languagehat.com

In the course of a very silly MetaFilter argument about whether it hurts the Guardian‘s feelings to be called the Grauniad (talk about your political correctness run amuck!), daisyk linked to the excellent Guardian style guide Twitter account, and I thought I’d share it here. Right off the bat I learned that the “La’s” of The La’s, a band I never heard of, is “an abbreviation of Lads, so the apostrophe signifies missing D, not a plural” and it’s pronounced Lazz (not, as apparently many people think, Lahz). Hooray for style guides!

A Victor Mair post at the Log discusses the issue of Chinese borrowings from Japanese (with links to earlier posts on the topic), focusing on a striking recent example:

The word “desu です” is a copula that occurs at the end of a statement sentence in Japanese. In Mandarin there was originally no such sentence final copula. However, in contemporary internet language usage, it is fashionable among Chinese young people to add deshuō 的说 (lit., “X’s saying”) to the end of sentences. Though many of them may not know the origin of the expression deshuō 的说, despite their being fond of using it, it is most likely a usage borrowed from Japanese.

Here is an example showing the phenomenon:

English: It is very cold today.

Japanese: Kyō wa totemo samui desu 今日はとても寒いです。

Standard Mandarin: Jīntiān hěn lěng 今天很冷。

Sino-Japanese (Mandarin with Japanese characteristics!): Jīntiān hěn lěng deshuō 今天很冷的说。

This is a phenomenon I noticed back around 2008 […], but I am only prompted to write about it now because in recent years so many of my students from Sinophone countries have developed such an enthusiasm for learning Japanese. […]

Bilingual (Mandarin and English) Chinese colleagues have explained this usage of deshuō 的说 as being roughly equivalent to “it seems that; it is said that”. Monolingual Chinese have told me that they think of deshuō 的说 as meaning roughly jùshuō 据说 (“reportedly; it is said that”).

A trilingual (Japanese, Mandarin, and English) Japanese colleague suggested to me that deshuō 的说, rather than deriving from desu です, may have come from deshō でしょう (“it seems that; I suppose; perhaps; would”), the volitional form of desu です.

So far as I can tell, sentence final deshuō 的说 is used primarily by teenagers and young people in their twenties.

There is, as usual, good discussion in the comments.

Jennifer Schuessler’s New York Times story reports on an exciting discovery; this bit is of particular LH interest:

The draft, Professor Miller argues, dates from between 1604, when the King James Bible was commissioned, and 1608, when the six teams were asked to send their work to the general committee for review. Unlike the other surviving drafts, which scholars date to later parts of the process, it shows an individual translator’s initial puzzling over aspects of the Greek text of the Apocrypha, indicating the reasoning behind his translation choices, with reference to Hebrew and Latin as well.

“You can actually see the way Greek, Latin and Hebrew are all feeding into what will become the most widely read work of English literature of all time,” Professor Miller said. “It gets you so close to the thought process, it’s incredible.”

Thanks, Bonnie!

A reader writes:

Can you tell what language the man is singing in during the opening credits?

This is the 1966 Soviet movie Aladdin’s Magic Lamp. I am guessing that the language is supposed to be Arabic, but somehow it doesn’t quite sound like it. Also, I can’t think of many Arabic speakers in the USSR. In the movie, most of the “eastern” looking actors were Georgians. Could the language be some kind of Georgian or Caucasus language?

I didn’t know the answer, so I turn it over to the Varied Reader. Anybody recognize it?

Isaac Butler has an interesting investigation in Slate of what Shakespeare might have meant by the word “fat.” He begins by saying that we think of Hamlet as “lean and pensive”:

But what if our mental image of Hamlet is wrong? What if the grieving, vengeful prince is actually fat? Just because you’ve never considered the possibility doesn’t mean that Shakespeare scholars haven’t argued about it, just one front in a centuries-old debate about how you determine meaning in Shakespeare’s plays.

The most straightforward way to figure out whether Hamlet is fat is to look at the text itself, in which Hamlet’s own mother calls him fat. During the play’s final sword duel, King Claudius turns to Queen Gertrude and says that Hamlet will win the duel, and Gertrude replies, “He’s fat and scant of breath,” before turning to Hamlet and telling him to “take my napkin, rub thy brows.”
[…]

We can also look at the history of scholarship of Hamlet, as University of Wisconsin–Whitewater professor Elena Levy-Navarro does in this wonderful essay on the subject of Hamlet’s fatness. Levy-Navarro documents how, during the Victorian era—a time of fad diets and fitness crazes where one’s weight was mistaken for an indication of one’s moral fiber—a vocal minority of Shakespeare scholars, following the lead of Goethe, believed Hamlet was fat and that his fatness indicated weakness. A Victorian actor named E. Vale Blake declared in an 1880 article for Popular Science Monthly that Hamlet was “imprisoned in walls of adipose,” which, “essentially weakens and impedes … the will,” leading to his inability to, as Levy-Navarro puts it, “act decisively to avenge his father.”
[…]

I decided to get to the bottom of this with some help from John-Paul Spiro, a Shakespearean scholar who teaches at Villanova. According to Spiro, investigating the meaning of specific words in Shakespeare is particularly fraught because Shakespeare was the Ornette Coleman of language. Beyond inventing more than 1,700 words, Shakespeare was “deliberately coming up with new meanings of words, and opening up new conceptual spaces,” Spiro said. The play Macbeth invents the contemporary definition of the word success, for example, and Shakespeare was the first person to use crown as a verb.

In order to figure out what fat means at this specific moment of Hamlet, then, we must look not only at how Elizabethans understood the term, but how his contemporaries used the term, how Shakespeare uses it in his plays in general, and how Shakespeare uses it in Hamlet. To the Elizabethans, fat could indeed mean sweaty, but “sweaty in the way fatty meat is sweaty when you cook it,” Spiro said. “Even in Elizabethan times, you would never say, ‘I went for a run, and now I’m fat.’”

They go to the concordance, and much discussion ensues. I still am not sure what Shakespeare meant by the word, but I learned things and was entertained.

Yes, this narrative.ly piece by Rosalie Chan is another “saving an endangered language” story, but Hakka is really interesting:

It’s 6:30 p.m. at a radio studio in Miaoli, a small city in Western Taiwan. Yin Chang is plugged in. Her headphones are on, and the microphone is adjusted close to her mouth. The lights are dim; a blue banner declaring “Voice of Hakka Radio 97.1 FM” hangs behind her.

Chang, 36, fixes her headphones and pushes a strand of her bobbed hair behind her ear. With a bright voice, she enthusiastically greets the audience: “Hello, tegaho gaihei DJ Yin!” – “Hello everyone, this is DJ Yin!”

Chang hosts a program called Heinai, or “It’s me” in a variety of Chinese known as Hakka, the language of a Han Chinese ethnic group scattered throughout the continent. Heinai is aimed at Hakka youth; it’s part of Chang’s efforts to reinvigorate the dying language.

Chang grew up in Miaoli and, like 62.2 percent of the local population, is Hakka. In Taiwan, the Hakka are frequently referred to as ke jia ren or “guest family people” because throughout their history, Hakkas have been a migrant group, fleeing settlements to avoid one catastrophe after another. The Hakkas arrived in Taiwan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they escaped the Manchurian Armies that were taking control of China. The Hoklo people had already settled the fertile land of Taiwan, so the Hakkas were left to make do with the remaining infertile foothills, and, thus are known for their history of hardship and frugality. […]

Every year the Hakka Affairs Council — an organization established in 2001 and dedicated to preserving Hakka culture and promoting Hakka media — surveys Hakka people in Taiwan about the presence of language in their lives. According to a 2013 survey, 47.3 percent can speak Hakka fluently; however, most of those are elderly. Only 22.8 percent of people aged 19 to 29 speak Hakka, and that figure is even lower for children 18 and under.

Chang hopes that by presenting Hakka music to young people in her country, it will spark their interest in learning the language and spur more engagement in the culture, the same way it did for her about ten years ago.

The link is from Victor Mair’s Log post, which contains an introduction to the remarkable history of the Hakka:

Although the Hakka amount to approximately only 4% of the total population of China, their influence on politics, the military, culture, and other spheres of life in the past two centuries has been disproportionately large

The Hakka have assumed positions of leadership not only in China, but in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the New World. To name only a few of the important Hakka statesmen, revolutionaries, and cultural leaders of the last century and a half, we may list the following:

The list includes everybody from Sun Yat-sen to Lee Teng-hui, Lee Kuan Yew, and Ne Win. I had no idea!

A nice little piece on the great and still underappreciated writer Andrei Platonov (see here and here for LH discussions of his novels) by Alice E.M. Underwood; it starts with quotes like “People see with the eyes of their heads; beards grow from exhaustion; fowl can be pro-Kulak; the body of a chicken is made dead for morning breakfast; and good communists live thanks to birth, and die of life,” gives a brief description of how his prose works, and ends with more samples. If the quotes intrigue you, go to the source!

Project Description:

This Survey constitutes a highly detailed micro-dialectological study of spoken Irish in the Aran Islands, focusing on geographical and social variation linked to generations (older and younger age-groups), genders (male and female), and level of education. It provides for the first time ever for any language anywhere in the world an extensive analysis of a wide range of phonological and grammatical variation on a dialectal and sociolinguistic basis. In the case of the largest of the three islands, Inis Mór, the Survey includes detailed information on phonological, grammatical and lexical variation at the level of individual townlands. The geographical layout of these townlands and the strategic position of the archipelago in Galway Bay in relation to the surrounding mainlands in Connemara, East Galway and Clare lend a remarkably potent visibility to the spectrum of linguistic variation displayed in the study. As such, the Survey echoes and also builds on Heinrich Wagner’s 1958-69 work Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects to provide an unrivalled portrait of Irish as it was spoken in Aran in the late twentieth century. Presenting a novel and ambitious exploration of complex linguistic change embedded in a social context, the Survey represents a milestone contribution to dialectology and sociolinguistics – and, indeed, to the Irish language itself – that is of international significance.

What a great project, and what a great thing to put online! You can read about it in a good Irish Times story by Lorna Siggins. This is particularly pleasing to me because Inis Meáin is where I practiced my Irish — learned at the Dublin Institute from Mícheál Ó Siadhail — four decades ago. Thanks for the links, Stan and Trevor!

This piece by Osama S. M. Amin is about a fragment of Gilgamesh that was discovered in 2011 and published in 2014, so it’s not exactly breaking news, but I hadn’t been aware of it and I suspect many of my readers will be in the same boat. Here’s Amin’s summary of the salient points:

● The revised reconstruction of Tablet V yields text that is nearly twenty lines longer than previously known.
● The obverse (columns i-ii) duplicates the Neo-Assyrian fragments which means the Epic tablet can be placed in order and used to fill in the gaps between them. It also shows the recension on Tablet V was in Babylonia, as well as Assyria and that “izzizūma inappatū qišta” is the same phrase that other tablets being with.
● The reverse (columns v-vi) duplicates parts of the reverse (columns iv-vi) of the late Babylonian tablet excavated at Uruk that begins with the inscription “Humbāba pâšu īpušma iqabbi izakkara ana Gilgāmeš”.
● The most interesting piece of information provided by this new source is the continuation of the description of the Cedar Forest:
   ○ Gilgamesh and Enkidu saw ‘monkeys’ as part of the exotic and noisy fauna of the Cedar Forest; this was not mentioned in other versions of the Epic.
   ○ Humbaba emerges, not as a barbarian ogre, and but as a foreign ruler entertained with exotic music at court in the manner of Babylonian kings. The chatter of monkeys, chorus of cicada, and squawking of many kinds of birds formed a symphony (or cacophony) that daily entertained the forest’s guardian, Humbaba.

Thanks, Matt!

I generally have little interest in lists of invented words, which at best induce a slight smile and are never heard of again, but every non-word (@nondenotative) is different; it consists of “combinations of English syllables that don’t appear in the dictionary,” and the very fact that it’s not trying to be clever means you can imagine definitions for (non-)words that don’t shout their would-be meaning at you. Kudos to Daniel Temkin, whose projects (shown at that link) involve other interesting ideas like Esoteric.Codes (“a blog investigating programming languages as experiments, jokes, and experiential art”) and Borges: The Complete Works (“All of Borges’s words, slightly out of order”).