Archives for July 2003

Language hat is going to spend the next week in California. Regular blogging will resume July 13; in the interim, I urge you to visit the excellent sites blogrolled at right, and (for those of you in climates resembling that of New York) drink plenty of fluids and stay in the shade.
Update. I’m back, and I thank you all for your various bon voyages.

Avva has posted a complete transcription of Jonathan Ree’s essay “Being foreign is different” (Times Literary Supplement, 6/9/96), one of the most interesting things I’ve read lately on translation. The text is without italics or accents, but it’s generally easy enough to see where they should be; for one section which their absence renders incomprehensible, he provides an accented version, and I will add italics:

Take, for example, the celebrated essay “La Différence”, in which Derrida tried to open out the concept of difference by comparing the French différer with Greek diapherein, Latin differre, and differieren in German. As everyone must know by now, Derrida dramatized his point by coining the non-word différance, spelled with an “a”, alongside the ordinary French word différence, spelled with an “e”. And since the two forms are pronounced the same, they made a nice illustration of Derrida’s point about writing not being a depiction of speech; manifestly, the difference between différance and différence could be seen but not heard.
As it happens, it is easy to reproduce this effect in English. Différance can be transliterated as “differance” with an “a”, yielding an English non-word which sounds the same as the ordinary English word “difference”, thus translating Derrida’s device perfectly. This was the solution adopted in David Allison’s translation, published in 1973. But a decade later, Alan Bass produced a new version, which opted to leave différance in French. This crazy translation took off, just at the time when Derrida was becoming a cult author in English, and as a result thousands of English-speaking Derrideans were left floundering for a French pronunciation of différance, apparently under the impression that they were being loyal to its quintessential Frenchness. Unluckily for them, though, différance was not a French concept at all, and – by making the difference between differance and “difference” audible, all too audible – the Derrideans were not only missing Derrida’s point, but spoiling it too. It was as if the translator, rather than helping us engage with ideas and argue over them, preferred to fetishize their foreignness and turn us into dazzled spectators of an exotic scene.

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I do love a well-used word. In a report on the Chinese Three Gorges Dam project and the consequent flooding of fields and villages in this week’s New Yorker, Peter Hessler says of a fellow building a fishing boat:

Huang is shirtless, a skinny, square-jawed man with efficient ropelike muscles. Later, when I ask if he’s worried about the boat’s not being tested before the water rises, he gives me the slightly annoyed look of a shipwright hassled by diluvian reporters. Huang Zongming is a righteous man, and he knows that his boat will float.

Well played, sir! Deucedly well played!

And, speaking of words, there’s a lexicographical examination of “blandishment” over at The Discouraging Word today (no permalinks).

I was reading a recent issue of the LRB and came to “Mohocks,” by Liam McIlvanney, a review of The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era by David Finkelstein. I almost skipped it because, really, who cares?—but my omnivorous reading habits kicked in and I plunged ahead. I’m glad I did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have learned about the Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of mostly imaginary conversations between the Edinburgh wits of the 1820s that were a regular feature of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. McIlvanney describes them as follows:

Wilson’s dialogues are… an astonishing repository of literary Scots, particularly in the speeches of the [Ettrick] Shepherd [James Hogg], those unpredictable and extravagant vernacular riffs. Since the 17th century, Scots has been (in David Craig’s useful phrase) a ‘reductive idiom’, a way of undercutting Latinate English, and we get a lot of this in the Noctes… But we also get lengthy, vertiginously inventive passages in which the Scots tongue is put through its paces in a manner almost without parallel in 19th-century writing. The Scots of the Noctes is a language not merely of pawky humour and vituperation, but of philosophical speculation, impressionistic description, political oratory, sentimental rhapsody, critical pronouncement, religious devotion. In short, it is a language fit for all purposes, and if he did nothing else in his long and varied career, Wilson composed, as Cockburn noted, ‘the best Scotch that has been written in modern times’.

So I’m hoping somebody will put it, or at least a good sample of it, online. (There is actually a searchable archive of Blackwood’s here, but alas only for 1843-1863, well after the years of the Ambrosianae—named, incidentally, for a real Edinburgh tavern, Ambrose’s of Picardy Place, where they were set.)

By the way, I urge anyone with the slightest fondness for the kind of theological weirdness exploited by, say, Hawthorne to read Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner; you can even do so online. It’s a real hoot, and at the same time sends a shudder down the spine.

Addendum. The Scribe has taken note of my call for online Noctes and has posted some at The Discouraging Word under the rubric (le mot juste—it’s red) “Dogs and skating in the Noctes” [roughly halfway down — thanks, January First-of-May!]. Even the few excerpts there show amazing range, from the casual (“It’s lang sin’ I’ve drank sae muckle sawt water at ae sittin’—at ae soomin’, I mean—as I hae dune, sir, sin’ that Steam-boat gaed by. She does indeed kick up a deevil o’ a rumpus.”) to the exalted:

But the mystery o’ life canna gang out like the pluff o’ a cawnle. Perhaps the verra bit bonny glitterin’ insecks that we ca’ ephemeral, because they dance out but ae single day, never dee, but keep for ever and aye openin’ and shuttin’ their wings in mony million atmospheres, and may do sae through a’ eternity. The universe is aiblins wide eneuch.

Many thanks for the prompt satisfaction!

Des is not a man who sees an Augean stable and wanders off whistling; he has decided to take on “Serious Writers who have succumbed to the urge to Hold Opinions about languages,” and his first installment, in which he whacks Mihály Komis about the head and shoulders for suggesting that Hungarians should learn German rather than English, is now available for your delectation.

Via Avva comes this Guardian piece by John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, who picks his favourite words with unusual origins. I myself particularly like #8:

to curry favour is a common idiom which embraces two linguistic ‘fossils’ as well as a cultural misunderstanding. The ‘currying’ here does not refer to the addition of spices to a dish but to the act of rubbing down a horse with a brush or comb. The idiom derives from the French ‘estriller fauvel’, ‘to curry the chestnut horse’, the horse in question, Fauvel, being a character in the French tale the ‘Roman de Fauvel’ (1310). In the story Fauvel, like Reynard the Fox, represents hypocrisy and duplicity. In English the unfamiliar ‘Fauvel’ was gradually replaced by the similar-sounding ‘favour’ in an idiom that came to mean ‘to seek to win favour, to ingratiate oneself’. As is the case with many fossilized idioms, the fact that the transformation of ‘Favel’ to ‘favour’ made nonsense of the verb ‘curry’ in the context did nothing to deter usage.

It’s interesting to learn that hobbit “has since turned up in one of those 19th-century folklore journals, in a list of long-forgotten words for fairy-folk or little people”; when will they get around to adding this to the online OED entry?

Larry Trask, who made a prior Languagehat appearance in this entry, has a useful Basque page, prefaced with the following pointed caveat:

But please note: I do not want to hear about the following:

Your latest proof that Basque is related to Iberian / Etruscan / Pictish / Sumerian / Minoan / Tibetan / Isthmus Zapotec / Martian

Your discovery that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam inscriptions / the Phaistos disc / the Easter Island carvings / the Egyptian Book of the Dead / the Qabbala / the prophecies of Nostradamus / your PC manual / the movements of the New York Stock Exchange

Your belief that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind / a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis / the language of the vanished civilization of Antarctica / evidence of visitors from Proxima Centauri

(Thanks to Vidiot for the link.)

Addendum. Thanks to Pat of fieldmethods.net for this excellent interview with Trask; I was sad to read at the end: “Illness has robbed him of his voice, so that this interview had to be conducted entirely by email.”

As it happens, yesterday was a day of, shall we say, personal chronological significance, and my lovely wife gave me several presents, mainly books. (As she put it, “You don’t need more books, of course, but… you need more books.”) One of these was a book I recently posted about, Switching Languages, “the first anthology in which translingual authors from throughout the world examine their experiences writing in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one.” I am, of course, delighted to have it (and Summer in Baden-Baden and Life Along the Silk Road) and am very much looking forward to reading it. Another source of delight: not only is my wife lovely and generous, but she reads my blog.
Coincidentally, today’s NY Times has an article very relevant to the book, about two Americans who have made careers in Argentina, writing in Spanish:

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Regular readers will know that I often have occasion to berate the hapless William Safire, whose love for the English language is passionate but lamentably short on genuine knowledge. Today, however, reading him has filled me with joy, for he has brought me good tidings. The magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang, edited by Jonathan Lighter, was dropped by its original publisher, Random House, after two volumes in an appalling demonstration of obsession with profit to the exclusion of all other factors. (They might have considered the example of the OED, which was similarly seen by Oxford as a sure money-loser in the beginning; since then, of course, it has been a bonanza for OUP.) But salvation is announced in Safire’s Sunday column:

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