languagehat.com

A few years ago I did a post about the pronunciation of the tribal name Wampanoag that wound up (thanks to reader Martin) discussing revival efforts as well; now Martin sends me a link to a very interesting Technology Review article by Jeffrey Mifflin on the revival, covering the ground from John Eliot’s 1663 Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament [Entire Holy his-Bible God both Old Testament and also New Testament], the first Bible published in Ameri­ca, to three-year-old Mae Alice, “the first native speaker of Wôpanâak for seven generations.” It’s well worth the read, and I hope there are many more such revivals.

I’m trying, I really am. When I was younger I was an intolerable snoot (to use DFW‘s silly term), picking apart texts and holding up errors (real or factitious) with repellent glee. Years of linguistics courses, followed by more years of absorbing their descriptive approach, not to mention the tolerance that comes with middle age, have left me readier to roll with the punches, accepting the fact that the language changes faster than I can change with it, amused by my own irritation with usages I happen not to like. Even within the history of this blog, I’ve grown less eager to seize on linguistic misdeeds found in my endless reading; life is short and one can’t expect reporters and editors, increasingly pressed for time, to get everything right. I’ve even stopped expecting The New Yorker to live up to its former hard-earned reputation for accuracy. But some things are too much to be borne.

In this week’s issue, one of the “Talk of the Town” segments, Word Feast by Lauren Collins [archived], is a chatty squib about the practice (imposed by a new general manager) of poetry readings before the “family meals” at the Union Square Café (which was one of my favorite restaurants back when I lived in NYC and could afford to eat at such places). My pleasure at the thought of people sharing poetry is, unfortunately, more than outweighed by my resentment at bosses who force their employees into jolly group activities. But that’s neither here nor there; the bone I wish to pick is with the very last sentence, describing the aftermath of the reading:

“Did we order forks, by the way?” someone asked, which could be considered iambic quadrameter.

This is so egregiously stupid a sentence, in two completely different but equally easily avoidable ways, that I am compelled to bring it here for public keelhauling.

In the first place, there is no such word as “quadrameter.” I can, alas, believe the twentysomething Ms. Collins was never exposed to even the most basic analysis of poetics in her doubtless expensive education, but could she not have opened a dictionary? And more to the point, did no one at the magazine (once famed, let me repeat, for its eagle-eyed editors and fanatical fact-checkers) read that sentence and say “Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right”? The word is tetrameter, which comes from Greek tetra- ‘four-‘ (combining form of tettara ‘four’) and metron ‘measure’; it has been in standard English use for four hundred years. The fact that “quadrameter” is a bastard, half Latin and half Greek, like television, would be annoying if it were a real word, but it’s not—there’s not even a nonce usage recorded in the OED (which I certainly hope will ignore this citation).

Secondly, no it could not “be considered iambic quadrameter,” or even iambic tetrameter. This would be iambic tetrameter: “The forks! The forks! We must have forks!” The quoted sentence has no meter at all; if you inserted an extra syllable—“Did we order the forks, by the way?”—it would make a nice anapestic trimeter, and if you read it with a slight pause where the inserted word would be you could fit it into such a context (“How delightful a banquet we’ll have!/ Did we order forks, by the way?”), but it is neither iambic nor tetrameter, and no amount of strained emphasis will make it so. The last paragraph of that story is so wrong, so bad, that it should shame the once-proud magazine that ran it.

Claire of Anggarrgoon has a post on the Papuan language Diuwe, about which the Ethnologue entry says only “below 100 meters.” The code for the language being DIY, Claire thought a fuller description of the language would make a good “DIY effort”:

Therefore let me start the ball rolling by claiming that DIY is the only language which supports the hypothesis that altitude affects air stream mechanisms. Its consonant inventory contains 3 stops, four fricatives, 5 laterals, six approximants and seven vowels.

Mark Dingemanse of The Ideophone (who alerted me to this project) picks up the ball and runs with it:

Hidbap is Diuwe’s closest neighbour both geographically and phylogenetically. It is a language spoken above 100m but below 200m in the same area as Diuwe, that is, 12 miles southwest of Sumo, east of the Catalina River. Like Diuwe, it has exactly 100 speakers. The languages are quite closely related, though there is no mutual intelligibility due to the presence of a large bundle of isoglosses at the 100m isoline. This bundle of isoglosses is largely due to the fact that speakers of either language avoid crossing into each other’s territories at all cost…

There is much more, ending with a call for other language bloggers to “enlarge our sample of altitude-affected inventories to get a better view of the phenomenon.” Alas, I’m up to my ears in actual work at the moment, but I hope others will rush in where Foley¹ fears to tread!

[Read more…]

An interesting discussion of transliteration at the complete review, in the context of a new translation of Der Weltensammler, called The Collector of Worlds, by—well…:

Ilija Trojanow was born in Bulgaria, but his family left the country when he was very young and he has lived all over the world. He writes in German, and has always published his books under the name ‘Ilija Trojanow’.

Of course, Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic letters, and were one to transliterate his name from those into English one would do so differently than into German: the German w is the English v-sound, and a y is the obvious choice where the Germans use j. And, apparently seeking to get the pronunciation right, Faber is publishing The Collector of Worlds as by: Ilya Troyanov. Which does give English-speaking readers a better idea of how to pronounce his name.

The problem with this is that Ilya Troyanov is better-known as—indeed, very well known as: Ilija Trojanow. Even in the English-speaking world.

Two of his books have even been published in English translation—Mumbai To Mecca and Along the Ganges (get your copy at Amazon.com)—and they were published under the name: Ilija Trojanow.

When he appeared at the PEN World Voices festival last year it was as: Ilija Trojanow. (See now The Messiness of Now, an adapted version of his conversation at the festival now up at the PEN site, which is where we learned about the forthcoming translation.)

Perhaps most obviously to the point, in this Internet age, consider the Google results for the searches of his name:

* “Ilya Troyanov”: “30 results”
* “Ilija Trojanow”: “about 46,300”

You think maybe anyone who goes looking for information about this new Faber-author “Ilya Troyanov” on the Internet might wind up missing something?

My first reaction was “of course it should be Ilya Troyanov in English!” but as I read on I realized that, though it would have made sense for his first English publisher to have retransliterated the name, by now it’s pretty silly, and if his preferred transliteration makes it difficult for English-speakers to say his name correctly, that’s just the way Troy crumbles. (I added the alternate transliteration to his Wikipedia page; we’ll see if it stays. Oh, and by now “Ilya Troyanov” gets over 900 hits.)

Conrad’s latest post at VUnEx is his usual exhilarating excursion through byways of history that one might have thought dusty until he poured champagne over them; he begins with a delightful passage from Borrow‘s Lavengro (“‘He—he—he! you must know that in Lasan akhades wine is janin.’ ‘In Armenian, kini,’ said I; ‘in Welsh, gwin; Latin, vinum. But do you think that Janus and Janin are one?'”) and continues, via Abravanel, to Annius of Viterbo’s Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium.

Now Annius’ big idea was to get lots of fragments from ancient historians—Berosus of Chaldaea, Myrsilos of Methymna, Fabius Pictor, and so on—draw them all up, and weave them into a holistic history of the ancient world… The same basic idea had been done before by writers like Josephus and Eusebius; the only problem with Annius was that all of his fragments had been entirely fabricated, and by him.

Now that’s what I call breathtaking chutzpah, and his Wikipedia entry points out that not only his citations were sham: “His expertise in Semitic philology, once celebrated even by otherwise sober ecclesiastical historians, was entirely fictive.”

OK, I know everybody’s sick of Nabokov by now, and I’m trying to post about other things, but I ran across a quote I like so much I have to share it. I’ll tack on a couple other Nab-related items at the end for those who still have an appetite for Nabokoviana. This is from one of the lectures he gave at Wellesley in 1946, and it perfectly expresses how I view life and learning:

The more things we know the better equipped we are to understand any one thing and it is a burning pity that our lives are not long enough and not sufficiently free of annoying obstacles, to study all things with the same care and depth as the one we now devote to some favorite subject or period. And yet there is a semblance of consolation within this dismal state of affairs: in the same way as the whole universe may be completely reciprocated in the structure of an atom, . . . an intelligent and assiduous student [may] find a small replica of all knowledge in a subject he has chosen for his special research. . . . and if, upon choosing your subject, you try diligently to find out about it, if you allow yourself to be lured into the shaded lanes that lead from the main road you have chosen to the lovely and little known nooks of special knowledge, if you lovingly finger the links of the many chains that connect your subject to the past and the future and if by luck you hit upon some scrap of knowledge referring to your subject that has not yet become common knowledge, then will you know the true felicity of the great adventure of learning….

(Quoted in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd.)

In other Nabokov news, Dmitri Nabokov, VV’s son, after years of dithering and agonizing, has decided to defy his father’s dying wish and publish the incomplete manuscript of his last novel, The Original of Laura. I approve of the decision (if you want things burned, burn them yourselves, persnickety creators—once you’re dead they belong to the living) but I don’t expect to be bowled over by the book.

And here‘s the Barcelona Review Nabokov Quiz from 1999. It’s difficult!

An interesting jeu d’esprit at Waggish:

pick a work of literature or philosophy (or poetry, if you can make it work) and a sentence from that work that, if the sentence had been excluded from the work, would have made the greatest difference in the work’s interpretation/reception/history in the following years.

As david feil says in the comments:

It seems that there are several different types of sentences that can be turned up by this question. There are sentences which change the way you read the text, whether it is an explicit instruction (like your Wittgenstein) or a cryptic clue. There are sentences that are so eruptive that they anchor the rest of the text (Conrad’s “The horror, the horror” or Faulkner’s “I don’t hate the South, I don’t hate it” [from Absalom, Absalom—LH]). There are sentences where the text reaches its most crystallized coherence and turns into some sort of poetic easiness. There are sentences which for arbitrary reasons have been given a lot of critical attention (“My mother is a fish.” [from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—LH]) but despite their immediate impression don’t really define the text as a whole at all. And then there are the sentences which an individual latches on to as their personal lens of the text, but might have nothing to do with the general reaction…

I think we can eliminate the last category as irrelevant to the spirit of the game (and with my irritating editorial nitpickiness I must point out that “I don’t hate the South” is as apocryphal as “Play it again, Sam”; after Shreve asks “Why do you hate the South?” Quentin responds “I dont hate it,” going on to think “I dont hate it … I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!“—right up there with “yes I said yes I will yes” in the Memorable Endings sweepstakes). In terms of the original formulation of the question, what comes to my mind is “‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.'” (Through the Looking Glass, Chap. 6) Interesting thing to consider, no?

A very interesting article by Eildert Mulder about the difficulty of setting Arabic script in type:

The technical problem is this: Arabic letters are generally not written separately but joined to each other in groups or entire words, like a script typeface in English. And though the Arabic alphabet has only 28 letters, most letters have four forms, depending on whether they occur at the beginning of the word, in the middle of the word, at the end of the word, or stand alone. Furthermore, each combination of letters is unique, creating a typographic challenge greater than Chinese. Because all letters connect dynamically with the preceding one, and most also with the following one, the number of unique combinations is almost astronomical.
The esthetic problem comes from the dizzying mutability of written Arabic. For example, there are actually three ways the letter ha can be written in the middle of a word, and the calligrapher’s choice is influenced not only by the letter immediately preceding the ha, but also by the letters earlier in the word, and even by letters that follow it—yet, in whatever form, it is still in essence the ha in the beginner’s textbook. A sequence of letters can run along a baseline the way Roman letters do—though Arabic runs from right to left, of course—or they may start above the baseline and descend in a diagonal if the connections from one letter to the next make that an esthetically pleasing choice.

[Read more…]

From an impassioned Poetry Foundation article on translation by Linh Dinh:

One of the defining figures of Vietnamese literature, Phạm Quỳnh helped to modernize the language, encouraged the writing of short stories and novels, and the anthologizing of folk poetry. Admiring the logic and clarity of Western thinking, he felt that Vietnamese needed to learn from it, but that they also needed to identify and protect their distinctiveness. In 1922, he wrote about Vietnamese folk poetry, ca dao: “Even though our oral literature has not been recorded in any book, I will insist that it is a very rich one, richer, perhaps, than any other country. [The more illiterate a population, the richer the oral tradition—L. Dinh.] Although it is not without its crudeness, this oral literature is also profoundly resonant; one can say that the wisdom, morals, and aesthetics of our common folks are all contained within these idioms.” In short, don’t be half-Westernized and half-Vietnamese, one must become an Uber-Westernized Uber-Vietnamese. Warning Vietnamese writers against composing in French, Phạm Quỳnh wrote: “In borrowing someone’s language, you are also borrowing his ideas, literary techniques—even his emotions and customs.” After centuries of writing in Chinese, the Vietnamese had produced no Li Po, he pointed out, and writing in French, it is unlikely that they will ever produce a Victor Hugo or a Anatole France. After reading a story in French, Phạm Quỳnh suggested as an exercise, Try retelling it to one’s wife in Vietnamese.

Pham Quỳnh translated tirelessly from Maupassant, Pierre Loti, and Alfred de Vigny, among many others. He wanted to have his Trojan Horse and eat it too. He wrote travel pieces, scholarly articles and books about Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes and Confucius… He ridiculed men into cutting their hair short, begged women to not sleep in the kitchen, even if it was the warmest nook in the house. His considerable political engagement brought about his demise, however. Advocating gradual Vietnamese independence within the French union, he worked with Bảo Đại, the figurehead emperor. Quỳnh’s compromised stance towards the Colonialists, his lack of militancy, is revealed in this famous saying: “As long as [Nguyễn Du’s epic poem] Kim Van Kieu remains, our language remains, our nation remains.” He equated great poetry with language, with nationhood, all else is Bushism. On August 23, 1945, he was captured by the Việt Minh, the Communist-dominated guerrilla group supported by the O.S.S. (precursor to the C.I.A.) in W.W.II, along with Ngô Đình Khôi (brother of Ngô Đình Diệm, future president of South Vietnam) and his son. All three were killed on September 6, 1945. Although I wasn’t within earshot, I’m convinced Phạm Quỳnh’s last words were “At least I translated.” His body was only found 11 years later, in Hắc Thú [Black Beast] forest, near Huế.

(Via wood s lot.)

I just discovered an etymology that surprised me: barrio, which the OED takes back only to “Sp. barrio district, suburb,” is now considered to be, as AHD puts it, “Spanish, from Arabic barrī, of an open area, from barr, open area. See brr in Appendix II.” And from Appendix II we learn that it’s related to birr, the unit of currency in Ethiopia. (According to Wikipedia, “Before 1976, dollar was the official English translation of birr. Today, it is officially birr in English as well.”)