Archives for July 2003

Via Plep, the Native American Religions section of the Internet Sacred Text Archive includes a fair number of cultures; most are only in translation, but there are originals included in texts for Cherokee, Navajo (both Washington Matthews books), and Haida. (There may be others; I didn’t try every link.)

Via Desbladet, an extremely interesting LINGUIST List discussion of the popular idea that various phonological changes in languages (notably the Castilian ceceo /thetheo/ and the French uvular r) were the result of a royal speech impediment that spread throughout the population. I was rather surprised that this (to me, clearly ludicrous) idea was taken so seriously, but the discussion that followed is full of great details about the history of uvular r (written R in linguistic usage) in French and German, as well as tidbits about Soviet officials imitating Brezhnev’s and Gorbachov’s southern-dialect fricative pronunciation of [g], Indonesian government officials imitating Suharto’s Javanese-influenced pronunciation of the verbal suffix {kan} with schwa instead of [a], and the like. A sample [2023: by Marie-Lucie Tarpent, not yet a fixture at the Hattery!]:

It seems quite well-documented that the uvular pronunciation developed first as a stigmatized feature among the Parisian lower class, the apical r being general at that time. This was still the case at the end of the 19th century where this pronunciation was called “parler gras” ‘to speak fat’ and the R, “r grasseyé” (the pronunciation [gRa] itself, with low back [a], examplifying the feature in question)… Anyway, during the Revolution when it was important for the former upper classes to keep a very low profile, and often to go into hiding, many people started to use the R in an effort to try to blend with the common people… Later the pronunciation of a rather weak uvular fricative became general in Paris and also spread to other urban areas (where it might have been adopted first by local revolutionaries), but the reinstated royal court and the old aristocracy, especially the ones who had emigrated to escape the revolution, clung to the apical r, as did most of the country people. It is only in the 20th century that R has become standard, but many older people especially in rural areas still use r.

I had no idea that the uvular R took so long to become standard. The whole piece is well worth your while.

A reader’s e-mail got me digging around for an online version of the Tao Te Ching (or, if you prefer, Dao De Jing), and I wound up at an amazing site, Zhongwen.com: Chinese Characters and Culture. Its primary focus is on the characters:

Alone among modern languages, Chinese integrates both meaning and pronunciation information in its characters. Zhongwen.com deciphers this rich information to help students understand, appreciate and remember Chinese characters, one of humanity’s greatest and most enduring cultural achievements…
EVERY CHARACTER on this site is “CLICKABLE”.
Click to see its definition, etymology, and relation to other characters.
Click on “+” to hear it, see it drawn, and see its entry in other dictionaries.

But along with the dictionary and the lists of dynasties, surnames, names of Chinese-Americans (if you’ve ever wondered about the characters for Connie Chung, Michelle Kwan, I.M. Pei, or Yo-Yo Ma, here’s where you can find them), and the like, it has a Readings section with not only the Dao De Jing but the Analects of Confucius, the 300 Tang Poems, Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman, and other classic texts (not to mention speeches by Deng Xiaoping and Bill Clinton [!]). A tremendous amount of work has obviously gone into this site, which is a treasure-trove to set alongside the Russian ones I blogged yesterday; it’s been quite a weekend for foreign literature here at Languagehat.

William Safire’s column today is neither so idiotic as to require yet another Safire-flogging nor so informative as to be cited for its own sake (it’s a routine investigation into the history of the phrase “tipping point”), but it uses a spelling variant that leapt out at me and sent me running to the dictionaries. In the course of trying to find a replacement for the now overused phrase, he says: “Turning point? Not a lot of bezazz, and it does not express the idea of the straw that breaks the camel’s back…” Bezazz! I knew the word “pizzazz” had variants, as befits such an irrepressibly slangy term, but I hadn’t seen this one. Merriam-Webster gives only “pizazz” as an alternate, while American Heritage allows you to simplify either of the z clusters, but neither offers a version in b-. Then I tried the OED, and bingo: “Also bezaz, bezazz, bizzazz, pazazz, pazzazz, pezazz, pizazz, pizzaz.” Now there’s generosity for you; in fact, I wonder whether there is any entry for which they offer more variants. The curious thing, though, is that all the citations with initial b– seem to be British:

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I have occasionally made offhand remarks indicating my dislike for Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories and, still worse, his effect on the field, but I have not had the heart to go into detail; I’m worn out from all the arguing I did about him back when I was an actual linguist (now, I just play one on the internet). Fortunately, my procrastination has paid off (as it so often does), and Scott Martens has done the job for me. I direct anyone who wants to know exactly how wrong and destructive Chomsky has been to go forthwith to Pedantry and scroll down to “Friday, July 25, 2003: My carefully considered and well earned aversion to Noam Chomsky” (I won’t even try to provide a permalink, Blogger being what it is). Quick summary: “His principles ultimately produced nothing, and may well have set linguistics back decades. The day will come when his legacy is compared to Skinner’s, and when historians of the social sciences will debate which one ultimately caused the most damage.” But there’s much, much more.

Addendum. Scott expands on the subject in the comments to this entry.

A caveat: after sixteen paragraphs, you will reach the sentence “There was some more stuff I was going to say about Cambodia.” You can stop there, unless you’re particularly interested in the still-simmering argument over exactly what Uncle Noam said about the Khmer Rouge 25 years ago and whether it was justified given what was known at the time. As Scott says, “There’s something about that country that seems to drive its students mad.”

Again via Avva, an online corpus of transcribed French conversations:

The French corpus is currently comprised of 51 hours of spoken French recorded in Paris, Grenoble, Monpellier and Avignon. We are in the process of transcribing this data and so far we have five texts available on-line. Soon we hope to post more texts as well as ethnographic information about the speakers and the speech situations. The twenty-seven texts below are comprised of approximately 119,000 words total.

Invaluable for anyone wanting to research French as she is actually spoke.

I mean, sure there’s a lot of Pushkin online, but I just discovered (via a comment in Avva) the mother lode: the entire 10-volume edition, with bad language supplied in angle brackets (it’s never printed in Russian editions, thanks to lingering prudery), the originals of things he wrote in French (linked to Russian translations), very reader-friendly format… bless this newfangled internet!

And I’ve just hit the “rvb” link and discovered it’s only part of an online library that includes full editions of Dostoevsky (15 volumes), Derzhavin, and Khlebnikov, not to mention works by Bely, Remizov, and others, as well as Gnedich’s 1829 translation of the Iliad. It may well be that every other Russian-reading person in the universe has long known of this resource—it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been behind the curve—but I’m very glad I finally caught up.

Addendum. Anatoly, in the comments, sent me to another Russsian literature site that has more material, including the 16-volume edition of Pushkin used by scholars. Unfortunately, it uses an annoying frames interface, so I can only link to the main Pushkin page; to get to the edition you have to click on the + next to Произведения Пушкина on the left, then on the + by Собрания сочинений Пушкина, then on the one by Полное собрание сочинений в шестнадцати томах. — 1937—1959, at which point you get the list of volumes. Furthermore, the alphabetical index is a text file, so if you’re looking for a particular poem you have to go to the index, find the page number, then go back to (say) Volume Two and estimate where that page number would be in the list of entries. Contrast with the RVB site above, where the index has links that take you right to the desired work. But it’s still good to have all this stuff online.

Further addendum. This site has all of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, &c. in transcription. Most useful.

There’s a fascinating discussion at the site I Love Everything (with which I was previously unfamiliar, but whose name definitely appeals to me) that began with the question “How do the deaf interpret rhyme?” Along with some understandable defensiveness from deaf people interpreting it as implying they should value rhyme in some way, it became a very interesting exchange of ideas; this in particular brings up things I had never thought about and would like to know more about:

There are entirely different patterns by which poetry & narrative are constructed in the deaf community. A deaf person can of course read conventional poetry, with rhyme and all that, but it tends not to carry the same weight or interest that sign-specific stories & poetry do.

There is an enormously rich “oral” tradition (ie, carried on exclusively through signing and not written down) in the deaf community that is pretty much entirely unknown to the hearing world. I recently wrote a screenplay for an animated program for deaf children my ex is producing for p b s. I wrote the scenario, which was then translated into ASL by her and by the deaf actors doing improvisations (they filmed it in rotoscope). My original script almost completely vanished, since the puns and jokes and signifiers and the interesting patterns they can be put into are so hugely different from written speech.

The deaf world is really a self-sustaining alternate universe, with its own cultural codes and achievements. Hearing-based formal elements, like rhyme, are largely irrelevant to them and it’s a common mistake (one I used to make as well; I’m not trying to scold you) to assume they value, or should value, the same things we do.

— chester (goth_casua…), July 25th, 2003

This gives me the sense of an entire cultural world about which I know nothing, like when I first began to realize the riches of Persian civilization. So many worlds, so little time—how can people ever get bored?

A useful little article by Michele A. Berdy from the Moscow Times (once again via the excellent Taccuino di traduzione).

Addendum (March 2020). Might as well provide some excerpts:

One of my favorite interjections is aga, which is a rather low-brow sign of agreement, something like yup, sure, you got it, uh-huh in American English. — Ty kupil khleb? — Aga. (Did you pick up bread? — Uh-huh.)

Another good interjection to know is fu, a kind of all-purpose expression of disdain, disgust or displeasure. Ty chital statyu v Izvestiyakh? Fu! Gadost! Nenavizhu kompromat! (Did you see the article in Izvestia? — Yuck! Disgusting! I hate smear articles!) When you use it to refer to a bad smell or something revolting, in English you say Phew! P-U!

[…]
Ai-ai-ai, said with a wag of the head, means “shame on you,” and is expressed in English as Tsk tsk. Brys! Fu! or Kysh! are what you shout at your cat when she’s on the countertop and about to dive into your chicken dinner. In American English we shout Shoo! or Scat!

[…]
And then there’s Au, which is both a call for someone you are looking for, or a response to the call. For example, when you walk in your colleague’s room and say Sasha! he can respond with Au, pronounced as a diphthong. In English you might say, “Here I am.” or “Yes?” But when you get separated from your fellow mushroom hunter in the woods, you call out Auuuuu!, elongating the syllables and letting them float on the wind. […] When translating Au!, ignore the dictionary suggestion “You-hoo!” In fact, take out your thickest marker and cross it out. Even though it’s close in sound, trust me — no one has used this in English except as a joke since 1942. Most of the time we just shout out the person’s name, making the syllables last a few seconds: A-a-a-a-lex! Su-u-u-san! Not as universal as Auuu!, but it does the trick.

Note that ага, which she transliterates as “aga,” can be pronounced [mhm] (with the mouth closed), [əhə] (with open mouth), or [aga], a spelling pronunciation.

Via Taccuino di traduzione, a multilingual online course for translators; here‘s the English version. From Translation studies – part one:

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