection of her novels half a century or so ago.) Thanks, Eric!

(Sorry about the outage yesterday; it was something to do with MySQL not running after an update by the service that hosts LH. All hail Songdog, who managed to fix it!)

I’ve always been a fan of schisms and heresies (see this post and those linked in its first sentence), so of course I was pleased to find “In Praise of Older Schisms,” by slklassen, the Drunken Mennonite; I knew I had to bring it here when I got to the last one:

10. The Famous Bonnet Controversy of Stirling Ave.

Mennonite women in Ontario wore hats until the mid-nineteenth century. Like everyone else. Then they switched to bonnets. Like everyone else. Then, in the early twentieth century, they started to switch back to hats again. Like everyone else. Which, apparently, was wrongheaded of them. In 1924, the hat-wearers and their supporters at Berlin Mennonite Church (now First Mennonite), having had enough persecution from the bonnet faction, marched up the hill to form Stirling Ave. Mennonite Church. I attended this Church through my growing up years. And never wore a bonnet once.

Hat heresies are the best heresies!