languagehat.com

In a recent post, Anatoly discusses his occasional reluctance to look up English words he doesn’t know, preferring to deduce their meaning from context, a habit which occasionally leads him astray. (This is not a problem for me; I obsessively look up words, fearful of missing a shade of meaning that’s important in context.) He says the actual meaning sometimes turns out to be a letdown, but this was not the case for the word gossamer. It is indeed a great word, and I wonder how many languages have a specific word for (in the OED’s definition) “A fine filmy substance, consisting of cobwebs, spun by small spiders, which is seen floating in the air in calm weather, esp. in autumn, or spread over a grassy surface”? The etymology is both straightforward (goose + summer) and mysterious: why “goose summer”? OED:

The reason for the appellation is somewhat obscure. It is usually assumed that goose in this compound refers to the ‘downy’ appearance of gossamer. But it is to be noted that G. mädchen-, altweibersommer mean not only ‘gossamer’, but also a summer-like period in late autumn, a St. Martin’s summer; that the obs. Sc. GO-SUMMER had the latter meaning; and that it is in the warm periods of autumn that gossamer is chiefly observed. These considerations suggest the possibility that the word may primarily have denoted a ‘St. Martin’s summer’ (the time when geese were supposed to be in season: cf. G. Gänsemonat ‘geese-month’, November), and have been hence transferred to the characteristic phenomenon of the period. On this view summer-goose (which by etymologizing perversion appears also as summer-gauze) would be a transposition.

Victor Mair has a post at the Log featuring “Brian Holton’s ongoing translation of Shuǐhǔ zhuàn 水滸傳 (Water Margin; All Men Are Brothers) into Scots, part of which is available online.” Holton calls his version “The Mossflow,” a wonderful term which the DSL defines as “a wet peat bog, a quagmire, swamp.” Mair gives as an example the following passage:

那时西岳华山有个陈抟处士，是个道高有德之人，能辨风云气色。一日骑驴下山，向那华阴道中正行之间，听得路上客人传说：” 如今东京柴世宗让位与赵检点登基。”

Which Sidney Shapiro translates into standard English as:

At that time on Huashan, the West Sacred Mountain, lived a Taoist hermit named Chen Tuan. A virtuous man, he could foretell the future by the weather. One day as he was riding his donkey down the mountain towards the county town of Huayin he heard a traveller on the road say: “Emperor Chai Shi Zong has surrendered his throne to Marshal Zhao in the Eastern Capital.”

Holton renders it thus:

In thae days there wis a hermit hecht Chen Tuan bydin on the Wastlin Tap o Mount Glore: he wis a kennin an gracie sowl at bi glamourie cud guide the wind an wather. Ae day whan he wis striddlin his cuddie doun the brae ti the Gloresheddae Road he heard an outlan bodie sayin “Richt nou in the Eastren Capital Chai Shizong hes reteirit an Gaird-Marischal Zhao hes taen the throne”.

I love this sort of thing and wish to encourage it. Also, if you follow the first link to Mair’s post, you will find a vigorous discussion in the thread on language, dialect, and fāngyán 方言 ‘topolect.’

Anatoly recently posted about the Acapela Text to Speech Demo, saying he was struck by how well the Russian voice (Алена) rendered the text he entered. I tried it with both Russian and English and was similarly impressed. So I ask the same question he did: is this a particularly good, cutting-edge, site, or is this pretty standard for the current technology? If so, it’s come a long way since I last noticed it.

I presume we all know about the first appearance of the word America on the Waldseemüller map of 1507; what I, at any rate, didn’t know was that the text of the map and accompanying book, and hence the coining of the word, is thought to be the work of Waldseemüller’s friend Matthias Ringmann. As a Fourth of July post, therefore, I offer “How America got its name: The suprising story of an obscure scholar, an adventurer’s letter, and a pun,” a lively Boston Globe piece by Toby Lester. A sample:

The author, for example, demonstrates a familiarity with ancient Greek, a language that Ringmann knew well and that Waldseemüller did not. He also incorporates snatches of classical verse, a literary tic of Ringmann’s. The one contemporary poet quoted in the text, too, is known to have been a friend of Ringmann.

Waldseemüller the cartographer, Ringmann the writer: This division of duties makes sense, given the two men’s areas of expertise. And, indeed, they would team up in precisely this way in 1511, when Waldseemüller printed a new map of Europe. In dedicating that map, Waldseemüller noted that it came accompanied by “an explanatory summary prepared by Ringmann.”

This question of authorship is important because whoever wrote “Introduction to Cosmography” almost certainly coined the name America. Here again, I would suggest, the balance tilts in the favor of Ringmann, who regularly entertained himself by making up words, punning in different languages, and investing his writing with hidden meanings. In one 1511 essay, he even mused specifically about the naming of continents after women.

I confess I felt a sting from this offhand remark: “After studying the classics at university he settled in the Strasbourg area, where he began to eke out a living by proofing texts for local printers and teaching school. It was a forgettable life, of a sort that countless others like him were leading.” Yeah, well where would your texts be if there were nobody to proof them, eh?

Plato’s Protagoras, a translation is “an attempt at a collaborative translation of Plato’s Protagoras, a beautiful and challenging dialogue. The (lead) author is Dhananjay Jagannathan, a graduate student in ancient philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford.” You can read a little more about it here:

The basic principle is this: every day for a few months, I will post roughly a page of the dialogue on a blog (http://openprotagoras.wordpress.com/), side by side in Greek, in my own translation, and in Jowett’s classic 1871 translation that appears commonly online. I’ve invited readers to comment and offer suggestions to improve the translation. My goal is to communicate Plato in English the way readers of his would have interpreted his Greek, aiming to capture his range of styles (colloquial conversation on the street, philosophical debate, rhetorical displays, poetic analysis, and so on) in a contemporary idiom. The nature of the project requires a wide readership for its success, so I hope you will pass this along.

So I am passing it along, with best wishes for its success.

Robert McCrum’s new book Globish, about how English is becoming the world language because it’s so “unique” and “direct” and “universal” and what have you, has gotten a well-deserved thrashing from linguist John McWhorter in The New Republic. After some nice bits of paralipsis, or, if you prefer, preterition (“Never mind overall that a considerable proportion of the text is breezy recapitulation of English and American history with brief asides about implications for the development of English… And never mind the endless misinterpretations and downright solecisms….”), he gets down to the meat of his attack:

But the central problem is that McCrum’s sense that English is somehow uniquely “direct” and “universal” and therefore well-suited to bestride the world is false. In two ways.
First of all, to the extent that McCrum is taking this from English being light on conjugation suffixes (in the present, just little third-person singular –s) and not having gender (no el sombrero for hat but la luna for moon as in Spanish), you can’t claim that this makes it easier for a language to be universal without looking at the fate of other languages. [McWhorter uses the “murderously complex” Russian as a counterexample.]
Then McCrum errs in a second way. He misses that to the extent that geopolitical dominance and linguistic structure can be correlated, it’s in that the dominance causes the grammatical simplification, not the other way around.[…] McCrum knows this – but misses that it upends his paradigm. The Vikings didn’t pick up English because it was enticingly “universal” – they made it easier by picking it up.

He goes on to explain why “Globish reinforces some questionable ways of thinking about language.” It’s a good demolition job that I commend to your attention. (Joel at Far Outliers points out a minor error: “Unfortunately, McWhorter confuses Papua New Guinea, where Tok Pisin is the lingua franca, with Papua, where Indonesian is the lingua franca. Otherwise, he’s right on target.”)

As I enter my sixtieth year, I take pleasure in all the people life has put in my path (which of course includes you LH readers); on a less elevated plane, I take pleasure in the chicken curry and homemade peach ice cream I’m now digesting and in the presents generous kith and kin have showered me with, the more LH-relevant of which I will now mention, so you will know what I am experiencing in the weeks to come. From my wonderful wife, a CD of The Indestructible Beat of Soweto (this is one of the best records ever, and if you’re not familiar with it you should run right out and listen to it—mbaqanga forever!) and Viktor Shklovsky’s Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot. Ever since I read Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey I’ve been wanting to read more by this amazing stylist and critic, and this late work (it was finished in 1981, when he was 88) looks like just the ticket.
From Sven & Leslie, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak; from Brooke & Elias, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman (see this post from February) and The Russian Context: The Culture Behind the Language by Eloise M. Boyle and Genevra Gerhart (you can read about this amazing book, which I will be working my way through for at least the next year, here; I learned about it from a comment by Bill Walderman to this post on The Russian’s World by Gerhart). And from my brother Eric, this selection of Asian movies (original titles courtesy of Wikipedia/IMDb): Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ, saeng satawăːt), Adrift in Tokyo (転々, Tenten), Public Enemy (공공의 적, Gonggongui jeog), 24 City (二十四城记/二十四城記, Er shi si cheng ji), and Ashes of Time Redux (东邪西毒, Dung che sai duk). Many thanks to one and all!
Update. Just received a package from bulbul in far-off Slovakia: a copy of Язык старой Москвы [The language of old Moscow], a “linguistic-encyclopedic dictionary” of the language of Moscow of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by V. S. Elistratov. Looks both enjoyable and useful—Ďakujem!

My wife and I were doing an acrostic puzzle in which one of the clues was “penny farthing” and the answer they wanted was “bicycle.” I had never heard the term, so I looked it up, and it has a wonderful explanation. OED:

A bicycle with a large front wheel and a small rear one, current from the early 1870s to the mid 1890s; an ordinary. Now hist.
[…]1910 Lotinga’s Weekly 7 May 64 The old type of machine, known as the ‘Penny-Farthing’ owing to the size of the wheels.

The Wikipedia article has a picture showing the two coins together, as well as one of the contraption itself.

The Fondation Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has an online interview (French) with translator André Markowicz:

Born in Prague in 1960, André Markowicz spent the first four years of his life in Moscow. Brought up in France in a family of Russian intellectuals, he began translating under the guidance of the linguist Efim Etkind. Chekhov offered Markowicz an initial opportunity to translate prose, but it was with his translation of the complete works of Dostoyevsky for Actes Sud in the early 1990s that he first rose to prominence.

The interviewer’s introduction says: “By the time he finished the mammoth undertaking in 2002 he had proved something: what people had been reading by Dostoyevsky wasn’t Dostoyevsky. It wasn’t his style, there was nothing of his collision of linguistic registers, which had been smoothed out to obtain a language far too literary for an author whose strokes of the pen were like axe blows.” This illustrates a major difference between French tradition, which expects translations to read like French literature, and the Anglo-American tradition, which welcomes variety of style, including the kind of “low” register that is resisted in France. Some excerpts:

When you read the original text alongside the first translations (which came out almost immediately), you realize that you’re not looking at the same author. Dostoyevsky writes obsessively, there is a very striking use of repetition. The early translations took out those repetitions. On the other hand, he also makes up sentences which are not proper written Russian. That’s quite normal; in Russian, nobody tells you how to write properly. But the translators would construct sentences in proper written French. All the same, the ideas were still there. The issues which Dostoyevsky addresses are so crucial: responsibility, the relationship between God and the world, humanist values in modern society, good and evil, the nature of obsession. These are questions of philosophy, not style. So you can read a very bad translation of Dostoyevsky and still be gripped by reading him. The fact that Dostoyevsky’s works had already been translated meant that I was in the fortunate position of a writer putting forward his own vision of that output. I was lucky to be able to work on the style, using the ear that I had for the text in my native language. Now, in Dostoyevsky, as in any writer, style is sense. My translation was not so much a new reading as a way of clarifying a number of points, after a century of reading Dostoyevsky…
[. . .]
I was one of the first translators to become the focus of very personal discussion. What the readers of my generation were arguing about was not so much my translation, in the end, as the ones they’d grown up with. Was my own reading right? At any rate, I can certainly account for it. But the way I translate, not respecting the canonical norms for French literature because the author is Russian, well, that of course upsets those readers who only see foreign literature through the lens of French literature. But it seems to me that we should be able to go beyond this difficulty. For me this is extremely important. It is in this respect that translation is a political act. It is not simply a question of turning what is foreign into French, but of understanding that it should not be the same as we are. Translation should be a process of reception, not of assimilation.

There’s much more of interest, including an illuminating discussion of Shakespeare towards the end. And I like his modesty: “People quoted me as saying that I was restoring the true face of Dostoyevsky. I never claimed to be doing so much. The earlier translations were clearly inaccurate in terms of style, but they did give a certain face to Dostoyevsky. Mine gave him a different one.” Next up, Pushkin: “‘I’ve taken thirty years to translate Eugene Onegin,’ he says. ‘It’s my whole life’.”

Kyoto Journal is “a non-profit volunteer-based quarterly magazine established in 1986” that “offers interviews, essays, translations, humor, fiction, poetry and reviews.” Their current issue, #74, “(latest we have ever been in getting a new one out!) is a long-awaited special, on the Silk Roads, guest-edited by Leanne Ogasawara, with guest designer Kevin Foley providing some spectacular layouts and typography.” Leanne’s blog, tang dynasty times (“all the peonies of Chang’an”), “was the catalyst for this special themed issue of KJ. In posts that read as dispatches from outposts on a journey of exploration deep into the history of relations between East and West, she reflects on aspects of what a truly global culture might encompass, presenting Tang multiculturalism and Silk Road cosmopolitanism (and much, much more) as reference points for our present times.” Check out the KJ material available online (and, of course, Leanne’s excellent blog), and if you’re sufficiently impressed, you might seek out a physical copy (¥1,500, US/Can$15, Aus$20, €10). I’m getting mine free, because I contributed a review of Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road (see this LH post from last year, as well as the previous posts linked therein).

Update (Sept. 2018). #74 is, of course, no longer the current issue, and I have changed the link accordingly; there do not seem to be excerpts available online.