languagehat.com

Yes, that’s a dumb title, but I’m a sucker for these things (as long as they’re true to the facts of the language, which this appears to be as far as I can tell). Colm FitzGerald created the listicle; my favorite:

3. Hungarians don’t ask little children “Why are you crying?”, they ask “Why are you giving drinks to the mice?” (Miért itatod az egereket?)

Brian E. Denton takes an interesting approach to a famously long novel:

My project is a year-long, chapter by chapter, daily devotional reading of and meditation on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I read the novel for the first time seven years ago. I loved it. I wanted to read it again. The only problem was, and I’m sure my fellow bibliophiles can relate, I also wanted to read other books. I’m just promiscuous like that. So the question presented itself: how was I to keep reading War and Peace, a notoriously long novel, and still keep up with my other reading interests? While looking at Constance Garnett’s Modern Library edition I noted that the book is divided into fifteen parts and two epilogues (yeah, you read that right). Each part, in turn, is divided into chapters. Small chapters. I counted those small chapters and there turned out to be 361 of them. And that’s when I decided that I’d spend each year of the rest of my life cycling through War and Peace at the rate of one chapter per day. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past six years. It’s a curious, fun, and reflective way to read the book. It also makes it much easier. The longest chapter is only eleven pages and the average chapter length is just shy of four pages. I know this because last year I started a spreadsheet to compare the different translations. Anyway, this year I decided that I want to share this method of reading the novel with other people. To that end I’ll be publishing the devotional, complete with a synopsis and daily meditation based on each chapter starting 1 January 2017, on Medium.

At the end the interviewer, Lucie Taylor, asks “What will you do when you run ut of translations to read?” His answer: “Read them again.” Good man!

Maeve Reilly writes about an interesting initiative:

For those who speak English, or another language that is prevalent in First World nations, Siri or other voice recognition programs do a pretty good job of providing the information wanted. However, for people who speak a “low-resource” language—one of more than 99 percent of the world’s languages—automatic speech recognition (ASR) programs aren’t much help. Preethi Jyothi, a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow, is working towards creating technology that can help with the development of ASR software for any language spoken anywhere in the world.

“One problem with automatic speech recognition today is that it is available for only a small subset of languages in the world,” said Jyothi. “Something that we’ve been really interested in is how we can port these technologies to all languages. That would be the Holy Grail.”

Low-resource languages are languages or dialects that don’t have resources to build the technologies that can enable ASR, explained Jyothi. Most of the world’s languages, including Malayalam, Jyothi’s native south Indian language, do not have good ASR software today. Part of the reason for this is that the developers do not have access to large amounts of transcriptions of speech—a key ingredient for building ASR software.

She and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson are trying something called “probabilistic transcription” which involves native English speakers transcribing languages they don’t know using nonsense syllables (the current project focuses on Arabic, Cantonese, Dutch, Hungarian, Mandarin, Swahili, and Urdu). It sounds weird, and I don’t get quite how it’s supposed to work, but I wish them every success. (Thanks, Andy!)

I came across a reference to Seite Books and wanted to know how the name was pronounced, so I googled up this LA Times article from 2014 [archived] by Hector Tobar and was immediately hooked:

When Adam Bernales and Denice Diaz started Seite Books in a little storefront in East Los Angeles, a lot of people thought their taste in books was too highbrow. […]

But Bernales and Diaz, both then in their mid-20s, persisted. A few students from nearby Garfield High School and East Los Angeles Community College started wandering in. There was Fernando, a teenager who wanted to read nothing but Russian novels “because they’re the greatest,” and a young woman who loved Amiri Baraka and wanted to buy all the African American poets Seite Books had to offer.

Seite Books is the bookstore East Los Angeles didn’t know it needed: an oasis of literary culture in a book-starved corner of L.A. that’s never had a Dutton’s or a Borders or a Barnes & Noble. […]

For its small but loyal initial customer base, Seite Books filled out its collection of Russian literature, and of poets of color, with Bernales and Diaz going to estate and garage sales hunting for used books. For other customers they tracked down novels by sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, and classic mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett. They built a sizable collection of Latin American literature too, a category that at Seite Books includes Jorge Luis Borges and Chicano journalist Oscar Zeta Acosta’s seminal novel “The Revolt of the Cockroach People.”

What a great-sounding place! Oh, and my original question was answered: “The name Seite is a product of their erudite aesthetic — it’s a German word for ‘page,’ or ‘side.’ (At first, the books occupied just one side of the storefront.)” So it’s theoretically /zaitə/, though I imagine many of their Spanish-speaking customers say /seite/ (which was my guess before I got to that last bit).

Sally Thomason (who occasionally posts at Language Log) is a wonderful linguist I’ve written about here more than once; last March Ryan Bradley interviewed her for the Paris Review, and it’s very much worth reading. An excerpt:

Are there languages that are better at adapting? When languages meet, does one “win”?

Sure. But that comparison has nothing to do with the structure or the vocabulary of the language, it has to do strictly with social factors. It’s not as if people come into contact and one crowd says, Boy, your language is a lot more efficient than ours! It depends on who’s got the power. The world I live in, the world you live in, Western Europe, the United States, highly industrialized countries, the paradigm we’re used to is colonialism—and then the indigenous languages are threatened. A lot of them have disappeared and the ones that haven’t are at great risk, so that seems like the norm.

But imagine a society—and again, these are mostly hunter-gatherer societies, but there are still a lot of those around—where the people practice exogamy, meaning you have to find a marriage partner outside your own group. Often the criterion is whether they speak the same language as you. If you have a society like that, you’re in contact with at least one other group and typically several relatively small groups—and it’s greatly to your advantage to maintain different languages, right? You don’t want to change your whole culture, you value your culture, exogamy seems like the way the world ought to be, and you certainly want to get married and you have this view that you shouldn’t marry your sister—then you preserve the languages.

How did you get started on Montana Salish?

I was working on language contact, and the Pacific Northwest—Washington, Oregon, neighboring parts of British Columbia, particularly—is one of the best-known linguistic areas in the world. There are languages in that area, some of them totally unrelated as far as we know, that share all sorts of structural features. Not vocabulary, so much, but structural features that they didn’t inherit from their ancestors, that have traveled from one language to another. There’s also a phenomenon where you’ve got three or more languages in the same area trading features through multilingualism.

My family was already spending summers one mountain range to the east of the easternmost Salish language—most of the Salish languages are on the coast. I thought I could find out about this linguistic area if I started studying this language, and the tribes wanted somebody to come and help them get used to the writing system, a new linguistic device for them, so I was going to be useful. I thought I’d find out about this language and then I would find out about the whole family, and then I would be able to study the histories—how these features got from one family, where they started, how they got from one family to the next. So in 1981, I started trying to learn about this language, and it took about ten years before I realized I need maybe another 150 years for that project, and then I’d only need another century or so to understand the linguistic area.

But in the meantime, I really got hooked on the language. It’s a wonderful language. I like consonants, and they have thirty-eight consonants. I like big, long, complicated words, and they have huge, long, complicated words.

Here’s a couple of piquant examples of Montana Salish’s reluctance to borrow:

The word they use for automobile means “that it has wrinkled feet,” which is, incidentally, an example of how the words you have reflect your culture. If you’re a tracker, you’re going to be noticing the tire tracks—the focus of that particular word. And the word for telephone means “you whisper into it.”

Great stuff, and here’s hoping for more interviews with linguists.

Back in August 2015, Dave Sayers had a bracing post on a contentious topic:

“Indigenous languages” and “immigrant languages” are much discussed in language policy research, but surprisingly little time is spent actually defining those terms. In general, “indigenous” tends to encompass two features: a long heritage in a place; and some form of contemporary disadvantage, usually associated with prior colonisation/invasion. But those criteria are seldom explicated.

I particularly like these examples:

Take the creole Nouchi, in the Ivory Coast, arising in the 1980s through contact between French and various Ivorian languages. Nouchi is indigenously Ivorian but has no obvious ethnic pedigree. It arose because street traders, itinerant workers, and others in the Ivorian grey economy – who didn’t share a common language – needed to communicate. From a rich mix of diverse people striking deals, talking shop, agreeing, disagreeing, socialising, eating, dancing and falling in love, came about a more distinctive set of words, phrases, and grammatical features. This story of language genesis is as old as human speech itself. And in the worldwide context of overwhelming language death, Nouchi could be celebrated as a new indigenous minority language.

So is it celebrated? Not quite. Although a vibrant feature of Ivorian popular (sub-)culture, Nouchi is typically looked down on by mainstream media and other guardians of all that is right and good in the world, as broken French and/or a subversive subaltern code. That even includes minority language sympathisers. In a book-length discussion of Ivorian minority languages, Ettien Koffi (2012) mentions Nouchi only once (p. 207) and then only as a kind of curiosity. (See my somewhat irritable review of Koffi’s book here.)

The same fate has befallen Tsotsitaal in South Africa, another recently born creole “including elements of Zulu and Afrikaans … from the working class outskirts and townships of Johannesburg … used by (would-be) gangsters and rebellious township youth. … [L]anguages like Tsotstitaal are not legitimated … and their speakers are marginalized” (Stroud & Heugh 2004: 202).

Dynamic urban vernaculars also have a tendency to change and transform much more quickly than older languages. That is of course part of the appeal for their speakers, but another reason for indifference among those who prefer languages to sit still.

Hurray for dynamism, and fie on sitting still!

This is an interesting piece about an illustrator named Lou Marchetti and a writer named David Markson, but I’d link it just for the magnificent reproductions of the front and back covers of the anthology of Russian stories whose title I have borrowed for this post. Thanks, Trevor!

While the rest of you are celebrating the turning of the calendar page to the year 2017, I am celebrating my own advance to 1858. Yesterday I read Turgenev’s Поездка в Полесье [A journey to Polesia], in which a hunter gets gloomy in the pine woods one day and meets a local robber the next (apparently there were supposed to be more installments, but that’s all that got printed, and pretty trivial stuff it is), the last of my 1857 reading, and today I began on his much-loved story Ася [Asya (a woman’s name)], published in January 1858. To provide a brief roundup of the 1857 items I read in the preceding days, in Pavel Melnikov (Pechersky)’s Медвежий угол [Bear’s Corner (i.e., ‘godforsaken hole’: nickname of the provincial town Chubarov)] the narrator visits a sleepy town created not for any economic reason but because someone pointed a finger at a map and said “Let there be a town there,” and the honest old contractor Gavrila Matveich explains how local corruption works; in Dostoevsky’s unexpectedly charming Маленький герой [A Little Hero] the narrator recalls a summer he spent at a country house when he was 11, tormented by the jokes of one woman and involved in the romantic travails of another; and in Tolstoy’s Люцерн [Lucerne] the narrator (essentially Tolstoy himself — he had recently visited the Swiss city) treats a wandering street singer from the Aargau to champagne at the fancy Schweitzerhof, hears his life story, and is enraged at the contempt shown by staff and guests to the ragged fellow — he is itching to use his fists on one or more of them but they don’t give him the satisfaction of an open insult. I enjoyed them all, but wouldn’t wish any of them to be longer than they are. Next (after the Turgenev story) come Goncharov’s Fregat “Pallada” [The Frigate Pallada] (about an 1852-55 expedition to Japan — it’s been called “his second-best book”); Aksakov’s Detskie gody Bagrova-vnuka [The childhood years of grandson Bagrov, tr. A Russian Childhood], which I’ve read in English and am looking forward to experiencing in the original; and Pisemsky’s Boyarshchina (name of a region) and Tysyacha dush [One Thousand Souls]. I was pleased, on going back over my reading record of the year, to see that I covered almost a decade (I started the year in 1851), so I should get well into the 1860s in 2017.

For a Robert Louis Stevenson quote suitable to the occasion, see this post, and a Happy New Year to you all!

I don’t normally post about things hidden behind paywalls, but Yiyun Li’s “To Speak Is to Blunder” (New Yorker, January 2, 2017) is so good I’m making an exception. It’s one of the best things I’ve read about someone’s personal relationship to language; I’ll provide a few excerpts so you can get the feel of it:

Years ago, when I started writing in English, my husband asked if I understood the implication of the decision. What he meant was not the practical concerns, though there were plenty: the nebulous hope of getting published; the lack of a career path as had been laid out in science, my first field of postgraduate study in America; the harsher immigration regulation I would face as a fiction writer. Many of my college classmates from China, as scientists, acquired their green cards under a National Interest Waiver. An artist is not of much importance to any nation’s interest. […]

Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom.” That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in and claims understanding and empathy do people call it a tragedy. One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.

I often feel a tinge of guilt when I imagine Nabokov’s woe. Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can be comforting and irreplaceable, yet it can also demand more than what one is willing to give, or more than one is capable of giving. If I allow myself to be honest, my private salvation, which cannot and should not be anybody’s concern, is that I disowned my native language. […]

The tragedy of Nabokov’s loss is that his misfortune was easily explained by public history. His story—of being driven by a revolution into permanent exile—became the possession of other people. My decision to write in English has also been explained as a flight from my country’s history. But unlike Nabokov, who had been a published Russian writer, I never wrote in Chinese. Still, one cannot avoid the fact that a private decision, once seen through a public prism, becomes a metaphor. Once, a poet of Eastern European origin and I—we both have lived in America for years, and we both write in English—were asked to read our work in our native languages at a gala. But I don’t write in Chinese, I explained, and the organizer apologized for her misunderstanding. I offered to read Li Po or Du Fu or any of the ancient poets I had grown up memorizing, but instead it was arranged for me to read poetry by a political prisoner.

I love the deadpan “instead it was arranged” of that last sentence (no, you can’t read the great poetry you love, you must read the politically relevant stuff we want to hear). The whole thing only takes up four pages in the print version, and I personally think it’s worth getting the magazine to read it. And this (one of several quotes from Katherine Mansfield’s journal) makes me want to read Mansfield:

It is astonishing how violently a big branch shakes when a silly little bird has left it. I expect the bird knows it and feels immensely arrogant.

Another great language-preservation initiative, from Mexico, as reported by Andrew S. Vargas for Remezcla:

Sesenta y Ocho Voces, Sesenta y Ocho Corazones (also known as 68 voces), is a new initiative from Mexico’s government Fund for The Culture and Arts (FONCA) that seeks to elevate Mexico’s 68 indigenous languages by preserving their myths, legends, poems, and stories in the form of beautifully animated short films. Their goal is to foment pride amongst speakers of these languages, and respect among those who don’t, under premise that “nadie puede amar lo que no conoce” (no one can love what they don’t know.)

There are currently seven of these short animated films available, covering dialects of the Huasteco, Maya, Mixteco, Náhuatl, Totonaco, Yaqui and Zapoteco languages. Ranging from two to three minutes, each film employs a different designer to give powerful expression the wisdom contained in these indigenous languages. From reflections on life and death, to vividly recounted myths of the ancient times, these films give Mexico’s indigenous languages their due place amongst the great treasures of human civilization. Check them out below (for English translations, look on their Vimeo page.)

An update says they’ve added videos in Mayo, Ch’ol, Tseltal, and Ayapaneco. Thanks, Trevor!