Archives for April 2003

The Duck

Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups.

–Ogden Nash

The British Library/University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project “was founded in September 1996 in order to promote the study, editing, and publication of a unique collection of fifty-seven fragments of Buddhist manuscripts on birch bark scrolls, written in the Kharosthi script and the Gandhari (Prakrit) language that were acquired by the British Library in 1994. The manuscripts date from, most likely, the first century A.D., and as such are the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, which promise to provide unprecedented insights into the early history of Buddhism in north India and in central and east Asia.” I discovered this project through an article posted by John Hardy in his wonderful and endlessly varied blog Laputan Logic, which takes forever to load (any of you blog mavens out there want to give him helpful tips?) but is well worth it; recent posts have included fugu, the Jehoash Inscription, Udaipur photos, perpetual motion, and the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and in the past he’s discussed non-round protons, the planet Quaoar, and, well, go see for yourself. Just hit Stop when you get tired of waiting for the damn thing to finish loading.

Addendum. I have shamed John into fixing his own blog, and it now loads in a jiffy!

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Everything you wanted to know about Chinook Jargon in one remarkable website. Via taz. A bit of history within:

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Via Pensate Omnia:

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive persons listen persistently to the ticking of a watch, or gaze persistently on the monotonous flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotic trance; and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must needs listen, and various, that one may not be swept beyond memory or grow weary of listening; while the patterns of the artist are but the monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment.

From Yeats’s 1900 essay “The Symbolism of Poetry.”

People should be more aware of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, the great scientist from Khwarezm (south of the Aral Sea) who accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni on his conquest of India in the 1020s and wrote a comprehensive account of that country. “Biruni’s works cover essentially the whole of science at his time. Kennedy writes:”

… his bent was strongly towards the study of observable phenomena, in nature and in man. Within the sciences themselves he was attracted by those fields then susceptible of mathematical analysis.

But what is of immediate interest here is his linguistic accomplishment. Not only did he write many, many books in Arabic and Persian (neither of which was his native language), but on the trip to India he learned Sanskrit, not only translating sacred Hindu books into Arabic but translating Euclid’s Elements and some of his own works into Sanskrit! Now, that’s impressive.

I got onto the subject through this remarkable entry at Odd Things in Pitt’s Libraries:

The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows by Abu al-Rayħān Muħammad b. Aħmad al-Bīrūnī: Translation & Commentary by E.S. Kennedy, published by the Institute for the History of Arabic Science, University of Aleppo (Syria), 1976.

from the preface: “Copy for photo-offset printing was turned out in Beirut simultaneously with the development of the Lebanese civil war. The concomitant difficulties provide a blanket excuse to cover the manifold shortcomings of the result (the bizarre format of this page, for example). Moreover, the milieu in some ways appropriately resembled that of the wars of Sulţān Mahmud, and the vicissitudes under which al-Bīrūnī (973?-1048) brought forth the original of this work.”

Fourth floor, Hillman

I don’t even know how to start telling you about Carl Masthay and his obsessively compiled and self-published Kaskaskia Illinois-to-French Dictionary. Just go read the Riverfront Times article (by Matthew Everett); you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder how he finds girlfriends, you may even wind up sending him $30 for the book. No rush; it’s not selling out any time soon. (Thanks to the indefatigable Bob Cohen for the tip, and to Prentiss Riddle for the dictionary link.)

Addendum. I just (Jan. 2006) discovered the Everett article has migrated to another URL; having at first thought it had vanished, I believe I’ll reproduce some of it here just in case:

For Masthay, though, the dictionary—more than twelve years in the works—is a final, monumental validation of the decades he’s spent looking into the hidden corners of language. Through his self-financed and often obsessive research, Masthay has marked out a peculiar and far-reaching patch of intellectual territory, becoming something of a local legend in the process for his intelligence and his eccentricities.

Masthay, 62, came to St. Louis in 1967 after a stint in the U.S. Air Force. He enrolled in graduate school at Washington University, working toward a master’s degree in Chinese. After a year at Wash. U., he went to work at the Mosby publishing company, editing medical texts. He stayed there 33 years, retiring in January 2002. Outside work, he pursued his other interests: biology, astronomy, entomology, archaeology and, in particular, foreign languages.

“I see languages as tools to understand the universe, to understand other people’s cultures,” he says, rubbing his temples as he searches for the exact words he wants. “As a kid, I saw them as codes. I want to know what they’re holding.”

Over the years, Masthay has become a familiar figure on the academic circuit. He counts professors at major universities all over the world as his friends. His living room is cluttered with journals and science magazines, in addition to hundreds of compact discs (mostly world and ethnic music), his own notebooks and photocopied pages of poems, puns and etymologies. He claims fluency in five languages—French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Russian—and competence in dozens more, with texts in Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese lining the shelves in his house.

Masthay occupies a nebulous place among professional scholars; he’s not quite an equal, but many of them appreciate his efforts and consider him a respected contributor to their fields.

“People cite his work. They trust it enough to cite it,” says linguist David J. Costa, who works with Indian tribes to revive dormant languages. “He’s not a linguist in the sense that he has a degree in linguistics, but he’s a linguist in the sense that he speaks a lot of languages. The consensus seems to be that he’s a very reliable editor, a skilled translator, and he’s almost insanely meticulous. And when you’re preparing a scholarly edition of a 300- or 400-year-old manuscript, that attention to detail is essential.” (Masthay would dispute Costa’s characterization of his credentials. He says the work he did to transcribe another Indian document, Schmick’s Mahican Dictionary, would have been enough to qualify him for a doctorate.)

As someone who also “occupies a nebulous place among professional scholars,” I salute his dogged and unremunerative efforts.

Teresa Dowlatshahi has a new comic using words in foreign languages that sound like English ones; today’s installment, for example, describes the Lardil word weel as meaning ‘big clouds (that come out of the east in the summer)’ and shows several whale-shaped clouds floating over a landscape. Fun.

Update (Mar. 2024). The comic lasted a few years; the original link is dead (I provided an archived one), but the whole run is available here.

Dorothea Salo over at the always interesting Caveat Lector is generously providing a series of lessons in Movable Type for rank beginners (such as myself). So far there have been What’s a Movable Type template?, Anatomy of a template, Preferences and placeholders, and Container placeholders; you can follow the series here. I’m sure I speak for many when I say: thanks, Dorothea!

Anyone in the New York City area should be aware of the program coming up May 2-29 at the Walter Reade Cinema in Lincoln Center, Films from Along the Silk Road: Central Asian Cinema.
Addendum. Anthology Film Archives is in the middle of Voices Of Dissent In Arab Cinema: A Selection Of Films By North African Directors; oddly, there is nothing about it on AFA’s own site, but here‘s a review from the Village Voice.
More on the Central Asian program:

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Here’s a little quiz. What language was spoken three centuries ago by the Jewish community of Istanbul? Of Bordeaux? Of Hamburg? (Hint: three different answers.)
Answers (and much more) within….

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