languagehat.com

A couple of years ago I posted about Barrie England’s blog Real Grammar; it’s now gone, along with its host (though it’s archived), but England has started a new one, Caxton (after this guy), and imported posts from his older blogs. It’s very nicely designed, and the latest post does a good succinct job of describing something I was going to post about, so I’ll just copy his text: “In his latest post, David Crystal gives details of recordings of how a sermon by John Donne might have sounded in the original pronunciation in 1622. Transcripts available here and the recordings here.” So add it to your bookmarks or RSS feed, and may it have a long and prosperous career! (Via Sentence first.)

I do enjoy a good heresy and an eloquent denunciation thereof (see, for instance, here or here), so you can imagine my pleasure when I came upon this passage from The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England: An Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles by Thomas Rogers (Cambridge, 1854; p. 202):

Hence detest we both all the old heretics, and their fancies, with the new prophets of Basilides, the manifestation of Marcion, the mysteries of the Manichees, the Jobelæa of the Scythians, the Symbonia of the Archontics, the Cabala of the Jews, the Alcoran of the Turks, and also all new heretics and schismatics, with all their cursed opinions; as first, the Anabaptists, and namely the Libertines, the Davi-Georgians, and Family of Love, and all the co-deified elders thereof; as Henry Nicholas, Eliad, Fidelitas, Christopher Vitel, Theophilus the Exile, and the rest.

I am particularly intrigued by the Jobelæa and the Symbonia; I would guess that the first might have something to do with Jubilee, but if anyone has any knowledge (or an entertaining guess) about either, I will be happy to hear it.

This story about “15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’” has been making the rounds, and I was afraid I would have to mount my spavined old historical-linguistics horse and do battle. In the comment thread of this post, marie-lucie and Piotr Gąsiorowski were scathing about it, and now Sally Thomason at the Log has obviated any need for effort on my part by doing a thorough demolition job. Her conclusions in a nutshell: “garbage in, garbage out” and “you still can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” For details, I happily refer you to her post, and join the many commenters there in thanking her for writing it.

When we left our hero, Baron Brambeus (alter ego of Osip Senkovsky), he was deciding against getting married as a cure for spleen (in the old sense of “melancholy”); now that I’ve read further, I can tell you that he considers hanging himself, but it’s too much trouble (and besides, hanged men look ridiculous), so he goes abroad instead. He sees pyramids and apes, kangaroos and English missionaries (пирамиды и обезьян[…], кенгуру и английских миссионеров), and returns home feeling he has studied people to the full and developed his mind and heart. But when his father is presented with the bill for these adventures, he shakes his head doubtfully and says as far as he knows, there’s nothing in people that’s worth even half that: “I think you were cheated.” His aunt calls him a fool. He goes off in a huff but decides they’re right and he was in fact cheated—he’d learned not about people but about foolishness, and he promises to tell us what he’s learned:

But the voyage is completed, the foolishness is done—which is, of course, a great joy to you all—and for our mutual pleasure I am ready to share with you three fragments of my foolishness. I say “fragments” because you yourselves are clever people and you know that we live in a fragmentary age. The time is past when a person lived a single life for eighty years straight and thought a single long thought in eighteen volumes. Now our life, mind, and heart consist of petty, motley, disconnected fragments—which is far better, more diverse, more pleasant for the eyes, and even cheaper. We think in fragments, exist in fragments, and are dispersed into fragments. For that reason I can put forth my biography in no other fashion; in our time, even foolishness goes forth into the world, as required, only in fragments, though sometimes fairly significant ones. We must walk in procession with the age!

(Russian below the cut.) Which sounds quite modern, no? At any rate, for his first adventure he heads south in search of strong sensations, which he first finds in a fearful Ukrainian storm and then when he arrives in Odessa and his coachman steps off and disappears forever into the mud. He spends some time in Odessa (mentioning the variety of languages, including the Italian I posted about here); having encountered a couple of yokels who came to town to sell wheat and lard and seemed to be having trouble getting rid of the proceeds, he wins all their money at cards and then hides in the quarantine quarter to escape their wrath. There he is informed by his Greek acquaintance Bolvanopoulo that he should go to Constantinople, which is entirely made up of strong sensations, so he takes ship for the Ottoman capital, where he indeed gets into some startling adventures among the even more varied nationalities of that great city (in the neighborhoods of Pera and Galata). And in that section (to come to the point of this divagating post) he used a word that puzzled me: тандур [tandur], described as “a large table with a large brazier underneath, surrounded by sofas and covered with a huge, thick wadded coverlet; in cold weather, women and men sit around it on the sofas, with their legs underneath and pulling the coverlet up to their necks, and, arranged like a wind rose, chat, redden from the brazier’s heat, swell up, and burst with happiness.”
Now, I knew the Persian word tandur ‘(clay) oven,’ which many of us are familiar with from tandoori chicken, but this was a different usage. The OED (in an entry from 1910) had it s.v. tandour (“A heating apparatus consisting of a square table with a brazier under it, round which persons sit for warmth in cold weather in Persia…, Turkey, and adjacent countries”), and on further investigation I found an almost identical description in Anastasius, Or, Memoirs of a Greek: Written at the Close of the 18th Century, by Thomas Hope (3rd ed., J. Murray, 1820, p. 76):

What could the company do, in the uncertain state of the sky, but collect round the tandoor? — that safe refuge against the winter’s rigours, that eastern nondescript, which in the angle of the mitred sofa holds a middle character between the table and the bed, and underneath whose gaudy coverlet all the legs of the snug party coverge round a pot of lighted charcoal, there to stew for the evening. Like the rest, I crept under the bed-clothes.
[footnote:] Tandoor: a square table, placed in the angle of the sofa with a brazier underneath and a rich counterpane over it, under which, in Greek houses, in cold weather, the company creep close to each other.

Sounds very cozy indeed.
At the end of the chapter, he finds himself in the care of a Doctor Skukolini, who converses with him on learned subjects, as a result of which “I became completely obtuse, tedious, and at the same time I felt myself quite learned. And the stupider I grew, the more learned I became! Isn’t that strange? [Я сделался совершенно тупым, скучным и в то же время почувствовал себя весьма ученым. И чем пуще я глупел, тем больше становился ученым!.. Не правда ли, что это странно?]” Reminds me of grad school.

[Read more…]

A worthy project: “Phonemica is a project to record spoken stories in every one of the thousands of varieties of Chinese in order to preserve both stories and language for future generations. […] Our mission: Bringing the richness of oral Chinese to a wider audience, through the words of natural storytellers, from every corner of the world where Chinese is spoken.” You can read more about it here:

We begin by finding storytellers. We interview them – sometimes in the dialect of their home village, sometimes in a variety of standard Mandarin – then put the recording online, transcribe it into Chinese characters, into a Romanized (Latin alphabet) version, and into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Also, we translate each story into English.
All this work is done by Phonemica volunteers, both online and off. If you’re interested, please get involved!

A great idea, and I hope similar things are being done with other languages.

Lucy Sisman’s wwword.com piece “Changing Times,” about the variety of headlines used at the NY Times, may not be of earthshaking consequence, but to lovers of print journalism, it’s pretty interesting—especially to me, who have been following the Times at least since my teenage years; I vividly remember many of the front pages shown, and I used to have a yellowing copy of MEN WALK ON MOON (with an apposite palindrome by Voznesensky: а луна канула [and the moon sank]; you can see it, along with an amazing selection of other Russian literary palindromes, here) until I had to clear out my parents’ garage and realized it was not in good enough shape to be worth anything and I didn’t want it cluttering up my garage. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout both world wars the Times frequently ran long headlines, in bold italic capitals, spread across all six columns and running three lines deep. It hardly needs pointing out that these were times with a lot of dramatic news. By contrast, the headline on the morning of September 12, 2001, was “U.S. ATTACKED,” in capitals with no italics. “Italics give importance and vitality, but this wasn’t a time for sensationalism,” Bodkin says. The trend to shorter headlines started with the moon, he adds. “The line on July 21, 1969, was ‘MEN WALK ON MOON,’ and the first time the Times went beyond a standard banner head.” Compare this brevity to the verbiage of October 15, 1912: “Maniac in Milwaukee Shoots Col. Roosevelt; He Ignores Wound; Speaks An Hour; Goes To Hospital.” That’s practically an entire story in today’s New York Post!

Several people sent me the worshipful Kevin Mahnken article from Humanities on the ubiquitous Pevear/Volokhonsky translation team (who have the mightiest PR juggernaut in the history of translation). I am not a fan of theirs (see, e.g., here), and I was glad to see Alexander Anichkin take them on in this Tetradki post, focusing on P&V’s allegedly perfect translation—”It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it”—of an allegedly repetitive Dostoevsky sentence:

I thought there was something suspicious about it. It can’t be that Dostoyevsky is as repetitive as this. His style is different from the beautifully succinct Turgenev, or the elaborately detailed, thoroughly explorative Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky writes in a semi-colloquial, almost chatty way, as though he is sitting at a tea table and telling a story to a group of friends. At times, it is sloppy, or seems so.
I searched the Russian text of Crime and Punishment to find the phrase that baffled Pevear. (See ‘Dostoyevsky on one page‘) This is how it goes (from Part I, beginning of Chapter VI):
Дело было самое обыкновенное и не заключало в себе ничего такого особенного.
It’s not repetitive at all, it’s a perfectly normal phrase. I’d translate it something like this:
[It turned out that] It was quite simple and there was nothing unusual about it.
My wife, a native English speaker, thinks that ‘and’ is better replaced with a semi-colon. She suggested:
In fact it was perfectly simple; there was nothing out of the ordinary about it.
[…]
“Ничего особенного” can mean ‘nothing complicated.’ For example, when you ask ‘Is it a difficult problem?’, you can get an answer ‘Nothing complicated.’ But here, in Dostoyevsky’s context it’s definitely ‘nothing extraordinary, nothing unusual, nothing suspicious’.
When you read the Humanities article between the lines, you can see that every time Pevear, who has ‘only a basic Russian’ as the author mentions, has doubts, Volokhonskaya bullies him into accepting her version.
Publishers have built such a juggernaut of PV’s translations, probably because of ‘live’ copyright, it’s unstoppable now.

Sadly, that final line is hard to dispute, but it’s nice to see someone pointing out an inconvenient truth.

Last month I mentioned Piotr Gąsiorowski’s series of posts on the origin of language; the latest post is so interesting I’m calling particular attention to it. Here’s the core of his conclusion:

The PIE reconstruction is a monumental intellectual achievement, and yet it isn’t “a language” that could be ascribed to any single speech community at any time. It’s a large set of coalescent reconstructions distributed in time and possibly in space as well. Other protolanguages, even relatively uncontroversial ones, are usually still more nebulous. If we ever manage to prove that the IE languages are related to some other established family, the reconstructed features of the common ancestor will naturally be even harder to constrain, and the protolanguage itself more elusive and fragmentary. It is hard to predict how far back in time our best reconstructive methods can take us before the notion od “protolanguage” becomes too vague to be meaningful. We can only resolve this question empirically, by putting our methods to extreme tests. If we consistently fail, it may mean that we have already reached the limit.

But if you’re interested in this stuff at all, you’ll want to read the whole thing. (That, by the way, is one of the main reasons I bailed out of historical linguistics; the uncertainty became too much for me.)

I recently read Bruce Grant’s The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus, which talked about a lot of interesting things but was a little too larded with jargon and Theory for my full reading enjoyment. But on page 120 he cleared up a problem that has been bothering me for years, ever since I first saw Sergei Bodrov‘s 1996 movie Кавказский пленник (Englished as both the literal Prisoner of the Caucasus and as Prisoner of the Mountains): what language(s) is/are the non-Russian characters speaking? I knew enough Georgian to recognize a few words and phrases, but a lot of it clearly wasn’t Georgian. Grant writes: “One sign that the film is squarely intended for Russian audiences is the curious contradiction between the consistent flow of subtitles and the “mountain of tongues” shared by the actors playing Caucasian characters—the captor’s daughter speaks to her father in Azeri, her father answers in Georgian, their kinsmen address them in Avar, and so forth.” An odd way of doing things, but at least next time I watch the movie I’ll know what I’m hearing.

bradshaw of the future has a post called “The ten coolest languages”; obviously any such top-ten list is to some extent subjective and arbitrary, and this one tails off at the end (“Sanskrit has a cool compounding system,” “Telugu: Because it has such a beautiful script”), but the ones chosen for their phonetics are truly astonishing. Number one is Austronesian languages of Vanuatu: “The languages of Vanuatu, like Vao, Tangoa, and V’enen Taut (Big Nambas), are I think the only languages in the world to use linguo-labial consonants. These consonants are made by touching the tip of the tongue to the upper lip.” Number two is Salishan languages:

Here are some words in Klallam. (ƛ̕ is a lateral ejective /tɬʼ/, c is /ts/)
sƛ̕íƛ̕aʔƛ̕qɬ “child”
ɬq̕čšɬnát “Friday”
sk̕ʷc̕ŋíyɬč “cherry tree”
The orthography is an accurate representation of the pronunciation. There are no epenthetic vowels; the word for “Friday” really does begin with 6 consonants.

Mazatec “contrasts creaky and breathy voice vowels”; ǃXóõ “has five basic click consonants, each of which can be modified in various ways, for a total of over 80 click sounds.” And there are audio files for many of these amazing phenomena!