Archives for January 2003

I never cease to be amazed at what I find at library sales. Today I dropped by the Mid-Manhattan, and within a few minutes had found (and, of course, bought, for a total of $3) a dictionary of Romansch (Oscar Peer’s Dicziunari rumantsch: ladin–tudais-ch, Lia Rumantscha, 1962) and a textbook of Moroccan Arabic (Henry Mercier’s L’Arabe par l’image: textes ethnographiques, Les éditions la porte, Rabat, 1946). Neither was in the foreign-language section; I just have a nose for these things. And for an extra dime I couldn’t resist a copy of Quotations from Chairman LBJ (Simon and Schuster, 1968), a true relic of the age (and of my youth).

Wood s lot [01.24.2003] points me to Jonathan Mayhew’s blog, which has been going since last September (and all of which is on a single page, so it takes a while to load: yo, Jonathan, how about showing a week at a time?); he discusses both poetry (he teaches and translates) and jazz (he drums—yes, I’m sure he knows the jokes as well as you do, so you can stop right now), and has interesting things to say about both. At the moment he’s engaged in a series of entries describing his twenty favorite poets, and the first name that hit my eye when the page finally appeared was that of Lorine Niedecker, who’s one of my favorites as well, so I was hooked. He doesn’t have comments; if he did, I would have left one responding to this (from Monday, September 23, 2002):

The idea of translating in order to arrive at “what the poet would have written / had she written in English.” This is a cliché, of course. More than that, it is radically false. How do we know what kind of English Homer would have written? How would Mozart have phrased his solos on 52nd street in the 1940s? A sonnet in English might have a totally different rhythmic feel from a sonnet in Italian: yet many would accept this exchange as “formal equivalence.”

This (it seems to me) is very forced. Of course we can’t “know what kind of English Homer would have written”; the point is that thinking in those terms can help us avoid falling back on our own linguistic habits and making everyone we translate sound like us. This, on the other hand (from Wednesday, September 25, 2002), strikes me as brilliant:

A brief poem by Antonio Machado, “Sobre la tierra amarga,” contains four words of Greek etymology: laberínticos, criptas, melancólicos, quimeras. I contend that these should be translated with their English cognates: labyrinthine, crypts, melancholy, and Chimeras, not, as one translator does, with maze, vaults, wistful, and fantasies. The Greek words form an “underlying network of signification,” to use a phrase from Antoine Berman: they have specific historical and linguistic resonance. A labyrinth contains a Minotaur in a way that a maze does not. A crypt is a tomb or something hidden, as in a “cryptic message.” A vault might be found in a bank. Burton did not write an anatomy of wistfulness. A Chimera is a specific mythological beast, etc… (Of course fantasy is also a Greek word, but not the one Machado chose!) Should the translator always go for the cognate? Of course not, but when the cognate is a richer, more resonant, or more specific word, the easiest solution becomes the best solution.

He mentions a story I’ll have to read:

Harry Mathew’s story “The Dialect of the Tribe” is the perfect Borgesian parable of translation. It speaks of a language that can be translated successfully while not revealing any substantive meaning. The story gradually fades out of English, as the narrator uses more and more words from the tribal language he is elucidating.

And this endears him to me: “I prefer irregular past tenses in English whenever possible. For me, the past tense of dream is “dreamt,” not “dreamed.” snuck, not sneaked, etc… “

(Oh, by the way, Jonathan—I have a copy of Robert Grenier’s a day at the beach…)

I’m used to seeing dubious or just plain wrong etymologies, both online and off-, and usually I just ignore them. This site, however, is so bad that I feel the need to give it a public thrashing. It purports to list borrowed words by their languages of origin (and it’s the number one Google hit for “borrowed words,” so I’m not just picking on some obscure site no one will ever see). Let’s take Akkadian, for which the entry is:

Babel (ancient city – from babul, gate of God), Babylon (ancient capital city – from babul, gate of God), cherub (gracious), dragoman (interpreter), Orion (constellation – from Uru Anna, light of heaven), ziggurat

Now, ziggurat is an Akkadian word; no problem there. Babel and Babylon are also from Akkadian, but the etymon is wrong. Here’s the best description I’ve found on the early development of the name: “The Sumerian name for this small village was Ka-dingir-ra. In Semitic Akkadian it was called Bab-ilim. It seems that the name came not from Kadingirra, but from another name for the town, Babil, the meaning of which is unknown. Later the plural name Bab-Ilani ‘the Gate of the Gods’ was used.” It’s normal (if oversimplified) to say that Babylon is from Akkadian Bab-il/ilu/ili/ilani (take your pick) and define this as ‘gate of God,’ but “babul” seems to have been pulled out of a hat (perhaps by vague association with Kabul). The other entries are sheer fantasy. “Cherub” is, of course, from Hebrew. “Dragoman” is (via Italian and Greek) from Arabic tarjuman, which is from Aramaic turgemana [but this is probably from Akkadian targumanu]. And Orion, as any schoolboy knows, is a Greek mythological figure; this etymology is probably taken from the Online Etymology Dictionary, which says “perhaps from Akkadian Uru-anna ‘the Light of Heaven,'” but that’s a very big “perhaps”—what a Greek hunter would be doing with an Akkadian name is anybody’s guess, and “etymology unknown” is the only safe statement.

The Afrikaans entry lists “slim,” which is from Dutch or Low German. The Albanian entry reads, in its entirety, “Carpathian (Eastern European Mountain Range – from karpë, rock),” which is ridiculous; “Carpathian” is from Greek, and while the Greek name may well have come from a local Thracian or Illyrian word related to Albanian karpë, that’s like saying “Caucasus” is from “high” because there’s a possibility the name is related to the Germanic root of the English word. Under Algonquin is listed “Oregon,” which is of very disputed etymology; one theory is that it resulted from a French map engraver’s having put the last four letters of “Ouariconsint” (the Wisconsin River) on a separate line, thus creating an apparent “Ouaricon” River, and “Wisconsin” is probably from an Algonquin name, but that’s really pushing it. The next language listed is “American English,” and I won’t bother going through the words, because the whole category makes no sense—even if “raincoat” and “typewriter” were first used in the U.S., how can they be considered “borrowed”? An almost equally pointless category is “Anglo-Saxon” (more properly called Old English); most of the basic English vocabulary is “from” Old English in the sense of having developed from it by sound change, but the only words that could be said to be borrowed from it are scholarly ones like “witenagemot,” and none of them are listed. Under Amoy is listed “ketchup,” which is from Malay; under “Avetsan” (i.e., Avestan) is “bronze,” which is from Italian (via French); under Basque is “bizarre,” also from Italian; the sole entry for Beja is “bedouin,” which is from Arabic; and under Breton is a whole raft of words, none of which have anything to do with Breton (“branch,” “carry,” “hurt,” for heaven’s sake?). I could go on, but why bother? Furthermore, the page is littered with misspellings, for example racoon, cumquat, attrium, and the aforementioned Avetsan. I don’t blame the people who compiled the list, who are simply enthusiastic amateurs who love words and had no means of judging the validity of the etymologies they ran across, but it’s depressing to think this is what people looking for information online will find and cite.

Here is a much more reliable list: only one word per language, but at least you can be pretty sure that word is correctly listed.

Addendum. A correspondent has brought to my attention this silly site, which purports to list “some of Shakespeare’s many coinages!” What they mean, of course, is “words first attested in Shakespeare,” but that doesn’t sound nearly as sexy. And some of them aren’t even that; “accused,” for instance, is centuries older:
1297 R. Glouc. 523 “Sir Hubert de Boru.. Acused was to the king of mani luther prise [‘wrongful takings’].”

Do these people really think Shakespeare made up the word “alligator”?

This week’s New Yorker has a “Talk of the Town” piece by Dana Goodyear on Demetri Martin, a Greek-American comedian obsessed with language games. Along with creating “one of the longest, non-computer-generated, sensemaking palindromes in English” (called “Dammit, I’m Mad”), he has composed the wonderful “All the Words Printed on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order”:

Women, your ability to operate extra tender springs from birth.
Good machinery comes as your contents cause enjoyment.
Cash, beer, a car: rock and rolling.
During “it,” the general warning:
“We may risk pregnancy according to old problems.”

Puckfist: ‘an empty braggart.’ Here’s an abbreviated version of the OED entry:

puckfist (‘pʌkfɪst). [app. f. puck sb.¹ + fist sb.² Cf. puff-fist, -foist, which appears about the same date.]

1 The Puff-ball, Lycoperdon Bovista. Also abbreviated puck.
1601 B. Jonson Poetaster iv. v, I’ll blow him into aire, when I meet him next: He dares not fight with a puck-fist. 1893 S.E. Worc. Gloss. s.v., I shud like a drap o’ drink, fur I feels as dry as a puck-fyst.

2 A term of contempt for an empty braggart.
1599 B. Jonson Ev. Man out of Hum. 1, To be enamour’d on this dusty turf, This clod, a whoreson puck-fist. 1605 Tryall Chev. iv. i. in Bullen O[ld English] Pl[ays] III. 328 Giue me leaue to incounter this puckfist, and if I doe not make him cry Peccavi say Dicke Bowyer’s a powdered Mackrell. 1637 Shirley Example ii. i, Lady, he is no man..A very puckfist. Jacinta. What’s that, I pray? Vain. A phantom, a mere phantom. 1821 Scott Kenilw. xviii, A base besognio, and a puckfist.

attrib. 1615 J. Taylor (Water P.) Urania xxiv. Wks. (1630) 3/2 Then loue him; else his puckfoist pompe abhorre.

[The serendipitous finding of this word was inspired by the ever-inspirational Caterina. And in case you were wondering, a besonio (or besognio) is ‘a raw soldier; (term of contempt) a needy beggar, a base worthless fellow.’]

Update (Nov. 2021). I am happy to report that the entry was updated in September 2007; here is the new version, antedated by three centuries:

Etymology: Apparently < puck n.¹ + fist n.² With sense 1 compare puff-fist n., and also puffball n. 1.

I. As the name of a plant.

1. A puffball fungus. English regional (chiefly west midlands) in later use. Now rare.
c1300 in T. Hunt Pop. Med. 13th-cent. Eng. (1990) v. 263 Item contra brok: Recipe mussourounys .i. poukisthes qui crescit super sterquilinium .i. miskyn.

1602 B. Jonson Poetaster iv. vii. sig. I2 I’le blow him into aire, when I meete him next: He dares not fight with a puck-fist .
1609 C. Butler Feminine Monarchie x. sig. K6 Next vnto brimstone [for smoking bees] is the smoake of tuchwood, or puckfists.
[…]
1766 Compl. Farmer at Bee The narcotic, or stupefying fume, is made with the..large mushroom, commonly known by the name bunt, puckfist, or frog-cheese.
[…]
1852 J. Allies Antiq. Folk-lore 418 They also call the puff, or puck-ball fungus, by the name of pug-fiest.
[…]
1903 M. E. Belcher in Eng. Dial. Dict. IV. 636/2 Puckfice.

II. As a derogatory name for a person.

2. A boaster, a braggart. Now archaic.
1600 B. Jonson Every Man out of his Humor i. ii. sig. D To be enamour’d on this dustie Turfe? This clod? a horson Puckefist ?
1605 Hist. Tryall Cheualry sig. G2ᵛ Giue me leaue to incounter this puckfist: and if I doe not make him cry Peccaui, say Dicke Bowyer’s a powdred Mackrell.
1615 J. Taylor Vrania xxiv, in Wks. (1630) 3/2 Then loue him; else his puckfoist pompe abhorre.
[…]
1821 W. Scott Kenilworth II. vi. 178 A base besognio, and a puckfist.
1989 Times Lit. Suppl. 21 July 798/4 Perhaps I am a paranoid puckfist, but when I see my praise being used as a puff for a novel, and my name has been reduced merely to Sunday Times..I begin to wonder if this is..a palpable snub.
1996 Sunday Tasmanian (Austral.) (Nexis) 29 Dec. The only time he has ever sworn over the air-waves was accidentally while trying to say the word ‘puckfist’—a word referring to a person who dominates conversation at a dinner party.

†3. A tight-fisted or avaricious person, a miser. Obsolete.
1606 Wily Beguilde 9 I heard your father say, that he would marrie you to Peter Ploddall, that Puckefist, that snudge snowte.
[…]
1631 B. Jonson New Inne iii. i. 151 Peirce. A grazier’s may. Fer. O they are pinching puckfists! Trun. And suspicious.

Nature investigates why “Species and languages flock together: Cultural and biological diversity are highest in the same places.” [Via Enigmatic Mermaid, via Plep.]

One of my favorite modern poets is Anthony Hecht, an unprolific formalist with a bleak outlook on life whose verse goes down like good strong black coffee. The NY Times has a piece on him today [archived] that explains something of his bleakness; after the usual unhappy childhood Hecht was

a 20-year-old Jewish soldier in the 97th Infantry Division and arriving one day at the Flossenburg camp in Germany, where the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed for treason. What Mr. Hecht saw horrified him: starving prisoners, dying at a rate of 500 a day from typhus. He had a smattering of German and French and was assigned to translate the prisoners’ accounts of the atrocities and the responses of their German guards, who had been captured. For years after, Mr. Hecht dreamed about the camp, waking up screaming…

More important than the biography, of course, is the work.

He is a poet’s poet, a composer of what the poet and novelist Nicholas Christopher, a former student, calls symphonic verse, of dazzling surfaces and profound rhythms. “Reading his work is like hearing really powerful music,” Mr. Christopher says, “Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky.”

Still, over the years Mr. Hecht has been criticized for being ornate, obscure, old-fashioned. “At times he’s been unpopular,” says J. D. McClatchy, the poet and editor of The Yale Review. “He’s not beating drums like Ginsberg. He’s not detached like Wilbur, or confessional like Lowell. He went his own way. At the end he may last longer.”

The library where Mr. Hecht sits is an expression of the man and the work — serene, with fluted pilasters and a frieze around the ceiling with lines from his “Death the Poet,” written in gold leaf:

Those grand authorial earthshakers
Who brought such gladness to the eyes
Of the knowing and unworldly-wise
In damasked language long ago?
Call them and nobody replies.
Et nunc in pulvere dormio.
And now they sleep in dust.

The Latin is a variant of a line from (not surprisingly) the Book of Job: “ecce nunc in pulvere dormiam et si mane me quaesieris non subsistam.” Job 7.21 (Behold now, I shall sleep in the dust: and if thou seek me in the morning, I shall not be.)

Several poems are online here, here, here, and here.

English in Montreal is becoming a unique dialect, according to Charles Boberg in this article from the CBC site (via Pat).

It’s so special because it’s the only major city in North America where English is a minority language,” says Boberg.
A Montrealer, for instance, might say she’s looking for “a three-and-a-half close to a dépanneur” instead of a “one bedroom apartment near a corner store.”
“You had the same sort of intimate contact between English and French in 11th century England as you do today in Montreal,” according to Boberg.
“And that was responsible in the 11th century for the conversion of English from a basically pure Germanic language to a kind of a hybrid language.”

More in this McGill Reporter interview.
Addendum. Desbladet rips Boberg a new trou; I should have remarked on the silliness of Boberg’s last statement about a “hybrid language,” and I am glad that Des has done it for me in his inimitable style. Another example of the latter, from his post on a Whorf quote translated as « ce que nous appelons la “pensée scientifique” n’est qu’une spécialisation du langage indo européen de type occidental… »:

Finno-Ugric-speaking persons! Desist from your desultory, doomed attempts to mimic the superficial trappings of European culture! Return, instead, to your caves and play “Pin the Definite Article on the Indo-European Noun Phrase” and other such traditional drinking games. As a sign of goodwill, here are some shiny glass beads which you can trade for “wodka”. (It’s made from potatoes, you know.)

Everybody go read him—just don’t let him catch you saying something dumb!

In reading Isabel de Madariaga’s Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (heavy going at times, but much more informative than the many lurid biographies of Catherine) I discovered to my delight that the two main parties in mid-eighteenth-century Sweden were the Hat Party and the Cap Party. Here’s a quotation from an online biography of Gustavus III:

To the conflicting interests of peasants, nobles, priests, and officials was added the struggle between the aggressive, pro-French, and aristocratic Hat party and the more conservative, pro-Russian Cap party.

I don’t know which I would have supported, but the choice would have been more entertaining than Republican vs. Democrat.

I recently bought Youssou N’Dour’s new album Nothing’s in Vain (Coono du reer), and having opened and played it today I am doubly delighted—not just by the music, which is wonderful, but by the booklet. For once, an African language (Wolof) is accorded the respect routinely given European ones: the lyrics are provided in the original as well as in translation. This parallels the recent trend in dictionaries to give exact etymologies even for African and Australian languages: where once “okra” was said to be “of African origin,” now Merriam-Webster’s says “akin to Ibo ókùrù okra.” To celebrate, here are the first lines of the song “Tan bi” followed by their translation from the booklet:

Sedd bi ag tàngaay bi dafa mel ni yëppa yam
Bu ci xas yegsi ba jàll da nga naan mo la gënël
Seddaay bi, tàngaay bi
Koo gëjë gis nan ko xaar tàngaay bi

No matter what the weather, it’s the same for us
In fact, we tend to prefer the season just ended
People you haven’t seen for a long time reappear when the weather is warmer
It’s time for outings again.

Addendum. Well, as I say, that’s the booklet’s translation. I suspected it was on the loose side, so I went looking for an online Wolof dictionary—and found a good one (pdf file). I’d have to know something about Wolof grammar to figure out the sentences, but tàngaay is ‘warm weather,’ seddaay ‘cold weather,’ and dafa mel ‘is like,’ so that gives some idea of what’s going on in the first line. Anyway, if you have any interest in West African languages, check out that dictionary.