languagehat.com

Last year we discussed Victorian colons in the context of Dickens; now, as I am finally remedying my lifelong failure to read Jane Eyre, I am struck by the punctuation in the second paragraph:

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

I like those colons very much; semicolons just wouldn’t be the same (and in any event one of the cardinal tenets of my editorial beliefs is that you can’t have two semicolons in the same sentence unless they are separating groups of items themselves separated by commas). It’s a pity we’ve let this form of punctuation slip away—I wonder when that happened?

The following paragraph has what to modern eyes is a bizarre mismatch of punctuation and wording:

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner, — something lighter, franker, more natural as it were — she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children.”

The combination of indirect discourse with quotation marks (which I encounter also in the Trollope novels I am reading to my wife) displeases me, and I am glad it has vanished into the dustbin of history. (I reproduce the punctuation from the 1850 edition of Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. By Currer Bell that is available on Google Books.)

Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org writes:

I’ve come across the following quotation in a number of places, such as this article from The Economist:

There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter.

The quotation is attributed to William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, who died in 1386. The problem is that I could only find the quotation in modern translation and it sounds distinctly un-Middle Englishy, so I doubted that it was authentic. Because I could only find it in translation, tracking it down was difficult—it’s hard to search for a Middle English quotation if you don’t have the Middle English diction. It turns out that the quote is genuine, but it is a rather free translation.
[. . .]

Langland says nothing about “writ[ing] a decent letter.” In the B-text he does bemoan the fact that English scholars can’t read a letter in languages other than Latin or English, but says nothing about writing them. The translation of clerk as “schoolboy” is also questionable. The word schoolboy connotes a relatively young age, but clerk, which is the ancestor of the modern cleric, referred to clergy, often used in the context of someone who could read and write. It could also refer to a university student—as in Chaucer’s clerk—but the word wouldn’t be applied to what we now dub a schoolboy. Also the word grammar has shifted in meaning considerably. […]

So a more accurate modern translation would read something like:

Latin, the basis of all, now beguiles children. None of these new university students can compose good poetry or write formally. Not one in a hundred can properly interpret what an author has written, or even read anything at all that is not written in Latin or English.

Langland was indeed bemoaning the state of learning, but not in the way people bemoan the supposed decline of English today. He was concerned with the fact that scholars didn’t know languages other than Latin and English, and the schoolchildren were not even learning good Latin. He was not going on about the decline of English, which at the time was not a prestige dialect—it was what linguists call a basilect, with Anglo-Norman French being the acrolect and Latin being the language of scholarship. The idea of English declining wouldn’t have made sense to him. If anything, English was on the rise, with poets like him, Chaucer, and Gower, once again composing serious verse in it.

Original and further details at the link; I love this sort of careful investigation.

Chi Luu (see this post) has a JSTOR Daily piece about a much-discussed topic, the English spelling system and the many attempts to reform it. It begins with Gerard Nolst Trenité’s “The Chaos,” a poem showcasing the absurdities of English orthography which I posted about almost a decade ago; continues with Patrick Groff’s 1976 paper “Why There Has Been No Spelling Reform,” his own preference (which I share) for keeping the historical forms of English spelling in place, and Anatoly Liberman’s cranky opposition to that view (“What sentiment? What value?”); and finishes up with a paean to the orthographical playfulness of the internet:

So are these deliberate misspellings a sign of English orthography simplifying organically, or deteriorating rapidly? The early constraints of mobile phone text messaging gave rise to short form spellings–which inevitably gave rise to a moral panic about literacy rates decreasing in young people. However, studies have shown that text-speak actually improves literacy, as users receive more exposure to language and different word forms, improving their reading development. According to David Crystal “there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language. […] If you can’t spell a word, then you don’t really know whether it’s cool to misspell it. Kids have a very precise idea of context – none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams – they know they would be marked down for it.”

In Young People’s Everyday Literacies: The Language Features of Instant Messaging, the analysis of a 32,000 word corpus of college students’ instant messages shows how IM users employ rich linguistic features to convey paralinguistic cues and clarify conversational contexts. One of the main features was eye dialect spellings and other simplified spelling forms. So deliberate misspellings are being used all the time, not because users are necessarily illiterate but because they know how to manipulate language in the right contexts. These new spellings are productively used and widely shared, quite unlike a spelling reform drafted by committee and applied by edict.

Lots of good stuff in there; thanks, Paul!

I was so tickled by the link Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) provided here that I thought I’d feature it; how can I, who began studying Russian in Argentina and still loves hearing Carlos Gardel, resist a site that features gorgeous images, clips of tango music and dancing, and lyrics in Spanish and Russian? Without further ado: Переводы стихов танго [Translations of tango lyrics].

And while we’re on the subject, I was intrigued to see that OnEtDi has a more specific etymology of tango than I was aware existed (it’s usually “perhaps of African origin”): “from Argentine Spanish tango, originally the name of an African-American drum dance, probably from a Niger-Congo language (compare Ibibio tamgu ‘to dance’).” Anybody know more about this?

Andrea Appleton at smithsonian.com reports on a new publication:

Middle Welsh and Manx, Lingwa de Planeta and Latgalian. In its 150-year history, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into every major language and numerous minor ones, including many that are extinct or invented. Only some religious texts and a few other children’s books—including The Little Prince by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—reportedly rival Alice for sheer number of linguistic variations.

But the real wonder is that any Alice translations exist at all. Penned in 1865 by English scholar Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, the book’s delight in wordplay and cultural parodies makes it a torment for translators.

How do you write about the Mouse’s tale without losing the all-important pun on “tail”? Some languages, like the Aboriginal tongue Pitjantjatjara, don’t even use puns. What about when a character takes an idiom literally? […]

A massive new work, Alice in a World of Wonderlands, devotes three volumes to exploring such questions. Published by Oak Knoll Press, the books include essays by 251 writers analyzing the beloved children’s book in 174 languages. The essays are scholarly but peppered with anecdotes illuminating the peculiarities of language and culture as they relate to Carroll’s book. […]

Language and typography scholar Michael Everson says the novel’s inherent difficulty is part of its appeal. “The Alice challenge seems to be one that people like because it’s really fun,” he says. “Wracking your brains to resurrect a pun that works in your language even though it shouldn’t, that sort of thing.” For instance, an early Gujarati translator managed to capture the tail/tale pun for readers of that western Indian tongue. When someone talks incessantly, it is often conveyed through the Gujarati phrase poonchadoo nathee dekhatun, which means “no end in sight”—allowing the translator to play on poonchadee, the word for “tail”, with poonchadoo.

I love the Gujarati example, and there are other goodies at the link (“In the Swahili edition, the Hatter wears a fez and the dormouse is a bush baby”). It’s amazing how clever people can be at coming up with corresponding wordplay. And I should note that the article doesn’t mention one of the more famous and successful versions, Nabokov’s Аня в Стране Чудес.

I’ve gotten to another good passage on language in Halkin’s Jabotinsky (see this post); the context is Jabotinsky’s founding of the Hebrew publishing house Hasefer:

One of Hasefer’s first volumes, issued in 1923, was a slim collection of Jabotinsky’s Hebrew poetry translations. In it were selections from Poe and D’Annunzio, the whole of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, and sections of Edmond Rostan’s Cyrano de Bergerac. What made it noteworthy, however, was not its content but its use of the Sephardic diction that Jabotinsky had first heard in Basel in 1903, together with the Sephardic system of poetic scansion. Although the Hebrew spoken in twentieth-century Palestine had adopted the Sephardic pronunciation, nearly all prominent Hebrew poets of the day were still adhering to the Ashkenazi rules of composition. Jabotinsky’s translations had an impact on the younger generation of Hebrew poets and helped speed the transition to a Sephardic prosody that took in the 1920s.

A second, more radical change that he promoted never attracted many followers. This was the Latinization of the Hebrew alphabet for purposes of phonetic clarity, an idea in keeping with similar spelling reforms undertaken at the time, such as the simplification of Russian and Yiddish orthography in the Soviet Union and the Latinization under Atatürk of Turkish’s Arabic script. It was a symptom of Jabotinsky’s ambivalent attitude toward Jewish tradition that he, the ardent lover and proponent of Hebrew, had an almost dyslexic difficulty with its written characters—“those damned square letters,” he once called them—and wished to exchange them for an alien system that would have severed the language from its ancient roots. Happily, few of its users agreed with him.

(Tsk tsk, such editorializing!) The last proposal reminds me of Nabokov’s wishing that Russian were Latinized.

I was shocked to learn from wood s lot that the wonderful poet Charles Tomlinson has died. As Michael Yong’s Bristol Post obituary says:

He was one of the first English men of letters to appreciate the great achievements of the American poets of the mid-20th century, particularly the work of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Yvor Winters, Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen – all of whom he came to know personally – and his poetry showed from the start, particularly in its versification, a strong American influence.

That’s doubtless why Yanks like me responded so readily to his work (Wallace Stevens was another early influence). Go to the wood s lot link for Michael Schmidt’s Guardian obit and a beautiful pairing of Tomlinson’s short poem “Reeds” with a color photo by Mark Woods (the proprietor of the s lot); he also quotes a majestic longer poem which I will reproduce here as an appropriate read for this late-summer day:

        IV. The Fireflies

I have climbed blind the way down through the trees
(How faint the phosphorescence of the stones)
On nights when not a light showed on the bay
And nothing marked the line of sky and sea—
Only the beating of the heart defined
A space of being in the faceless dark,
The foot that found and won the path from blindness,
The hand, outstretched, that touched on branch and bark.
The soundless revolution of the stars
Brings back the fireflies and each constellation,
And we are here half-shielded from that height
Whose star-points feed the white lactation, far
Incandescence where the single star
Is lost to sight. This is a waiting time.
Those thirty, lived-out years were slow to rhyme
With consonances unforeseen, and, gone,
Were brief beneath the seasons and the sun.
We wait now on the absence of our dead,
Sharing the middle world of moving lights
Where fireflies taking torches to the rose
Hover at those clustered, half-lit porches,
Eyelid on closed eyelid in their glow
Flushed into flesh, then darkening as they go.
The adagio of lights is gathering
Across the sway and counter-lines as bay
And sky, contrary in motion, swerve
Against each other’s patternings, while these
Tiny, travelling fires gainsay them both,
Trusting to neither empty space nor seas
The burden of their weightless circlings. We,
Knowing no more of death than other men
Who make the last submission and return,
Savour the good wine of a summer’s night
Fronting the islands and the harbour bar,
Uncounted in the sum of our unknowings
How sweet the fireflies’ span to those who live it,
Equal, in their arrivals and their goings,
With the order and the beauty of star on star.

(I strongly suspect there should be a period after “unknowings,” but the Poetry Foundation text doesn’t have one, and since I no longer seem to have my copy of the Selected Poems I can’t check it against a printed copy.)

I read Dan Barry’s long NY Times story on hurling because of my interest in Ireland, and I was pleased by “The Connemara team, from the Micheal Breathnach club in Inverin (named after an early-20th-century Irish writer, in keeping with this country’s celebration of the word)…” I’d enjoy rooting for the Mets even more if they were the New York Walt Whitmans.

One thing puzzled me:

On the Connemara side, players sat with hurleys in hand as their wiry manager, a school psychologist named Rory O Bearra, encouraged them in the language of Irish.

Mark your men, lads! Catch the ball — ball to hand! Move the ball quickly. Short grip on the hurley. Hit the man or hit the space with the ball. Let’s go, lads, let’s go!

I presume “the language of Irish” refers to the Irish language, and the passage in italics is translated therefrom, but it’s possible that is intended to mean “the quaint English dialect of the local Irish people”; it’s an odd locution, so it is.

Nupepa is:

Another place to talk about Hawaiian-Language Newspapers! Please note that these are not translations, but if anything they are just works in progress. Hopefully the English gets across the overall intent of the articles. Please comment if you come across misreads or anything else you think is important!

It’s lots of fun if you enjoy Hawaiian and/or old newspapers, and the comments are interesting too; this marriage announcement from 1913 got a response “Thank you for putting this up. Oscar Opiopio Apana was my grandfather’s (Frank L. Apana) brother.”

The Harvard Sentences are a set of phonetically balanced sentences used for testing audio circuits. If you’ve ever wanted to hear them spoken aloud, the Open Speech Repository has you covered: American English, British English. They also have files in Mandarin, French, and Hindi. (Thanks, Trevor!)