Archives for August 2003

Jim at UJG has an entry on the charming Renaissance genre of mixed-language poetry (vernacular words mixed into Latin verse) known as “macaronic” (after the Macaronea by Tifi Odasi [Typhius Odaxius] of Padua, 1486). But the style, if not the name, goes much further back; it was very popular among the wandering medieval poets, who loved to mix Arabic, Spanish, Provençal, French, English, and other languages, depending on their audience and experience. (The Andalusian zajal, for instance, consisted of colloquial Arabic verses with Spanish words inserted.)

Here are a couple of examples, drawn from Robert Briffault’s The Troubadours.

A celuy que pluys eyme en monde,
of alle tho that I have found,
    Carissima,
saluz od treye amour,
with grace and joye and alle honour,
    Dulcissima.
Sachez bien, pleysant et beele,
that I am right in good heele,
    Laus Christo!
et mon amour doné vous ay.
and also thine owene night and day
    in cisto.
–Camb. Gg. iv, 27; Chambers and Sidgewick, Early English Lyrics, VIII, early XVth century.

And this quatrain (Harleyan, 2253):

Scripsi haec carmina in tabulis,
Mon hostel est en mi la vile de Paris,
may I sugge namore, so wel me is;
yet I deye for love of hire, duel hit ys.

Incidentally, if you google “macaronic poetry” the first hit is a Bosna Forum article by Amila Buturovic called “Macaronic Verse in Ottoman Bosnia and the Incitement to Multivocality” (the direct link only gives the abstract—here’s the Google cache [no longer works in 2019]); it discusses the history and theory of the topic, with special reference to Bosnia, but sadly gives only one small example:

Elif
Elif-eldi nijjet geldi,
primakni se duso meni.
Da ja kazem elif tebi,
ti si tanka, elif motka
tu je osnov, tu je potka

[Alif
Alif is in hand (?) and intention here,
come closer to me, my sweet.
Let me say alif to you:
alif is a stick, and you are thin
that’s the basis, that’s the trick.]

But it begins with a delightful anecdote:

One Saturday morning as the cottage country north of Toronto awoke to a temporary ice age, my three-year old daughter broke its frigid stillness outdoors by resorting to a polyglot description: “Mommy,” she said, “çok je zima outside.” Put in plain English it meant, “Mommy, it is very cold outside”.

Enchanted by her linguistic economy and multivocality, I found myself face to face with a set of questions raised by her spontaneous leap through three languages – English, Turkish, and Bosnian – which captured with such candor her impressions.

Marco Schuffelen has a “Linguistics for Laypeople” page featuring Germanic material, especially Schuffelen’s native Dutch; besides a very interesting collection of Hebrew words that entered Dutch via Yiddish (occasionally quite different in meaning from parallel forms in English, eg gotspe ‘insolent brutality’ vs chutzpah), there is the excellent Dutch Pronounced!, which gives mp3 files for just about any Dutch name you might want to hear: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Pieter Bruegel, Huygens, Van Leeuwenhoek, Pim Fortuyn, Guus Hiddink, Edsger Dijkstra, Johan Cruyff, Max Euwe, ‘s Gravenhage, Waterloo… There are even names not borne by Dutchmen that you might be curious to hear a Dutchman say: Roosevelt, Van Buren, Richard Posthumus. A useful service indeed, considering the difficulty of correctly pronouncing Dutch vowels (even with this aid, I despair of ever getting the -uy- diphthong right). Thanks for the Hebrew/Dutch link go to the always worthwhile Taccuino di traduzione.

That’s how we should be pronouncing apostrophe, according to the OED: “It ought to be of three syllables in Eng. as in French, but has been ignorantly confused with the prec. word”—the prec. word being apostrophe ‘A figure of speech, by which a speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person or thing, either present or absent; an exclamatory address.’ The name of the punctuation mark, you see, is not from Greek/Latin apostrophê (which would justify the extra syllable) but (via French apostrophe—three syllables!) from Latin apostrophus, itself from “Greek ἡ ἀπόστροϕος (sc. προσῳδία ‘the accent’) ‘of turning away, or elision.’” So there’s no earthly reason to say “apostro-fee,” and yet we do anyway, perverse creatures that we are. Why don’t all the preservers of the purity of English take up this cause, now that they realize the error of everyone’s ways? I’d like to hear William F. Buckley lean back in his inimitable way and denounce “the illiterate use of apostroffs in plurals.”

But of course that’s a fantasy; the preservers ignore the ahistorical pronunciation and focus on that damnable plural use. In fact, according to the latest lament for the apostrophe, a Telegraph article by Matt Born, the “‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’—so-called because of shopkeepers’ propensity to display signs for ‘pear’s’ or ‘banana’s'” is the object of ever-increasing angst; it’s spreading so fast that “it threatens to undermine what has long been a strict rule of grammar.” Worst of all, “over time it may become acceptable.” I leave to the imagination the horrors that such an outcome would unleash upon an already suffering world.

But wait: what does the OED say in small type, there at the end of definition 2 (“The sign (‘) used to indicate the omission of a letter or letters… and as a sign of the modern English genitive or possessive case”)? It says… it says…

In the latter case, it originally marked merely the omission of e in writing, as in fox’s, James’s, and was equally common in the nominative plural, esp. of proper names and foreign words (as folio’s = folioes); it was gradually disused in the latter, and extended to all possessives, even where e had not been previously written, as in man’s, children’s, conscience’ sake. [Emphasis added.]

Why, that means that the apostrophe was originally, and thus properly, used in the plural; those greengrocers are right, and the Apostrophe Protection Society is wrong! Surely the Williams (Buckley and Safire) and the other preservers will lay off the ancient plural apostrophe and begin working on excising that excrescent final syllable. (OED citations and links to article and Society courtesy of The Discouraging Word, which should not be held responsible for the puckishly antinomian stance taken by this website.)

I’m reading Pushkin’s Povesti pokoinogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin), and towards the end of the first story, Vystrel (The Shot), an aristocrat is recounting an episode from his past and says, “Pyat’ let tomu nazad ya zhenilsya. – Pervyj mesyac, the honey-moon, provel ya zdes’…” (Five years ago I got married. – The first month, the honeymoon, I spent here…) The phrase “the honey-moon” is in English in the original. It’s quite striking to me that a story written in Russian in 1830 would use the English word; I would have thought that if a foreignism were wanted, it would have been the French lune de miel. Is this an idiosyncrasy of Pushkin’s, or does it reflect something about the history of the word or the concept? I will have to look into it further.

Scott Martens at Pedantry is reading the book Language Rights and Political Theory; having posted a detailed summary of the book, he’s now written a long critique with suggestions on how to make a better case for linguistic diversity, focusing on the economic value of second-language education for speakers of dominant languages. He promises a follow-up later in the week that “will cover a different normative political theory, one derived in large part from child development theory rather than traditional political or economic principles.” If you have any interest in this stuff, go thither and read.

At Deccan College in Pune (Poona) they’ve been working on a massive Sanskrit-English dictionary since 1948—and are still on the letter A. It’s true they don’t have computers (“‘We’re hoping for computers in one or two years,’ said Kshirsagar, not sounding very hopeful”), but that still seems awfully slow, and “political pressure is growing to finish the project.” You can read all about it here. Me, I’m perfectly happy with my Monier-Williams, and there’s a fair amount of lexical material on the web (including a search function for Monier-Williams), but more power to them. I just wish they wouldn’t say things like “The language is agonizingly complex and after 40 years even Bhatta can seldom just open a book and understand it.” After a couple of semesters of Sanskrit you can read it pretty well; of course there are authors who delight in using rare words and elaborate constructions, as there are in most cultures, but the language is no more “agonizingly complex” than any other. (Thanks to Gail Armstrong for the link… and happy anniversary!)

Ozhegov is the basic Russian reference dictionary, and it is available on the web in various forms, here for example, complete with italic and bold text when called for… and a plethora of ads. Now it is available in a simple text file at Moshkow: no fancy typography, but no ads and easy to consult. Many thanks to Anatoly for the link.

I was just down at St. Mark’s Bookshop picking up the latest LRB (recommended by Beth); taking a gander at the new releases, I saw a book by Mark Abley, Spoken Here, that I restrained myself only with difficulty from taking right to the cash register. From the publisher’s site (linked above):

Languages are beautiful, astoundingly complex, living things. And like the many animals in danger of extinction, languages can be threatened when they lack the room to stretch and grow. In fact, of the six thousand languages in the world today, only six hundred may survive the next century. In Spoken Here, journalist Mark Abley takes us on a world tour — from the Arctic Circle to the outback of Australia — to track obscure languages and reveal their beauty and the devotion of those who work to save them.
Abley is passionate about two things: traveling to remote places and seeking out rarities in danger of being lost. He combines his two passions in Spoken Here. At the age of forty-five, he left the security of home and job to embark on a quixotic quest to track language gems before they disappear completely. On his travels, Abley gives us glimpses of fascinating people and their languages:
• one of the last two speakers of an Australian language, whose tribal taboos forbid him to talk to the other
• people who believe that violence is the only way to save a tongue
• a Yiddish novelist who writes for an audience that may not exist
• the Amazonian language last spoken by a parrot
• the Caucasian language with no vowels
• a South Asian language whose innumerable verbs include gobray (to fall into a well unknowingly) and onsra (to love for the last time).
Abley also highlights languages that can be found closer to home: Yiddish in Brooklyn and Montreal, Yuchi in Oklahoma, and Mohawk in New York and Quebec. Along the way he reveals delicious linguistic oddities and shows us what is lost when one of the world’s six thousand tongues dies — an irreplaceable worldview and a wealth of practical knowledge. He also examines the forces, from pop culture to creoles to global politics, that threaten these languages. Spoken Here is a singular travelogue, a compelling case for linguistic diversity, and a treasure trove for anyone who loves any language.

Scroll down the linked page for an interview with the author (the supposedly extinct Manx is apparently alive and well) and a Glossary of Threatened Languages (Provençal: Branda li moustacho en quaucun: to stare defiantly at someone; literally, ‘to wag his mustache’). Being a cheap bastard (I buy so many books I have to be) I will wait, impatiently, for the paperback to shell out for this, but if anyone needs a gift idea…

A compelling discussion of why there’s no such thing as a “bilingual subject expert” and why it’s best to do a translation yourself if possible, certainly if it involves patents and you may wind up being grilled about it on oath. An interesting tidbit:

According to the European Patent Office, about one million patents are issued every year on this planet, and about one-third of them are patents in Japanese. Japanese scientists, inventors, and patent lawyers have one great advantage over their counterparts in this country: they can usually read patents in English, while their counterparts almost never read Japanese.

(Via the Enigmatic Mermaid, who sadly doesn’t seem to have much time for blogging these days.)

The Anglican Book of Common Prayer in various versions, including ones in Welsh, Scots Gaelic, and Hawaiian. (Unfortunately, although the Scots Gaelic page mentions an “already-existing Irish Gaelic BCP” the latter does not seem to be available.) Via Polyglut.