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Adam Taylor reports for the Washington Post on an interesting study:

On Wednesday afternoon, Pew Research Center released a study that looked at how national identity is defined across 14 different countries using survey data taken at the start of last year. In light of the ongoing debate about immigration in pretty much every part of the world, it makes for illustrative reading.

It turns out, for example, that most Americans don’t believe that where someone is born really defines whether they can be American or not. In fact, only a handful of the countries Pew surveyed thought this was important. And while America is a country well-known for its talk of values and God, most Americans don’t think that customs and religion are really important to being an American — and neither do most other countries.

Instead, Pew’s study found that in every country its researchers looked at, language was what really bound its national identity. The highest result was found in the Netherlands, where more than 84 percent of the population believes it is vital to speak Dutch if you want to truly be Dutch. But in all countries, a majority said it was “very important” to speak the national language.

This is not, of course, shocking news; as Taylor points out, Eric Hobsbawm wrote about it a long time ago. But the details are worth looking at, and I urge you to check out the table presented at the link. It ends with what is to me a heartening conclusion:

But things may change. For one thing, immigration also influences language: Germany has developed a colloquial language, “Kiezdeutsch,” which is primarily used by German speakers whose native tongue is Turkish or Arabic. Additionally, Pew’s data suggests that there is a big generational divide on whether language is very important for identity in most countries. In America, that shift is especially pronounced: While 81 percent of those age 50 or older say language is very important to national identity, only 58 percent of those age 18 to 34 agree.

Thanks, Eric! [N.b.: Retitled because I discovered I already had a post called Language and Identity.]

Philocothonista, or, The drunkard, opened, dissected, and anatomized, by Thomas Heywood, includes a chapter with the following splendid list of approved synonyms:

I come now to the penall Statutes enacted for diverse forfeitures, upon most grave and mature deliberation, No man must call a Good-fellow Drunkard, for that’s a name of reproach and indignity, as quite extermin’d out of their learned Society: But if at any time they spy that defect one in another, they may without any forfeit or iust exceptions taken, say; He is Foxt, Hee is Flaw’d, Hee is Flusterd, Hee is Suttle, Cupshot, Cut in the Leg or Backe, Hee hath seene the French King, He hath swallowed an Haire or a Taverne-Token, Hee hath hipt the Cat, He hath been at the Scriveners and learn’d to make Indentures, Hee hath bit his Grannam, or is bit by a Barne-Weesell, with an hundred such like adages and sentences, extracte out of the most Authentick Authors in their Liberary.

Philocothonista is presumably from κώθων ‘Laconian drinking-vessel.’ (Many thanks to Trevor for the link!)

I’ve finished Alexei Pisemsky’s Тысяча душ [One Thousand Souls] (see this post), so I thought I’d provide a few final thoughts. The novel is in four parts; he started writing it in 1854, under the heavy censorship of that period, and finished it under the much freer conditions that prevailed after the Crimean War. Even so, the fourth and most controversial part was published (in June 1858) only through the forceful intervention of Ivan Goncharov, who was a censor at the time; Pisemsky remained grateful to him all his life. He had originally planned to call the book Умный человек [A clever man], a phrase that occurs several times in it, but changed it to foreground the riches that are the object of Kalinovich’s striving — or rather, the necessary means to his ultimate goal, which is to use his intelligence and energy to help reform his slothful, corrupt country.

In order to achieve that goal, he finds himself taking actions that hurt people he loves, make enemies, and (as he himself says) kill the best part of his soul. He who had wanted to be a writer becomes a cold, callous official — but one who is doing his best to clean out the Augean stable, no matter how many feathers are ruffled in the process. It’s an interesting narrative arc; the problem is that (as usual) the early parts, involving sinning and character interaction, are more engaging than the last bit, when he is trying to put his ideas into practice. Lots of novels (and movies, for that matter) fall off towards the end, and this is nowhere near as dire a falling-off as that in War and Peace (see this 2009 post); I kept reading with undiminished interest until the end, and I warmly recommend the book.

And now for a few random things that struck me. There are a couple of mentions of Nikolai Polevoy, a forgotten hero of the early 19th century who I wrote about here, which gave me pleasure; in fact, in Part III, chap. 5 a chunk of his translation of Hamlet is quoted. In Part III, chap. 4 there’s a reference to a Лёв Николаевич, which is interesting in that it shows there was a pronunciation of the name Лев [Lev] as “Lyov” but it wasn’t standard (or Pisemsky wouldn’t have felt it necessary to mark the ё). There’s a mention of confiscation of Polish estates for private gain that I’m astonished made it past the censor. And the most piquant bit of literary detritus is in in Part II, chap. 8, when Nastenka’s uncle “вдруг проговорил известный риторический пример: «Се тот, кто как и он, ввысь быстро, как птиц царь, порх вверх на Геликон!» Эка чепуха, заключил он.” [suddenly uttered the well-known rhetorical example: “Behold the one who, like him, quickly upward, like the king of birds, flitted up onto Helicon!” What nonsense, he concluded.] It took me a while, but I finally determined that this is a distorted quote of a parody of Count Khvostov published by members of the Arzamas Society, a clashing crunch of short words which originally read in full:

Се Росска Флакка зракъ! Се тотъ, кто какъ и онъ,
Выспрь быстро, какъ птицъ Царь, несъ звукъ на Геликонъ!
Се ликъ одъ, притчъ творца, Музъ чтителя, Свистова,
Кой поле испестрилъ Россійска красна слова!

(Hopefully, you can see it here.) The Soviet annotators of my edition, who scrupulously translated every bit of French (Adieu!, merci, etc.), passed over this in silence.

I’ve been wanting to post this article from the Occidental Magazine since I got the physical copy a year and a half ago (I’m an alumnus), but it takes the good people at Oxy a long, long time to put issues online. At any rate, here it is; it starts with Dostert’s creation of the simultaneous translation system that made the Nuremberg trial possible, then goes back to his scrappy beginnings:

Dostert was born on May 14, 1904, in Longwy, France, a fortress town near the borders of Belgium and Luxembourg. His father disappeared early on, and his mother died when he was very young, leaving his aunt and grandmother responsible for his upbringing. He later cited his humble beginnings as the driving force behind his ambition.

In late August 1914, during the opening battles of World War I, the Germans marched into Longwy after a devastating bombardment that left the fortress and parts of the town in ruins. Ten-year-old Dostert was forced to attend German schools for the next four years, ­effectively beginning his education in foreign languages. He proved so adept at German that when he was put to work after finishing elementary school, he was relieved of his duties loading cargo and given a cushier job as secretary to a German officer and translator between the Germans and the French. He remembered translating the Germans’ request for a light bulb and feeling such a thrill when the lights came on that he decided then and there to study languages.

When American soldiers arrived in 1918, Dostert quickly picked up English and became a “mascot” for an Army regiment stationed in Longwy. Among the soldiers was Henri St. Pierre ’21, who was so impressed with the French teenager that he arranged for him to emigrate to California in the spring of 1921. […]

In fall 1963, he joined the Occidental faculty as professor of French and chairman of the foreign languages department:

As he did wherever he went, Dostert changed the status quo during his six years at Oxy. At his suggestion, the department was renamed the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics. He initiated a master’s program in 1964, established a special program for teaching English to Spanish-speaking students, and pushed his younger colleagues to launch Oxy’s modern-day study-abroad program—which today is a vital component of the undergraduate experience. […]

In November 1967, Dostert was the subject of a collection of essays and articles ­titled Papers in Linguistics in Honor of Léon Dostert, prepared by fellow linguists as a tribute to his many achievements in the field. In his dedication, Professor William M. Austin of the Illinois Institute of Technology wrote of his longtime Georgetown colleague: “There is hardly a major linguist today in this country or Europe who does not know him personally, hardly a segment of linguistic endeavor that has not been touched by his thought, guidance, or initiated programs.”

Unfortunately, he retired in ’69, while I was there but still a math major; the next year I transferred to the department he essentially created, but (being distracted by life and the Vietnam War) I never learned anything about him at the time. Now, all these years later, I’m very glad to learn his story, and I encourage you to read the linked piece and do the same.

I’m on the fourth and last part of Pisemsky’s Тысяча душ [One Thousand Souls] (see this post), and in chapter 5 I ran across a phrase that baffled me: “затевает с ним шутки вроде жены Пентефрия” [played tricks with him like those of Pentefrii’s wife]. I finally remembered to look it up, and it turns out Пентефрий is an old Russian (or Church Slavic) equivalent of Potiphar; the modern Russian form is Потифар, exactly like the English. I suspected that the older form was from Greek, but it turns out the Greek is Πετεφρής — close, but no cigar. Where did the -n- come from? The Greek gave rise to a Latin form Petefre, of which Jerome says “non Petefre, ut in latino scriptum est, sed Phutiphar eunucho.” According to Wikipedia, “Potiphar (Hebrew: פוטיפר‎‎) is the shortened form of the Egyptian name ‘Potiphera’ meaning ‘he whom Ra gave.’ This is analogous to the name ‘Theodore’=’God’s gift’ in the Western world.” A confusing mess, which I sum up here for the benefit of those who might encounter one of these forms and wonder what’s going on.

Incidentally, as I say on the Talk page for the Wikipedia article:

I tried to add ru:Жена Потифара (“Potiphar’s wife”) and got: “The link ruwiki:Жена Потифара is already used by item Q15732436. You may remove it from Q15732436 if it does not belong there or merge the items if they are about the exact same topic.” I don’t know enough to know what the deal is with Q15732436, but it’s not a Wikipedia article, and it’s ridiculous that there’s a Russian Wikipedia article on this exact topic that cannot be linked to it. I hope someone more knowledgeable than I will fix this.

So if you know what’s going on there and how to remedy the situation, be my guest.

Update. It turns out the Wikipedia system is basically working as designed; see January First-of-May’s comment below. This Wikiworld is too complex for me.

Stephen Owen has translated all of Du Fu. Big deal, you say, people are always translating other people? Well, what if I tell you that (to quote Jon, who sent the link to me) “It’s a remarkable piece of work! The translations are beautifully lucid and can be read as poetry, but it’s a critical edition and so has a big, unobstrusive, very satisfying apparatus. Oh, and it’s 3,000 pages long.” Sounds great, you say, I wish I could afford things like that? Well, what if I tell you De Gruyter has put the whole thing online to download for free? Just click the “Table of Contents” link and you’ll get a page from which you can download pdfs of as many sections as you want. Here’s their Aims and Scope statement:

The Complete Poetry of Du Fu presents a complete scholarly translation of Chinese literature alongside the original text in a critical edition. The English translation is more scholarly than vernacular Chinese translations, and it is compelled to address problems that even the best traditional commentaries overlook.

The main body of the text is a facing page translation and critical edition of the earliest Song editions and other sources. For convenience the translations are arranged following the sequence in Qiu Zhao’an’s Du shi xiangzhu (although Qiu’s text is not followed). Basic footnotes are included when the translation needs clarification or supplement. Endnotes provide sources, textual notes, and a limited discussion of problem passages. A supplement references commonly used allusions, their sources, and where they can be found in the translation.

Scholars know that there is scarcely a Du Fu poem whose interpretation is uncontested. The scholar may use this as a baseline to agree or disagree. Other readers can feel confident that this is a credible reading of the text within the tradition. A reader with a basic understanding of the language of Chinese poetry can use this to facilitate reading Du Fu, which can present problems for even the most learned reader.

This is an amazing gift to the world from De Gruyter, and I offer them my heartfelt appreciation. Also, Owen is a good guy and an enjoyable writer; from the “Du Fu Lore and Translation Conventions” section, here’s a sample:

Who’s Hu? Non-Han

By and large people doing Tang studies have fortunately abandoned the blanket term “barbarian” for the non-Han peoples with whom the Tang was engaged. I restrict “barbarian” to the word lu 虜, a contemptuous, pejorative term for non-Han without ethnic distinction. There are archaic terms, there are vague regional terms, and precise designations of peoples and polities. After long brooding I have decided to use the Romanization for Hu 胡. Hu refers primarily to the Indo-European inhabitants of Central Asia, such as the Sogdians, but it was applied more loosely to all non-Han peoples of the north and northwest. In Du Fu it is also used for northeasterners and on rare occasions, for the Tibetans. Du Fu often describes the rebels as Hu, so when he refers to the Uighurs, who were Tang allies, he often does so with ethnic precision, Huihu 回鶻. The northeastern peoples were most commonly referred to as Yi 夷, though sometimes Du Fu uses the more precise ethnic designations “Blond-heads,” huangtou 黃頭, and Xi 奚. Toward the west were the Qiang 羌, between the Tibetans, the Uighurs, and the Chinese. The Tibetans were China’s major adversary in the eighth century. They are often referred to anachronistically as the Rong 戎 or the Dog Rong, Quanrong 犬戎, the ancient adversaries of the Zhou dynasty. The equally anachronistic term for northern peoples was Di 狄. This is similar to the Magyars becoming Hun-garians, or the Germans in World War I being referred to as “Huns.”

(I should note that there is only one “Allusions” section, even though it is listed for each volume, so you only have to download it once.) Thanks, Jon!

Last year I posted about a language museum in Paris; now there may be one coming to Washington, DC, according to this piece by Kriston Capps:

The Franklin School in downtown Washington, D.C., has sat vacant since 2008, but the city abandoned the building decades earlier. Designed by Adolf Cluss, the architect who built the Smithsonian Institution’s Castle and its Arts and Industries Building, the revival-style gem survived many efforts to demolish it. More recently, it’s been the focus of everything from mayoral redevelopment schemes to an Occupy demonstration in 2011.

Now another group will take a stab at the historic Franklin School. On Wednesday, the city announced plans to turn the building into a museum of linguistics. Led by philanthropist Ann B. Friedman (wife of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman), “Planet Word” will be an interactive center dedicated to language arts, in the vein of the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, according to the city. […]

So what does one do at a linguistics museum? It’s not entirely clear yet. On the Planet Word site, founder Friedman invites future visitors to “[i]dentify accents, tell us how you say soda and hoagie, learn tips from professional dialect coaches, and climb a Tower of Babel or tunnel through a prepositional playground.” The museum could potentially occupy the space once claimed by the now-defunct Children’s Museum as the D.C. institution with the kid-friendliest programming.

Obviously this project is only in the beginning stages; it may never come to anything, and if it opens it may not be anything like what one would hope, but I can’t help but wish it well. Thanks, Trevor!

Update. See this Lingua Franca piece by Anne Curzan, who’s on the board of the museum and has a fair amount to say about it:

Rethinking K-12 language education in a more linguistically informed way is an ambitious undertaking. At its core is the key realization that linguistics is relevant to our understanding of the language we see and hear every day. My goal, which I share with students in my introductory linguistics course, is to see language incorporated into the curriculum in a much more exploratory way, where students are exploring how language works. As Kirk Hazen at West Virginia University has argued, students should be learning a little linguistics in early grades in the same way that they are learning a little geology, a little chemistry, a little biology, and so on. There is nothing more human than language, and students should learn about how language evolves, how dialects work, how they create new slang, how humans and computers learn language, and more — as they also learn the conventions of standard, formal writing (which right now too often gets equated with “what students need to know about language”). Kids love to play with language, and we could exploit that much more in the elementary- and secondary-school curriculum than we do.

This new museum promises to set the tone for language exploration for people of all ages. The description of Planet Word proposes “to make reading, writing, words, and language surprising, fun, fascinating, and relevant.” We hope to let people experiment with language technologies in a working language-research lab. Exhibits will feature language in all its variation, both spoken and written. The auditorium will host lectures on language, poetry readings, and the like. Most importantly, visitors will have the chance to play with language throughout the museum and seek answers to the questions they may bring (e.g., What makes a word a word? Do men and women speak differently? How could the New York Times dialect quiz pinpoint where I was from? How do puns really work?).

AJP Crown posted this remarkable passage from Montaigne on Facebook; since it was new to me and I figure will be new to at least some of my readership, I thought I’d rescue it from the oblivion that is the fate of all FB posts and copy it here:

The expedient [for learning Latin] found by my father was to place me, while still at the breast and before my tongue was untied, in the care of a German (who subsequently died in France as a famous doctor); he was totally ignorant of our language but very well versed in Latin. He had been brought over expressly and engaged at a very high fee: he had me continuously on his hands. He had two others with him, less learned: their task was to follow me about and provide him with some relief. They never addressed me in any other language but Latin. As for the rest of the household, it was an inviolable rule that neither he nor my mother nor a manservant nor a housemaid ever spoke in my presence anything except such words of Latin as they had learned in order to chatter a bit with me. It is wonderful how much they all got from it. My father and mother learned in this way sufficient Latin to understand it and acquired enough to be able to be able to talk it when they had to, as did those other members of the household who were most closely devoted to my service. In short we became so latinized that it spilled over into neighbouring villages, where, resulting from this usage, you can still find several Latin names for tools and for artisans. As for me I was six years old before I knew French any more than I knew the patois of Périgord or Arabic. And so, without art, without books, without grammar, without rules, without whips and without tears, I had learned Latin as pure as that which my schoolteacher knew – for I had no means of corrupting it or contaminating it. So if they wanted me to assay writing a prose (as other boys do in the colleges by translating from French) they had to give me some bad Latin to turn into good. And Nicholas Grouchy, Guillaume Guerente (who wrote a commentary on Aristotle), George Buchanan, that great Scottish poet, Marc-Antoine Muret whom France and Italy recognise as the best prose-writer in his day, who were my private tutors, have often told me that in my infancy I had that language so fluent and so ready that they were afraid to approach me.
  —On Educating Children 1:26, M.A. Screech translation

AJP adds: “His tutor was Albert Horstanus (aka Dr Horst, the anus is a Latin version).”

Matt Burgess of Wired reports on a new project called Localingual:

Its premise is simple: a world map shows each country and breaks it down to regions as you zoom in. When you click on a region, if sound has been uploaded the dialect and voice from that location will play.

The website launched on January 8 and has already had around 500,000 visitors recording 18,000 different voices. Anyone, on Android or desktop, can click on their region to record their voice if it’s missing. The iOS APIs don’t allow it to work on Apple devices.

“I was wandering around Ukraine when the idea came to me to put all the different languages and dialects I was hearing on the web,” Ding told WIRED. “One of the more difficult aspects of the project was acquiring the flag and emblem image for every region and city in the world. I had to write a primitive data-mining bot that scoured search engines and Wikipedia for these images.” […]

Eventually, Ding wants Localingual to become a “Wikipedia of languages and dialects spoken around the world”.

It’s a great premise, no question, but at the moment (and I realize it’s still in the earliest stages), the execution is… well, I went to Russia and so far have been unable to find an actual example of a dialect being spoken; I have found several sound files of names of cities, and when I clicked on “Leningrad” got the following list of cities:

suka blyat Сука блядь
Volkhov Волхов
Slantsy Сланцы
Vyborg Выборг
Gatchina Гатчина

The first one, Сука блядь, is actually a phrase meaning more or less ‘fucking whore.’ So yeah, kind of like Wikipedia except that vandalism doesn’t get swooped down on and removed by vigilant editors. On the plus side, if you click on “Сука блядь” the pronunciation is impeccable. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Mallory Locklear has a piece at the Verge on an old and probably unsolvable problem, the Indus Valley script. She writes that “new work from researchers using sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, and even cognitive science are finally helping push us to the edge of cracking the Indus script,” but that’s your basic science-journalism hype — that edge is a long way from the crack, and the crack is purely hypothetical. Be that as it may, if you’re interested in the problem, this is a useful summary of the current situation, with descriptions of techniques like conditional entropy and Markov models, and even some juicy academic brawling:

“You would be better off getting medical advice from your garbage man than you would getting ideas about the Indus script from listening to Steve Farmer,” says Wells. “None of the three authors have a degree in archaeology, epigraphy, or anything to do with ancient writing. Their underlying subtext is, ‘We’re all so brilliant and we can’t decipher it so it can’t be writing.’ It’s ludicrous.”

Thanks, Trevor!