Archives for June 2003

Nancy Gandhi at under the fire star makes note of an interesting word used in Indian English:

to prepone – example: The Friday meeting has been preponed to Thursday morning. (This word is succinct and useful. It deserves a place in English languages everywhere. I urge everyone who reads this to adopt it and help it grow.)

I agree with her. And through an entry in The Atlantic‘s “Word Fugitives” archives, we learn:

The word ‘prepone’ is found in The New Oxford Dictionary of English, published 1998. It is listed as being Indian (from India) and is defined as: to bring forward to an earlier date or time. Example given: The publication date has been preponed from July to June.

So there we have it: the word is listed in a dictionary, it’s well formed, and it’s unquestionably useful; I hereby welcome it to the English vocabulary!

I’m still reading the Ammiel Alcalay book (see Levantine Culture I), and have just come across the following passage, a nice counterpoint to the preceding Xenophobia entry:

Examples of the persistence of the Arabic element in Hebrew poetry abound. In Egypt, for instance, the Laylat al-Tawhid (the custom of studying the Torah on the eve of the ancient New Year) assumed a particular form. Hebrew liturgical poems were sung to Egyptian tunes before being translated, verse by verse, into Arabic. The climactic text—all in Arabic and recited at midnight—contained many Islamic formulas. Beginning with the Muslim invocation (B’ism Allah al-Rahman al-Rahim), it invoked the ninety-nine divine attributes in the Sufi manner and used Koranic epithets for biblical figures: Abraham as al-Khalil, Aaron as al-Imam and Moses as Rasul Allah. Kept intact as long as there was an active Jewish community in Egypt—until, in fact, the period during which Jabès emigrated—this solemn service that “renders the heart and fills the soul with terror” seems to have been originated by the Nagid Avraham, son of Maimonides. Remarkably enough, the ceremony has continued in the Egyptian Jewish community of Brooklyn, where even during the Gulf War Egyptian musicians (former members of Umm Kulthum’s orchestra) shared the stage with rabbis and cantors as they celebrated the ancient expressions of common unity.

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According to this post by the Enigmatic Mermaid, the Brazilian Senate is considering a bill for the “protection, promotion, defense, and use” of the Portuguese language: requirements for use in public communications, replacement of loan words, you know the drill. When will we grow up and move beyond this kind of idiocy? Borrowing is healthy; look at English! Besides, the bill has left the Merm’s “nerves too frayed for blogging.” Stop this madness at once!

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I am a lady bug and I
hope I look pretty and
I hope no kids will
trap me to keep being
locked up in something
because I have no idea
what the thing they lock
me up in is called and I am
so sorry it’s dinner time
good evening I have to go.
  –Julia Mayhew

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A story in the Hindustan Times discusses the effect of “e-governance” on the information technology market in India.

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An interesting reminiscence in The Threepenny Review by Bernard Malamud’s daughter Janna; this excerpt expresses the basic dilemma of the artist:

As with the quandary between the Shakespeare play and the baby, I think Dad struggled mightily with this dilemma of ruthlessness. How much should you allow yourself to pain, or harm, or simply not take care of the people around you in the service of art-making? Jude’s cry to Arabella, “have a little pity on the creature,” could have been my father’s central moral tenet.

Characteristically, the one time I met Malamud (in New Haven, circa 1980) I asked him about the pronunciation of his name: did the family say me-LAH-med, as in Yiddish? He laughed and said it had doubtless been that way in the old country, but in America the family said MA-lamud. I nodded, satisfied. I suppose I could have asked about the morality of the artist, but then I’d be Moralhat, wouldn’t I? And he wouldn’t have been able to give as satisfying an answer. (Link via the invaluable wood s lot.)

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I apologize for being late with this—the link will probably expire tomorrow—but I didn’t want to let go without comment one of the few entirely sensible things the NY Times has published on language; no surprise, given that it’s by Geoffrey Nunberg, whom I have previously praised. It’s called “The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics” and it should be the final word on the idiotic controversy over the College Board sentence “Toni Morrison’s genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.” Nunberg discusses the alleged rule that would make the sentence incorrect, and says:

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P. Kerim Friedman has a good post deconstructing a NY Times article by David Berreby that attacks the whole concept of trying to preserve languages. My favorite sentence: “He fails to grasp that the process of language death only seems natural if you accept the power inequalities that cause it in the first place.” Well said, Kerim! (Karen Chung tried to get a discussion of the article going on LINGUISTList, but it didn’t get very far.)

Via The Discouraging Word comes word of the discovery of the “oldest writing in English”: four runes on a brooch. Since we can’t even be sure it’s English, I’m dubious about the historical importance of the find, but here’s the start of the Daily Telegraph story by Paul Stokes:

What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes representing the letters N, E, I and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The six inch cruciform brooch is among one million artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. Dominic Powlesland, the archaeologist leading the excavation team, said: “This could well be the earliest example of written English we know of.
“Only one or two other runic inscriptions from around this period have been found, but this is either the earliest or one of them. We have no idea what the letters mean, except that it would have been something in early English.
“Whether it is a charm of some form, a person’s initials or the first letters of a phrase is something only future research will be able to determine. It was obviously something treasured by its owner as it had been carefully repaired.”

And we should bear in mind the following warning from Hugh R. Whinfrey in his article on runic inscriptions:

The most tenuous aspect of using the runestones as historical evidence is taking the absence or scarcity of them as supporting evidence to a hypothesis. Considering the millennium or so since their construction, many have been doubtlessly lost forever. A crude estimate made with liberally unrealistic assumptions concerning early English runic inscriptions yields a guess that at most one per cent of the objects actually inscribed are known to scholars today.

Update (Oct. 2023). I have been unable to turn up anything about this from the last two decades; the only hits are from 2003, e.g., from HADAS newsletter-392-november-2003:

What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes respresentating the letters N, E, I, and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The brooch is among one millions artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. The meaning of the writing is not, as yet, understood. English Heritage has provided £55,000 to display the finds at Malton Museum.

My conclusion: it was overhyped at the time.

If you’re worried about confusing those words, read this post (illustrated!) at Dr. Weevil and you need never fear embarrassment again.