Archives for August 2002

There’s an interesting discussion of vegetarianism, prejudice, the eating habits of Bulgarians, and suchlike going on over at glosses.net, and it’s being carried on in an admirably civilized fashion (I shudder to think of the insults that would be flying if the discussion were happening at MetaFilter, especially after the word “fat” came into it).
Full disclosure: I’m a participant in the discussion.

Update (Apr. 2021). Renee is now R. B. Lemberg; see this FB post for more.

Writing about the word “Thai” yesterday reminded me of one of the reasons for my occasional flashes of anti-Brit feelings. (Yes, I know “British” is not the same as “English,” and it’s the English who don’t pronounce their r’s and caused the problem I’m about to describe, but “anti-English feelings” just doesn’t work—it sounds like I don’t like the language, which is far from the case. Besides, “Brit” is internationally recognized shorthand for “those people who used to run an empire from London.”)

Remember Sade, “pronounced Shar-day“? I disliked her (quite irrationally) for forcing me to see that idiotic description for months on end (and hear Americans actually pronouncing it that way). There is, of course, no r sound in Sade; the description was created by Brits who don’t pronounce the r and wanted to indicate the a sound in “father.” Why they didn’t make it “Shah-day,” which would indicate the same sound and would work for all English-speakers, is beyond me, like the appeal of cricket. But they’ve taken the same tack for centuries, which has resulted in all sorts of intrusive r’s that cause names to be wrongly pronounced. Thai is full of them: the last syllable of Chulalongkorn [University] is actually kawn, and people named Porntip would get a lot less grief from English-speakers if it were written Pawntip or Pohntip. The Korean name Park is actually Pak. And the absurd new name for Burma, “Myanmar,” is made more absurd by the fact that not only is the r not pronounced, it’s not even used consistently: the country’s postal service is called Myanma Posts and Communications, for Pete’s sake. Mind you, the r in “Burma” itself is intrusive—the Burmese word is bama—but it’s old and established and there’s nothing to be done about it; “Burma” is the English name for the country and that’s that.

Off-topic, but I can’t resist:

Cheer up face
The war is past
The “h” is out
Of shave
At last
Burma-Shave

It has been brought to my attention that this blog is becoming Russocentric to a degree (I use the phrase in its original sense), so I thought I’d ruminate on a different part of the linguistic universe altogether.

For a long time I was confused by the terms “Thai language” and “Tai languages”: what was up with the h, and what was the relation between the two terms? Eventually (once I got out of the sandbox of Indo-European) I discovered that the Tai family of closely related languages spread from Assam in eastern India (named after invaders who spoke the now extinct Ahom language) to the mountains of northern Vietnam, and from southern China (whence they originated) to the Malay Peninsula. The best-known of them is of course Thai, the official language of Thailand; I’m not sure when and how the h came in (probably the Brit tendency to add it to foreign terms to make them look more exotic, cf. dhal), but it does come in handy to differentiate the terms, which are both from a T(h)ai word meaning ‘free’ (“Thailand” is half translated from prathet tai ‘country of the free’). Eastwards from India we find Shan (in Burma), Northern (or Lanna) Thai (in northern Thailand), Lao (the official language of Laos, but the majority of its speakers are in Thailand, where it is often called Northeastern Thai), and Red Tai, Black Tai, and White Tai (in northern Vietnam—no formal-wear jokes, please). An interesting point is that an alternate ethnic designation is at the base of Assam/Ahom, Shan, and Siam, as well as the Cambodian term Siem (the name of the town Siem Reap, near Angkor Wat, means ‘defeat of the Thai’).

Avva quotes a wonderful instance (picked up from agavr) of thoughtless translation: “Thank you—these two words…” is rendered into Russian as “Spasibo—eti dva slova [these two words]…”

This reminded me of something that made me laugh during my first, mirthless days in NYC (no job, no money, no telephone, just been dumped, you know the song). In those days, Don Q rum had an advertising campaign using the tagline “Quality begins with Q.” Advertisers were just beginning to realize it might be useful to reach the millions of Spanish-speakers in the city in their own language, so ads were being translated—but not always at the highest level. This one, for instance, became: “Calidad comienza con Q.”

One of my favorite guilty pleasures is a book called Ali and Nino by “Kurban Said.” It’s not Tolstoy or Faulkner by a long shot, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and if you have any fondness for tales of derring-do—if, say, you enjoyed The Princess Bride—you should lay your hands on a copy; you won’t be disappointed. I put Kurban Said in quotes because it’s not his real name; he was apparently born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku in 1905, converted to Islam as a teenager and changed his name to Essad Bey, and moved to Germany and wrote biographies under his own name and a couple of novels as Kurban Said. (I was lucky enough to run across 12 Secrets of the Caucasus, by Essad-Bey, in a Lancaster, Pa. used-book store a few years ago; it too is full of derring-do, and has chapter titles like “The Idyllic Robbers’ Den,” “The Master of Fragrance,” and “The Village of Poets.”) Here’s a sample from the first chapter of Ali and Nino:

I, Ali Khan Shirvanshir, had been three times to Daghestan, twice to Tiflis, once in Kislovodsk, once in Persia to stay with my uncle, and I was nearly kept down for another year because I did not know the difference between the Gerundium and the Gerundivium. My father went for advice to the Mullah at the mosque, who declared that all this Latin was just vain delusion. So my father put on all his Turkish, Persian and Russian decorations, went to see the headmaster, donated some chemical equipment or other and I passed. A notice had been put up in the school stating that pupils were strictly forbidden to enter school premises with loaded revolvers, telephones were installed in town, and Nino Kipiani was still the most beautiful girl in the world.

But I’m not here to talk about Essad Bey’s romantic prose or complicated life (someone’s said to be working on a biography, which I can’t wait to read), I’m here to talk about transliteration.

As enthralled as I was by the book, I kept wanting to throw it across the room while cursing the name of Jenia Graman. Yes, she rescued the book from a Berlin bookstall, translated it, and brought it to the attention of the English-speaking world, and for that we owe her. But didn’t the woman have any sense? She kept all the Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Russian terms from the novel in their German guises (the book was written in German), which produces an effect in English that is at best barbarous and at worst incomprehensible. Some examples: Dshafar for Ja’far, Nikolaus for Nikolai, Seljam-Alejkum for salaam aleikum (here we have the Russian substitution of lya for la, followed by the German substitution of j for y), Sakavkasnaja Jelesnaja for Zakavkaskaya Zheleznaya (Doroga, the Transcaucasian Railway), Jasid for Yezid, and—my two personal favorites, both from Chapter 11—Dshainabi: Tewarichi Al-Y-Seldjuk for Jainabi: Tavarikh-e Al-e Saljuk and Chajasseddin Keichosrov for Ghiyas-ed-din Kaikhusrow. Some names are rendered ambiguous by the veil of transmission: is “Seyd” Zayd, Sayyid, or Sa’id? And some are just gibberish as far as I can tell, like “Teshachut” in Chapter 24. All right, it would have required some effort on her part to find the proper English renderings of some of the more obscure terms, but surely she could have gotten “salaam aleikum” right! And the book keeps getting reprinted; couldn’t some merciful publisher fix these things? I have a fairly complete list I’ll be more than happy to supply, free and gratis. Let’s rid an otherwise satisfactory translation of these unsightly blemishes, shall we?

Update. The biography came out in 2006; I reviewed it here.

We humans have a deep need to find meaning in everything around us, and therefore have a hard time accepting the idea of meaningless coincidence. If something looks like something else, there must be a connection, mystical or otherwise. (See: Jung, synchronicity.) Fortunately, I’ve been exposed to enough statistics to know that if you keep tossing coins, the fact that heads and tails are equally probable means that it is inevitable that, if you toss long enough, you will get (say) ten or fifty or a thousand heads in a row, by pure chance. My education in historical linguistics reinforced the lesson: even though English and Persian are related languages, and even though Persian “bad” means the same thing as English “bad” and is pronounced almost identically, there is no historical connection whatever. It’s just a coincidence.

With that introduction, I proceed to my latest trip to Brighton Beach. Some time ago I read and enjoyed Boris Akunin‘s Azazel, the first of his “Fandorin” series of detective novels set in 19th-century Petersburg. I’ve since moved on to other things, most recently Pushkin’s “Poltava” and late-17th-century Russia in general (I highly recommend Lindsey Hughes’ Russia in the Age of Peter the Great—Yale very kindly lets you read the first chapter online, if you’re interested [Yale no longer practices such kindness, but you can use “Search inside the book” at Amazon]), but last time I was in BB I noticed a video of a televised version of Azazel, although I was too loaded down to buy it at the time, so today I went back to repair the omission. (I had the day off from work.) While I was in the smaller branch of Sankt-Peterburg (which has lower prices for some reason), I looked up at the detective-fiction shelves, and there was a new work by Akunin: Altyn-Tolobas, a novel set in late-17th-century Russia! I bought it and can’t wait to read it. But I don’t think it’s the work of the gods. It’s just those coins coming up heads.

I obsessively read the New York Times corrections sections, and today I hit the mother lode. This was printed at the end of the Book Review letters column (and is also online); I leave it to speak for itself:

Correction
The Close Reader column on July 14, about the relation between daily life and intellectual life in Israel at present, referred erroneously to protests against the award of the Israel Prize to an Israeli Arab, Emile Habibi. The award, and the protests, occurred in 1992, not ”recently”; the Israel Prize is given for a life of achievement, not any particular accomplishment. The novel ”Arabesques” was misattributed; it was written not by Habibi but by Anton Shammas, also an Israeli Arab, in Hebrew, not Arabic.

The column misstated the title of a book that discusses political minorities in modern Hebrew literature, and misstated its timing in the author’s career. It is ”Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon,” not ”Constructing the Hebrew Canon,” published after the writer joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, not before. And his preferred transliteration of his name from the Hebrew is Hannan Hever, not Chanan Chever.

The column also attributed an honor erroneously to the novelist A. B. Yehoshua. He has never received the Sapir Prize (often referred to as the Israeli equivalent of Britain’s Booker Prize).

In today’s New York Times there is a profile (registration required) by Clifford Krauss of a Canadian writer named Neil Bissoondath. (I apologize to him and to all of Canada for the fact that I had been unaware of his existence; like most Yanks, I am lamentably ignorant of our great neighbor to the north.) Mr. Bissoondath (to use Times style) came originally from Trinidad, like his uncle and mentor V.S. Naipaul, and he shares Naipaul’s disdain for the lesser breeds he has transcended by embracing the imperial culture. (I know, Canada was never an imperial power, but its culture came originally from Britain and France and has been heavily influenced by the U.S., and I trust no one will argue about the term “imperial” as applied to those heavyweights.) I was particularly struck by the psychological contradiction embodied in the following pair of quotes, a few paragraphs apart in the profile; I leave their exegesis as an exercise for the reader:
“Then there is ‘Selling Illusions,’ his collection of essays, in which he argued that Canada’s declaration that all cultures are equal and welcome is a curse in disguise. The financing of ethnic festivals and community centers, he wrote, amounts to the separation of minorities in Disneyland-like pockets of ethnicity frozen in time and out of context.“
“He is married to a French Canadian, has an 11-year-old daughter and lives in a city where there are few other immigrants. Although he writes in English, he strongly defends local efforts to preserve French culture. His comfortable fieldstone house is decorated with accessories from many countries, but there is no sign of anything Trinidadian.”

Anatoly Vorobey discusses the idea that the first lines of Evgenii Onegin should be interpreted according to a theory that uvazhat’ sebya zastavil is an early-nineteenth-century Russian equivalent of “kicked the bucket.” This seems implausible to me, but I don’t want to emulate Edmund Wilson and argue about the fine points of Russian usage with native Russian speakers; fortunately, Anatoly is also dubious, and like him I will wait for any evidence of such usage that may be forthcoming. In the meantime, I will rely on Nabokov, who knew Pushkin inside and out and translated the passage thus:

My uncle has most honest principles:
when taken ill in earnest,
he has made one respect him
and nothing better could invent.

As usual, one is taken aback by the determinedly rebarbative nature of the English phrasing (this from Nabokov!), but it is clear that he took uvazhat’ sebya zastavil in its obvious sense (“made one respect him”).

Not that Nabokov is infallible. In the same spirit in which he gleefully exhibits Pushkin’s “schoolboy howler” la greve d’Athenes for Byron’s “the Athenian’s grave” (commentary on Onegin One:XXXVIII.9, p. 162), I hereby place before the world his own ludicrous blunder at the end of his commentary on Two:XVI (p. 255), where he identifies Ratmir, one of the characters in Ruslan and Lyudmila, as “a young Hazaran Persian-speaking Mongol from Afghanistan”! Ratmir is a khazarskiy khan, a khan of the Khazars, the Caspian state that was a neighbor and rival to Kievan Rus in the days of which Pushkin is writing; what Nabokov thought a peasant from the mountain fastnesses of central Afghanistan might be doing at Vladimir’s court I can’t imagine. (The Hazara, incidentally, are not Mongols, though they have traditionally described themselves that way and have faces and cultural elements reminiscent of Central Asia; their actual ethnogenesis is lost in the mists of time, but they speak a dialect of Dari, the Afghan variant of Persian. Lest anyone take too seriously the matter of self-identification, let me point out that many Pushtuns believe they are descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel.)

In the Aug. 5 New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating article, “The Naked Face,” about a psychologist named Paul Ekman and his studies of facial expressions. It turns out that, despite what Margaret Mead thought, people all over the world, whatever their culture, interpret facial expressions the same way; furthermore, with sufficient training we can learn to interpret not just the obvious smiles and grimaces but every fleeting “microexpression” that reveals what another person is trying to hide. In fact, we can learn to tell whether someone is lying, and pretty much what they’re thinking.
But it’s not just that our expressions reflect our feelings; they also cause our feelings. Ekman and a colleague began noticing that when they practiced moving their facial muscles into expressions of anger and distress, they felt terrible. They did a study in which one group was told to “remember and relive a particularly stressful experience” while the other “was told to simply produce a series of facial movements…. The second group, the people who were pretending, showed the same physiological responses as the first.” In another experiment, people who were holding a pen between their lips (making it impossible to smile) did not find cartoons as funny as people who were holding a pen between their teeth (forcing them to smile).
So do we want to learn to read faces? What would be the effect? Ekman quotes Erving Goffman, who “said that part of what it means to be civilized is not to ‘steal’ information that is not freely given to us.” Goffman wrote:
“When the secretary who is miserable about a fight with her husband the previous night answers, ‘Just fine,’ when her boss asks, ‘How are you this morning?’ — that false message may be the one relevant to the boss’s interactions with her. It tells him that she is going to do her job. The true message — that she is miserable — he may not care to know about at all as long as she does not intend to let it impair her job performance.”
Would it be better for him to take note of her sadness? Would we benefit by recognizing the constant play of emotions that surrounds us, or would it make it impossible for us to function? Read the article — I’ve barely scratched the surface. And reflect on what language is, and what it’s not.