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If you’ve been frustrated by finding at Google a tantalizing snippet of what looks like an invaluable article on exactly the topic you’re interested in, only to discover that it’s behind the JSTOR wall, you’ll want to read this conversation between Tom Matrullo of IMproPRieTies and Bruce Heterick, Director of Library Relations at JSTOR. Here’s the basic point:

In fact, and here’s the maybe-if-and-when good news, the presiding lights behind JSTOR are now looking at various ways and means to open its treasurehouse to all, because they understand that that makes all sorts of sense. They simply have to ensure that by doing so, they don’t remove the parts of their economic model that have enabled them to build a self-sufficient, independent 501(c)3 organization in a relatively short time.

There’s much more in the post and comments; I don’t understand all the economic issues involved, but I’m glad they’re being discussed, and hopefully they’ll be solved before long. (Via Tom’s comment on this post at This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.)
Update. A followup post clarifies the situation, all too depressingly. Heterick wrote Tom:

It isn’t really the case that JSTOR is thinking about “open access” as much as I was carrying forward the notion that JSTOR is always trying to “open access” more broadly to other communities (e.g. secondary schools, public libraries, developing nations). That is an important part of JSTOR’s mission (to extend access as broadly as possible), so perhaps I should have used the phrase “broaden access” instead of “open access” to avoid the confusion with much more highly-publicized “open access movement”(OA).

Tom says, “Apparently JSTOR doesn’t believe that knowledge, the scholarly intelligence of the humanities, belongs to us all. I believe JSTOR is wrong.”

A couple of newspaper articles on the revival of Penobscot, an Algonquian language barely hanging on in Maine (Ethnologue prematurely pronounces it extinct): the Boston Globe‘s “Last Words,” by Stacey Chase, and DownEast Magazine‘s “Lost in Translation,” by Abby Zimet. Both have good quotes and samples of Penobscot words. From the Globe piece:

Maine’s Native American tribes speak closely related languages that derive from the Eastern Algonquian family of languages once widely used from Maine to Virginia. But a common misperception is that tribal languages are relics linguistically frozen in the 1600s, when they were first heard by missionaries and explorers, and they are missing words critical to communicating in today’s culture. “It’s entirely possible to talk about the stock market or auto racing in Penobscot if you want to,” MIT’s Richards says. “There’s nothing inherent in the language that makes it unsuitable for modern use.”

And from DownEast:

According to many experts, Penobscot is among [the disappearing languages] — though debate continues as to whether it is “dead” or merely “dormant.” Either way, outsiders paint a grim picture. Dr. Ives Goddard, curator and senior linguist at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, has been quoted as declaring: “The Penobscot language is extinct. There are no native speakers.”
Of course this is news — alternately amusing and infuriating — to tribal members who exchange daily pleasantries in their native tongue. In reality, almost anyone of a certain age on Indian Island will say they can still hear echoes of a native-speaking grandmother or aunt, and many repeat the native phrases of daily life to their children: “scowi mits” (come eat!) “koli keseht” (good job!) “ciksrta” (be quiet!) “krselrmzl” (I love you).
The disconnect between white and native perceptions is centuries old, a fragment of what one Penobscot activist calls “our twistory.”

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I’ve gotten interested in Chechnya and the Chechens, and after reading two superb books by reporters that came out after the First Chechen War, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power by Anatol Lieven (excellent historical and cultural background, on both Russians and Chechens) and Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus by Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal (great reporting—Gall in particular must have an amazing ability to convince hard-bitten and secretive rebels to let her accompany them to hideouts), I have moved on to Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory by Yo’av Karny, an odd but gripping book by an Israeli who became fascinated with the “mountain peoples” of the Caucasus. He mentions the Narts, the mythical race of giants whose tales are told throughout the North Caucasus (I wrote about them here and here), and in the process of investigating the Chechen versions of the Nart saga I discovered the later illi epics, comparable to Homer or the Serbian epics (JonArno Lawson says “This ancient rhyming form of the heroic ballad, which has been passed down until recently as oral literature, is peculiar to the Chechens. It is their oldest form of self-expression as a people”); an online book (pdf), The Culture of Chechnya: History and Modern Problems, contains an essay, “The Inception of Chechen Artistic Writing: Ethni-historical and Aesthetic Prerequisites” by Kh. R. Abdulayeva, that describes them as follows:

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This is truly wonderful: Mac OS X’s Dictionary program (featuring the New Oxford American Dictionary) lists the pronunciation of “Myanmar” as “Burma.” Go to Eric Bakovic’s LL post to see the image. Hey, that’s how I say it, anyway!
While you’re at the Log, you might check out a couple of posts by Arnold Zwicky: one about an absurd lie by the Toronto Star about a language test for immigrants that supposedly claimed that the sentence “The standard of living has increased” is ungrammatical, and a touching one about his long-time partner, whom dementia had robbed of the ability to recognize the word California… unless he needed to recognize it.

Luc Sante has an essay, “The Book Collection That Devoured My Life,” on a problem many of my readers will probably empathize with as much as I do: “Seemingly I’ve arranged my life in order to acquire as many books as possible…. I discovered that I owned no fewer than five copies of André Breton’s Nadja, not even all in different editions. I owned two copies of St. Clair McKelway’s True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality, identical down to the mylar around the dust jacket. I had books in three languages I don’t actually read….” Needless to say, I have books in even more languages I don’t actually read (though I think I may have disposed of the Albanian booklet on the wonders of socialism). Anyway, it’s as enjoyable as Sante’s writing always is (the name, by the way, is monosyllabic). Thanks, Jill!

I’m sure you’re all aware of the alleged incorrectness of sentence-adverbial (or “speaker-oriented”) hopefully (for a discussion of why apparently pointless decisions to chastise one sentence adverb and not another get made, see this LH post from last year). Well, Mark Liberman over at the Log has run some numbers, and it turns out that while “subject-oriented” hopefully (i.e., meaning “in a hopeful manner”) is fairly common in fiction (almost always modifying descriptions of speaking, looking, and going: “Doug looked up at him hopefully”), elsewhere (in newspapers, magazines, academic writing, and speech) it occurs, on average, just 5% of the time, and if you restrict the search to spoken usage, the percentage is zero. That’s right, people essentially never use hopefully to mean “in a hopeful manner” when they’re speaking their native language. So the word clearly means “it is to be hoped,” although in certain restricted environments it can be used to mean “in a hopeful manner.” Hopefully, we can now put this “incorrect” nonsense to rest.

Some of my favorite blogs are updated so rarely I can go weeks without checking them; recently three such have turned up with excellent posts I want to share.
1) Over at bulbulovo, the post may starts with a photo of an ad that plays on nostalgia for Socialist Realist images and goes on to one that says (in Slovak) “May is all about LOVE” with the last word in English… except that it’s spelled out in gold coins, and it so happens that love is also the Romanes word for ‘money.’ From there he segues into a discussion of Romanes loan words in Slovak. (One thing that puzzled me was his transcription of the Romanes word as “[‘lɔvɛ] or [‘lɔːvɛ]”; in most dialects, the stress would be on the final syllable, and I’m not sure whether his stress is for the Slovak loan word or whether Slovak dialects of Romanes have taken on initial stress under the influence of Slovak.)
2) Dick & Garlick had been quiescent since November, but I’ve learned not to give up on it, and more posts started appearing in April (though I just noticed them yesterday). The latest is my favorite: Automatic Hinglish, which points out that “Google Translate now offers translation from English to Hindi and vice versa. … What’s surprising is that if you translate from English to Hindi and convert the results back to English, some of the original text is restored.”

Here’s a portion of Hamlet’s soliloquy in Google Hindi:

‘ Tis एक consummation
श्रद्धापूर्वक को wish’d. करने के लिए मौत की नींद के लिए.
नींद के स्वप्न को perchance करने के लिए: सॉफ्टवेयर, यही तो कठिनाई है!

That’s completely meaningless, of course. But feed this drivel to the Google translator, and it becomes Shakespeare again – with a few improvements.

‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to wish’d. To death for sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream: software, there’s the rub!

Software, there’s the rub: truer words have never been spoken.

3) I’m particularly embarrassed not to have noticed this for so long, because it starts with a plug for my book: Polyglot Vegetarian had a post back on April 27 called Sowing Cumin and Basil that began “The American edition of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, co-authored by Steve at LanguageHat, still isn’t available, as far as I know. [Too damn true—LH] But being impatient, I went ahead and got the UK edition…” MMcM, the blogger, is inspired to write about curses, some involving cumin and basil, with the usual multilingual quotes (Greek, Latin, Persian, Old Norse, Hebrew, and Spanish, inter alia); his erudition is always worth diving into and splashing around in, with the warning that it may make you hungry.

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I’m always fascinated by the differentiated use of languages in multilingual situations (see this post for a great example from Madagascar), and I’ve run across one in my current reading, Anatol Lieven’s superb examination of the reasons for Russia’s disastrous loss in the First Chechen War, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. Lieven is discussing dedovshchina (literally ‘granddadism’), the brutal hazing endemic to the Russian army at least since WWII, and he quotes a Chechen who as a young conscript spent time in the Soviet army in East Germany in the early ’80s:

The ‘granddads’ forced the younger soldiers to buy useless things from them, hand over all their pay—and 20 marks a month was all we got. One young soldier in my squad had had to give most of his pay for a broken clock. I took it to the ‘granddad’, asked him, ‘Why did you sell him this?’ He cursed me. Now we Chechens don’t lightly curse each other—for us, this is a serious business. I broke the clock over his head. I got another three days in the cooler for that…

The footnote on this passage includes this illuminating remark:

Incidentally, it is not quite true that Chechens do not use the Russian expression, ‘xxxx your mother!’ when speaking to each other; but they only do so when speaking in Russian—in which language, among Russian men (thanks partly to generations of military service), it has become so common under Soviet rule as to lose all meaning. Spoken in Chechen, I was told, this would indeed be a killing matter.

Another bout of idle wondering led me to look up the etymology of stamina; I suddenly realized it looked like the plural of stamen, but thought “that can’t be right.” As it turns out, it is, in an unexpected way. Before stamen meant “The male or fertilizing organ of a flowering plant,” it meant ‘the warp in an upright loom’ (the Latin word stāmen is from the Proto-Indo-European root *stā- ‘stand’), and from there it came to mean (in the OED’s words) “The thread spun by the Fates at a person’s birth, on the length of which the duration of his life was suppose[d] to depend. Hence, in popular physiology, the measure of vital impulse or capacity which it was supposed that each person possessed at birth, and on which the length of his life, unless cut short by violence or disease, was supposed to depend.” (1709 Tatler No. 15.1 “All, who enter into human life, have a certain date or Stamen given to their being, which they only who die of age may be said to have arrived at”; 1753 L. M. Accompl. Woman I. 246 “Bad example hath not less influence upon education than a bad stamen upon the constitution.”) Hence the plural stamina meant “The congenital vital capacities of a person or animal, on which (other things being equal) the duration of life was supposed to depend; natural constitution as affecting the duration of life or the power of resisting debilitating influences” (1701 C. WOLLEY Jrnl. New York 60 “Such as have the natural Stamina of a consumptive propagation in them”; 1823 GILLIES Aristotle’s Rhet. I. v. 180 “If the stamina are not sound, disease will soon ensue”), and finally the modern sense “Vigour of bodily constitution; power of sustaining fatigue or privation, of recovery from illness, and of resistance to debilitating influences; staying power” (1726 SWIFT Let. Sheridan 27 July Wks. 1841 II. 588/1, “I indeed think her stamina could not last much longer when I saw she could take no nourishment”). This was originally construed as a plural, but by the nineteenth century careless writers were using it as a singular (1834 M. SCOTT Cruise Midge viii, “Why, Sir Oliver, the man is exceedingly willing,.. but his stamina is gone entirely”), and this rapidly became standard. Heretofore, when encountering people who insist that data should take a plural verb, I have said “I presume, then, you feel the same about agenda“; I will now add stamina to my arsenal.

My wife and I have finished Speak, Memory and moved on to Middlemarch in our nighttime reading, and the other day I was baffled by this, in a discussion of social mobility in Chapter 11: “Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth…” What on earth does it mean to “deny aspirates”? I looked up aspirate in the OED, thinking it might have some obscure sense that would explain the phrase, but no such luck.
Today it occurred to me to use GoogleBooks, and the fourth hit was page 209 of Our Corner, by Annie Besant:

While we praise concision, it is well to remember that it is sometimes carried to excess, brevity being attained by obscuring the sense. Thus we find George Eliot saying: “Persons denied aspirates, gained wealth;” a phrase which for a moment creates bewilderment by reason of the “denied” appearing to be in the active voice.

A light bulb went on: “denied” is passive! Persons who were denied aspirates [i.e., dropped their aitches, i.e., were lower class] gained wealth! Bless you, Annie Besant, and bless you, internet!

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