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Ani Kokobobo’s “Candid about the Camera: Tolstoy Scholars on Adapting Anna Karenina” is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking things I’ve read on adapting a classic novel; it’s a set of scholarly reactions to Anna Karenina film adaptations based on a special issue of the Tolstoy Studies Journal: Anna Karenina for the Twenty-First Century. I won’t try to summarize the various contributions, I’ll just reproduce one of the shortest and most intriguing, by my man Gary Saul Morson:

My favorite adaptation of Anna Karenina is the old Greta Garbo film because it gets the story EXACTLY wrong. Karenin is made completely beastly, Anna just a long-suffering, completely innocent soul. In the novel, Vronsky goes off to fight the eastern war because Anna has committed suicide, but in the film, Anna commits suicide because Vronsky has left her to fight the Eastern War! The Levin story barely exists, only as much of it as Anna would pay attention to.

In short, the Garbo film is the film that Anna herself would have made. If one sees the difference between it and the novel Tolstoy wrote, one appreciates the difference in perspective underlying the work, and so one understands the novel a lot better. And one grasps the difference between the “pro-Anna” and “anti-Anna” critical traditions better as well.

I now want to see several of the movies they mention, and am curious to see Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters again from this point of view. And here‘s a follow-up post by David Herman.

Adrienne LaFrance has a post for the Atlantic that focuses on the term “read” in “read receipts” (a phrase I had been unfamiliar with; it means “the little notification that pops up for the sender of a text message once the recipient of that message has opened [and ostensibly read] the text”):

How do you pronounce the term? Do you say it in the past-tense, so it sounds like “red”? Or in the present tense, so it sounds like “reed”?

This was the subject of a brief but dizzying newsroom back-and-forth on Monday among colleagues who insisted that one or the other was definitely, absolutely, without question the right way. Our dialogue never reached the proportions of the Great Dark Chocolate Debate of last week, but we still never reached a consensus. (I asked folks on Facebook and Twitter for their opinions and received similarly passionate yet inconclusive responses.)

Team “red” had a compelling case: A read receipt is a receipt that’s generated once the text message has been read. Therefore, past tense. But there was solid logic on team “reed,” too: Just think of it like a “repair receipt,” or “pay stub,” or “mailing receipt,” none of which are in the past tense even though they indicate an activity that’s already taken place.

Apparently “the question has been floating around since at least 2010,” and having belatedly become aware of it, my curiosity has been aroused. Arguments from logic are utterly uninteresting to me, since language is not logical; the only relevant question is how the term was traditionally pronounced in the relevant speech community, before the n00bs came along and ruined everything. So if you are aware of such a community and such a tradition, by all means share your knowledge. (Thanks, Paul!)

Geoff Pullum has been investigating the origins of the witticism that the oboe is “an ill wind that nobody blows good”; having chuckled at it repeatedly myself over the years (in an earlier post Geoff calls it “one of the funniest quotations I’ve ever studied”), I was extremely interested in his findings. He enlisted the great Fred Shapiro, compiler of the Yale Book of Quotations, who turned up a citation by Walter Winchell in the Scranton Republican of January 7, 1930, which rules out Ogden Nash (he had been proposed as originator); Ben Zimmer pushed it back to the fall of 1929. I’ll let you discover the details at his post; I want to quote the end, which expands on the idea that “The transmission processes for jokes almost guarantee in large numbers of cases we can never get back to the originators”:

People repeat things they hear other people say, and don’t always reproduce them perfectly, or attribute them correctly — or bother to attribute them at all. The passing of phrases from person to person not only obscures joke authorship but also affects all the rest of the language. The oboe calumny traveled around the Anglophone world via the same channels that caused American English to slowly diverge from British English — and then send back Americanisms to Britain, and in turn acquire Britishisms. The same processes that once turned the colloquial Latin of Roman soldiers into French.

We’ll probably never get back to a single true originator of the oboe witticism, and the reason is essentially the same as the reason that human languages change a little with each passing generation, and never seem fully polished or organized or codified.

An interesting thought, well put.

I’m a sucker for unpredictable pronunciations of place names and have posted about them more than once (e.g., in 2003 and 2007), so I was delighted to run across the website North Carolina place names:

From the mountains to the coast, place names in North Carolina can be confusing. (Why don’t Rowan and Chowan rhyme?) Click on the map below to hear North Carolina county names pronounced by local authors Bland Simpson and Michael McFee. The list that follows it includes cities, towns, mountains, lakes, and more.

It is wonderful to have audio files for all these place names, especially to verify what looks impossible, e.g. Cajahs Mountain = KAY-JUH Mountain. Click and enjoy! (Via Joel at Far Outliers, where you’ll find a selection of the weirder ones.)

The Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales is “a set of computerized linguistic resources and language processing tools” for the French language; the tabs on that front page lead to a lexical portal, a corpus of texts, dictionaries, and other resources that I’m too beat to investigate right now, but I look forward to exploring them and I thought I’d pass them along for anyone who works (or plays) with French and isn’t already familiar with it. Thanks, Paul!

The History Blog reports:

Founded in the 859 A.D. by Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a wealthy merchant who was herself highly educated and who dedicated her considerable inheritance to the creation of a mosque and school in her community, the University of Qarawiyyin in Fes, Morocco, is the oldest degree-granting institution in the world. The Al-Qarawiyyin library has been in continuous operation since the 10th century and is believed to be the oldest library in the world. After years of neglect, the library is undergoing extensive renovation as part of a renewal program that will restore the Medina, Fes’ walled pedestrian historic district built in the late 8th, early 9th century. […]

The library is replete with extremely rare, some unique, volumes. There are more than 4,000 manuscripts in its collection, including a 9th century Quran written in beautiful Kufic script on camel skin, the earliest known Islamic hadiths, and an original manuscript of the Mukkadimah, a universal history written in 1377 by philosopher Ibn Khaldun which many scholars hold to be the first exploration of fields we know as sociology, historiography, demography and other social sciences. […]

Right now, only curator Abdelfattah Bougchouf has access to the rare manuscripts kept in the secure room. With the help of experts from the Institute of Computational Linguistics in Italy, that will soon change. All 4,000+ manuscripts are being digitized in the new laboratory. This will make them widely available to students and researchers all over the world. About 20% of them have been digitized so far. The scanning process will also highlight any small holes and areas in need of conservation that are not necessarily evident to the naked eye.

Exciting news for anyone interested in the Arabic literary/cultural tradition. Thanks, Paul!

I just learned a useful term from Wikipedia: “An anti-language or cant is the language of a social group which develops as a means of preventing people from outside the group understanding it. […] Examples of anti-languages include cockney rhyming slang, CB slang, the grypsera of Polish prisons, thieves’ cant, Polari, and possibly Bangime. The concept was studied by the linguist M. A. K. Halliday who used the term for the lingua franca of an anti-society which is set up within another society, as a conscious alternative to it, and which indicates linguistic accomplishments of the users in action.” My problem is that I’m not sure how it’s supposed to differ from a cryptolect. Is anyone familiar enough with this stuff to clarify (if indeed there is a significant difference)?

(By the way, we discussed Polari back in 2003.)

I’ve excavated my pile of old journals up to the Aug. 14, 2015, TLS, where I was taken aback by a couple of (what struck me as) very odd relative clauses in Margreta De Grazia’s “Is there a Higgs boson in the house?” (a review of Graham Holderness’s Tales From Shakespeare: Creative Collisions). Though the article is not available from the TLS site, it has happily been excerpted here, if you want to see the passages in context. Here they are, with the offending clauses bolded:

The encounter between Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare in each critical chapter sparks a fictive spin-off – a fantasy travelogue, a comedy skit, a spy thriller – with the exception of the last, that remains grounded in the hard fact of terrorism.

As in the Essex rebellion, the play, by enacting a king’s deposition, incites insurrection. It introduces the native spectators to the possibility of overthrowing a ruler that in turn clears the way for a successor more hospitable to the British.

My sense of English forbids both these usages; they are not stylistic variants, they are unambiguously wrong, with “which” required rather than “that” in each case. But of course my sense of English is increasingly out of date (I am still not resigned to seeing “may have” instead of “might have” in counterfactuals, for example), so I want to canvass the Varied Reader: do those thats seem OK to you, dubious, or outright wrong?

Michael Erard has an Audible Range piece on how English is developing:

You might think of English, which is spoken by the largest number of people on the planet, as a mighty, never-ending river, full of life and always churning and changing. If you speak the language, it’s natural to wonder where this river is headed. And who will shape the sounds that bubble out of it in the future — 20, 50, or even 100 years from now?

Feeding the river are two tributaries that determine its direction. One of these carries the influence of the estimated two billion people who speak English as a non-native language. They are influential not just because of their number but also because the majority of interactions in English in the world occur between non-native speakers — as many as 80 percent, according to linguists. This is English playing its role as a global lingua franca, helping speakers of other languages connect with each other.

The other tributary carries the changes that English has been undergoing for hundreds of years. Between the 12th and 16th centuries, for example, English underwent the “great vowel shift,” which shortened some vowels, like “ee” to “aye,” and pushed others up and to the front of the mouth, so that the Middle English vowel pronounced “oh” is now pronounced “oo,” as in “boot.”

In the mid-20th century, linguist and English historian at the University of Michigan Albert Marckwardt argued that English wasn’t done changing and that the momentum of the past would carry on into the future.

There’s discussion of how non-native speakers change vowels, consonants, and intonation patterns, and audio links to the start of A Tale of Two Cities read in Old English, modern British-English, and “what English might sound like in 100 years.”

Anthony Verity, who has recently translated Homer’s Odyssey, has some things to say about it at OUPBlog:

The toughest challenge for the 21st century translator is undoubtedly that of register. As we all know, no one ever spoke Homeric Greek. It is an amalgam of different dialects, predominantly Ionic, whose effect is to set the story apart from the everyday, and to lend it a dignity appropriate to a tale of long ago heroic deeds. That said, Homer does often go remarkably well into current English. ‘Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who was driven/far and wide after he had sacked the sacred city of Troy’ is a near-literal rendering of the Odyssey’s first two lines. Compare the task of producing an acceptable version of ‘His sweet spirit surpasses the perforated labour of bees’ (Pindar, Pythian 6.52-4).

Still, there are times when one yearns for a modern epic poetic, to capture something of Homer’s heroic loftiness, at the same time as satisfying the two classes of notional classics readers: staying close to the Greek and offering a good read to the casual bookshop/internet buyer. It can’t be done consistently, of course. We can no longer draw on the poetic diction available to English writers in the 300-odd years from Shakespeare to the Georgians. T.S. Eliot saw to that, and in any case no one these days – with the possible exception of Derek Walcott – writes epic.

Nothing earth-shattering, but I always enjoy reading translators on their craft.