Archives for August 2003

Via the newly returned Grande Rousse (was she in the same province of Hiatus as Renee, I wonder?), a wide-ranging but spotty site on French language resources. Checking their book section under Etymology, I found several items that did not seem to have much if anything to do with the subject and none specifically devoted to it; looking around, they seem to focus pretty much entirely on traditional Académie-style works, ignoring scientific linguistics. But if the former is what you’re interested in, there’s a lot of it. And in the internet-links section, I found a nice little guide to French typographical style (though I wish they were a bit more expansive on the subject of capitalization in titles, which has always confused me).
Addendum. La Rousse has very kindly sent me links to two sites that offer exhaustive explanations of capitalization in titles, which I was quite right to be confused by. The sites are here and here, and I will try to summarize their wisdom:

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I tried to resist, I really did—I know I have a book problem—but I couldn’t resist at least looking at a book with the title Error and the Academic Self, and the table of contents was irresistible:
Introduction: The Pursuit of Error: Philology, Rhetoric, and the History of Scholarship
1. Errata: Mistakes and Masters in the Early Modern Book
2. Sublime Philology: An Elegy for Anglo-Saxon Studies
3. My Casaubon: The Novel of Scholarship and Victorian Philology
4. Ardent Etymologies: American Rhetorical Philology, from Adams to de Man
5. Making Mimesis: Exile, Errancy, and Erich Auerbach
Epilogue: Forbidden Planet and the Terrors of Philology
Every other word pushes one of my buttons, and the third chapter turns out to concern the OED as much as George Eliot. And when I turned to Seth Lerer’s Introduction and found that it began:

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That seems to be the motto of the Indonesian government, which is considering making foreign residents take Indonesian language exams, according to this Sydney Morning Herald story by Matthew Moore:

About 30,000 expatriates who live in Indonesia could soon find themselves swotting for language exams if the Ministry of National Education gets its way and begins testing all present and future foreign workers and students.
In a country where many foreigners get by with big smiles, phrase-book greetings and the locals’ knowledge of English, the plan to award each of them a standardised Indonesian-language score out of 900 might seem ambitious.
But the ministry’s language centre is geared up for the task. It wants to strengthen Indonesian as an international tongue and make it easier for foreigners to communicate with locals….

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The Shor language, with a disastrous history (outlined here) that apparently doomed it to extinction, seems to be making a comeback according to an article by Charles Carlson. (Via Morfablog.)

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“An extraordinary contempt for the word, or what might even be called a loathing for the word has seized humanity. Confidence in the notion that human beings are capable of persuading one another with words and language has vanished in the most radical sense. Everything associated with parlare has taken on negative connotations. Parliaments are corrupted by their own disgust with parliamentary activities in general, and when conferences are convened somewhere the participants gather in an atmosphere of scorn and skepticism. Knowledge of the impossibility of communication has become too pronounced. Everyone knows that everyone else speaks a different language and lives in entirely different value systems, and that every people is trapped in its own system of values. Indeed, this is true not just for every person, but for every profession as well. The businessman can’t persuade the military man, nor the military man the businessman. The engineer doesn’t understand the worker; or rather, they understand each other only in so far as each of them concedes to the other the right to bring all means within their power to bear, to ruthlessly use their system of values to their own advantage, to break any contract necessary in order to crush and overrun their opponent. Never before, at least not in the history of Western Europe, has the world admitted with such honesty and openness… that the word is of absolutely no use, and further, that it is no longer even worth the effort to pursue understanding…. Silence weighs heavily on the world…. A mute silence reigns between people and between groups of people, and it is the silence of murder.

“But in spite of this muteness the world is full of voices. They aren’t the voices of assertion and rejoinder, however. Rather, they are simply voices, screaming chaotically… over each other, drowning each other out, a simultaneous hullabaloo of language and opinions being spoken past each other, interrupted only by the rather mechanical and unceremonious sounds of dull church services, rendered banal and destroyed by the earthly noise. It is the terrifying noise of a silence that accompanies murder,… a muteness that is audible, but is no longer language. Rather, these disjointed cries make up components of language…. And in this silence they are merely eruptions—eruptions of anxiety, eruptions of desperation, eruptions of courage.”

From Hermann Broch’s essay “Reflections on the Zeitgeist,” available in a different translation (titled “The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age”) in a collection called Geist and Zeitgeist. It was written in 1934.

The excerpt above (translated by Daniel Slager) is, by the way, used as the introduction to the first issue of AUTODAFE, The Journal of the International Parliament of Writers, which has published two issues (some of the contents available here) and is about to come out with a combined n°3-4 (2003): “This issue attempts to provide an overview of the new dangers weighing on literature and thought, the unprecedented forms that censure and propaganda are wearing today, as well as the new means and networks of intellectual, literary and linguistic resistance…” Highly recommended.

Renee is back, from both Israel and Hiatus, with a monochrome design and a half-dozen new entries (including one about a guy with a box that would make me jealous if my shelves weren’t already groaning).

Back in January I bought (and posted about) The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature; now I’ve found a companion volume, American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, also edited by Marc Shell (whose take on the role of language in political conflict should be of interest to Scott Martens). Here’s Harvard’s description:

If ever there was a polyglot place on the globe (other than the Tower of Babel), America between 1750 and 1850 was it. Here three continents—North America, Africa, and Europe—met and spoke not as one, but in Amerindian and African languages, in German and English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. How this prodigious multilingualism lost its voice in the making of the American canon and in everyday American linguistic practice is the problem American Babel approaches from a variety of angles. Looking at the first Arabic-language African-American slave narrative, at quirks of translation in Greek-American bilingual books, and at the strategies of Yiddish women poets and Welsh-American dramatists, contributors show how linguistic resistance opposes the imperative of linguistic assimilation. They address matters of literary authority in Irish Gaelic writing, Creole novels, and the multiple voices of the Zuni storyteller; and in essays on Haitian, Welsh, Spanish, and Chinese literatures, they trace the relationship between domestic nationalism and immigrant internationalism, between domestic citizenship and immigrant ethnicity.

That “Creole novel” is Alfred Mercier’s L’Habitation Saint-Ybars (1881) (available online here), which is “perhaps the only systematically bilingual novel in American literature… Mercier does something very simple and very rare: he makes his characters speak the languages he judges they would have used. When he judges that his characters would have spoken Louisiana Standard French (LSF), they speak it. When he judges they would have spoken Louisiana French Creole (LFC), they speak that.” And there’s Ludwig von Reizenstein’s Die Geheimnisse von New-Orleans (now available in English), and a meditation on Hawai’ian pidgin, and all manner of good things. And it ends with “‘Prized His Mouth Open’: Mark Twain’s The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County in English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More, by Patient, Unremunerated Toil,” by the editor himself, who begins: “It’s no accident that I, Marc Shell (born Meyer Selechonek), come to the problems of bilingualism with which the essay that follows—and much of the work of Mark Twain—deals. I was born in Montreal in 1947… and raised in Quebec, where questions of politics and language go hand in hand.” Along with Twain, he quotes “quebecois superfrog Robert Charlebois,” whose “Frog Song” has the refrain:

You’re a frog I’m a frog Kiss me,
And I’ll turn into a prince suddenly
Donne moé des peanuts
J’m’en va t’chanter Alouette sans fausse note.

And so we circle back, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, to macaronic poetry.

I’m trying to figure out how to say the name of the poet Thomas Carew (more poems here). Chris Whent on the wonderful WBAI program Here Of A Sunday Morning (which I highly recommend to anyone in the New York area) says “kerry,” and that’s the pronunciation given in Daniel Jones and the Oxford Companion to English Literature, but the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary insists on ka-ROO (like the great baseball player Rod Carew), specifically for Thomas. Does anyone out there know how specialists in Renaissance music and poetry say it?

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I found this long, strange poem by Norman Dubie by googling the phrase “history of the ampersand”; I got to Section One of Book of the Jewel Worm and blinked in amazement. The stanza that prompted the Google hit was striking enough:

His history of the ampersand
as clear Sanskrit drool. His idea of the dead
borrowed from calculus and polkas.

But the more I scrolled around, the more striking it got, from the prologue:

I dreamt of wild horses bathing in white water again.
One stood and ate the salmon like a bear.
What of the Wishbone Pulsar, those cooling wicks
of the dark mother, lodged
deep in the throat of Cygnus; the merchants’ charcoal-
ballasted ships crossing the dead cluster district…

to a lot of stuff about the Khandro and Whitman and Dickinson and the Plain of Jars and… well, I don’t really know how to describe it, and it’s only part of a much larger work that’s not yet completed (“The Book of Crying Kanglings | coming November 2003”), and it’s based on some weird fantasy of future Buddhism (“This futurist poem enjoys the broken narration of its hero, Paul Ekajati, an amateur mathematician who once taught the Calculus on our moon. He is now an exhausted buddhist Vajramaster living in a small village at the Bakavi Lake Mining Colony on Mars. The year is 2277.” –from the Preface), but for some reason it appeals to me. Your mileage may vary.

I have to preserve this example of inadvertent verbal creativeness before it vanishes from the internet (I found it here but by the time you click on it I’m sure it will be fixed):

Small b Detonatesand
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:17 a.m. ET
No gility for t inside Newry’s main bus depot. Irish Republican Army dissidents continue to mount ocbombings in opposition to the 1998 peace accord for Northern Ireland, a Brititory.
Authorities were alerted caught fire, suggesting that the homemade device inside had malfunctioned. Bughters didnurce was a small bthey were dousing the blaze. Shnel hs bhe firef po

I particularly like the term “Brititory.” Thanks for the alert, Bonnie!
Addendum. But wait, there’s more!

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