Archives for August 2003

In the course of a post discussing his choice of Thunderbird as his e-mail client because it could handle Korean, Jonathon Delacour wondered why Korean (unlike Chinese and Japanese) couldn’t be entered in transcription:

I’m used to simply typing romaji to enter Japanese (and it took ten seconds or so to suss out pinyin) so I thought I’d be able to type ch’an maek⋅chu⋅rŭl chu⋅se⋅yo (“I’d like a cold beer, please”) on my English keyboard—just as I’d type bi¯ru o itadakitai’n desu ga in romaji—and that the IME would convert the hanglish to Hangul. But the only way I could enter Korean was by referring to this keyboard map. Maybe someone can tell me where I’m going astray.

In the comments, dda made an interesting point about Korean consonants that seems a convincing explanation of the keyboard problem:

The problem also is that even today, Koreans of the lower social classes can’t read latin characters. Spelling isn’t the forte of the overall spelling population either; if you’ve been to Korea, you’ve seen mispelled words and other abominations…

While this is partly a consequence of the close-mindedness of the country, it is mainly a linguistic problem: consonants can have two to four distinct values, depending on their position in a word.

For instance, ㄷ can be pronounced t,d,tt,t’. An initial is always unvoiced. Plosives between two vowels are voiced. Etc… Spelling a foreign name is excruciatingly difficult. My given name, Didier, always comes out wrong. Same for my family name, which has two B’s. There’s always a P, a T, plus some other typos. So I can’t imagine how they could type in Korean in romanisation!

A prose poem by Julia:

THE SUMMER VACATIONS
When people go to summer vacation in Europe there are languages. A month or two ago I went to Spain. They can have different cultures. Maybe there would be a king and queen in Spain and not in the United States. You walk and see. I like the museums. A great time it is.

I like that girl’s style.

I have already mentioned Forthright’s Phrontistery, a compilation of “word lists on various topics”; today on MetaFilter there was a post by adamrice about a section of the site I had missed, the Compendium of Lost Words, “400 of the rarest modern English words—in fact, ones that have been entirely absent from the Internet, including all online dictionaries, until now.” It’s more fun than useful, since being absent from the internet is a pretty arbitrary distinction, but it is fun, as is the entire site.

This is the best book ever written.

OK, OK, I’m not thirteen any more, and besides if the protagonists of the book ever heard me say such a thing they’d give me a look it doesn’t bear thinking about. So I’ll be grown-up and simply say it’s a book that could have been composed with me in mind, and perhaps the book I most wish I had written. Now, DeWitt can write as gripping a piece of plot as (say) William Goldman (whose Magic I literally could not put down when I opened it idly in a bookstore while waiting for a bus; I had to read the whole thing before leaving the store, since I couldn’t afford to buy it), and she (cleverly) demonstrates this in the Prologue to the book, to ensnare the prospective reader. But that’s not why I’m head over heels in love with this book (though it is certainly a recommendation). Here, let me show you. The first chapter (“Do Samurai Speak Penguin Japanese?”) begins:

There are 60 million people in Britain. There are 200 million in America. (Can that be right?) How many millions of English-speakers other nations might add to the total I cannot even guess. I would be willing to bet, though, that in all those hundreds of millions not more than 50, at the outside, have read A. Roemer, Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik (Leipzig, 1912), a work untranslated from its native German and destined to remain so till the end of time.

I joined the tiny band in 1985. I was 23.

The first sentence of this little-known work runs as follows:

Es ist wirklich Brach- und Neufeld, welches der Verfasser mit der Bearbeitung dieses Themas betreten und durchpflügt hat, so sonderbar auch diese Behauptung im ersten Augenblick klingen mag.

I had taught myself German out of Teach Yourself German, and I recognised several words in this sentence at once:

It is truly something and something which the something with the something of this something has something and something, so something also this something might something at first something.

I deciphered the rest of the sentence by looking up the words Brachfeld, Neufeld, Verfasser, Bearbeitung, Themas, betreten, durchpflügt, sonderbar, Behauptung, Augenblick and klingen in Langenscheidt’s German-English dictionary.

Now, I can completely understand a prospective reader’s closing the book with a shudder at this point, thinking “How did this thing get published?” For that matter, I’m not sure how it did get published; I’m just grateful. But my own thoughts on reading the passage were: is there such a book? (I don’t know, but there was an A. Roemer, who edited Aristotle’s Ars rhetorica in 1898); would Athetesen be “atheteses” in English? (the answer is yes, pronounced ath-e-TEE-seez, and the singular is athetesis); what does Brachfeld mean? (‘fallow field’); yes, that’s just what it’s like trying to read a real text in a language you’ve barely begun studying! And I turned the pages with increasing fervor.

I mentioned in an earlier entry that it’s about “a kid who learns Greek at four and Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese at five, grows up with The Seven Samurai as a source of role models, and carries around a copy of Njal’s Saga,” and all that’s true, but it only scratches the surface. The text has Greek and Japanese (both transliterated and in the original), a detailed excursus on the “waw consecutive” in Hebrew, a grammatical analysis of Iliad 17.441-449 (used for a most improbable purpose), a passage with a great deal of Inuit (AtaneK George silatudlartuinalungilaK angijomiglo suliaKarpaklune…), a detailed analysis of some Japanese dialogue from The Seven Samurai, and the sentence “He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men.” Plus a mystery and a couple of good tales of derring-do. I could go on, but by now you’re either running off to read the book or running for the hills. I’ll add only that I was so immersed in the book that when jonmc saw me in the subway the other day he had to literally tap on the book to get my attention, and yesterday I was reading it on the last (Queens) segment of the three-mile hike home from a suddenly powerless Midtown (took me almost two hours to get home to my relieved wife and a much-needed shower)—it kept me entirely incognizant of my aching feet. Thank you, Helen DeWitt.

Incidentally, in the course of researching this entry I came across this Beginning Philology site; while focused on Chinese, it has useful general material.

Addendum. A commenter at Avva’s post on the book links to this interesting page at Dagbladet, where DeWitt responds to readers’ questions. I’m glad to say, by the way, that I’ve inspired Anatoly (proprietor of Avva) to read the book; that makes three, along with Eudaemonist (see comments below) and Chris. Ms. DeWitt, I want a kickback… or at least an autograph.

Further addendum. I should add that, although for obvious reasons I’ve emphasized the linguistic aspect, the book in no way depends on knowing all those languages for its effect; almost everything is translated, certainly everything that might be important. Think of the Greek words and Japanese characters as a garnish on the dish, there for visual impact and not necessarily to be eaten (though it’s really quite tasty). I do want to emphasize, though, that her English sentences are constructed very carefully; if you read them at a normal pace, listening (so to speak) as you go, you will hear them with the proper emphasis and will follow the train of thought, but if you try to speed-read you may miss something. She respects her readers, an increasingly rare trait. But I promise you’ll enjoy the book even if your only language is English. (I shudder to think of what versions in other languages will look like if the translators don’t take their time and do it right.)

By the way, if you google “the last samurai” the first umpteen hits are for some forthcoming Tom Cruise movie. I expect this means that if a movie ever gets made from the DeWitt book they’ll have to change the name; I just hope they don’t come up with something stupid. But surely anyone with the daring and intelligence to want to film it in the first place wouldn’t disfigure it with a stupid title. Surely? Don’t call me Shirley!

One last thing (for now): at one point the novel gets into bathyspheres and we are introduced to William Beebe (1877 – 1962), who went down in one in 1934 and wrote what is apparently a fine book about the experience, Half Mile Down. I googled him and turned up a detailed biographical page that is well worth your while; the guy led an amazing life. He was married to two women, but my Webster’s Biographical Dictionary mentions only the second, the author Elswyth Thane, whom he married when he was fifty and she twenty-seven (they did not live together, and it might be interesting to read her book about the marriage, Reluctant Farmer). It does not mention his first marriage to Mary Blair Rice, even though it has a substantial entry for her (under her later married name of Blair Niles)—doubtless because they had a bitter divorce in 1913 that was public and scandalous (the New York Times headline read “Naturalist Was Cruel”), and Webster’s thought it best to sweep the whole unpleasant business under the carpet. Those were more decorous times.

Elsewhere in Blogovia: Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Planned Obsolescence has an interesting take on the book.

And: Isabella Massardo at Taccuino di traduzione followed my advice, bought the book, and fell in love with it. The same could happen to you!

German-related links from all over:

1) A list of grammatical terms, with each Latinate term followed by a native one and one or more examples: Adverb / Umstandswort / dort, heute, dabei so. (From UJG.)

2) The Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben (Society for the Strengthening of Verbs), which promotes the extension of the strong verb (like English “sing, sang, sung” as opposed to “walk, walked”) to as many areas as possible, creating conjugations like “knirschen, knorsch, knürsche, geknorschen” or “schweifen, schwoff, schwiffe, geschwiffen.” The latest entry is a suggestion that the same process be applied to English, with the example “invite, invote, invitten.” (Also from UJG, who got it from Transblawg.)

3) Langenscheidts Konversationsbuch English-Deutsch

This wonderful entry at Deuce of Clubs gives samples of such conversation-stoppers from the phrase book as:

Ich verabscheue den Geist der Unduldsamkeit, der diese Sekt beherrscht.
“I detest the spirit of intolerance by which this sect is dominated.”

Bitte hören Sie sofort auf, so zu tanzen.
“Please stop this kind of dancing at once.”

Ich habe die meisten un[s]erer Reste für die Suppe verwendet. Ich gebe ihr daher lieber keinen Namen.
“I have used most of our leftovers for the soup. I therefore hesitate to give it a name.”

And everybody’s favorite:
Humanitäre Gesichtspunkte werden wohl stets den militärischen Notwendigkeiten weichen müssen.
“Humanitarian considerations will probably always have to yield to military necessities.”

(From Des.)

4) False Friends between German and English

Besides the obvious (Gift/poison, &c), there is a useful (if short) list of loan words for which German has kept the form but shifted the meaning:

Slipper slip-on shoe
Smoking dinner jacket
Dress sports shirt/jersey; strip
Boy hotel bellhop
Oldtimer veteran car
Textbuch songbook or script

(I have omitted a couple which are false for Brits but not Yanks; this link is courtesy of Kai von Fintel, who adds Beamer for multimedia or data projector and Handy for cellphone.)

The speech accent archive has 264 speech samples of people from many linguistic backgrounds reading the same paragraph.

The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different english speakers. It allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech.

Via MetaFilter.

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The site Worthless Word For The Day features, as you might expect, a word each day, with explanations (on the money from what I’ve seen) of meaning and etymology as well as illustrative quotes. What do they mean by “worthless”? Here’s their explanation:

1. obscure, abstruse and/or recondite word, especially one not falling into the following categories: medical terms, foreign monetary units, foreign units of measure, legal terms, or professional jargon of any type.

2. obscure, abstruse and/or recondite word, including such falling into the following categories, if deemed to be appropriately ludicrous: medical terms, foreign monetary units, foreign units of measure, legal terms, or professional jargon of any type.

Some recent entries:

scribblative [rare] pertaining to scribbling
sharoosed [Newf. dial] taken aback, surprised; (also) disappointed, disgusted
rumpy-pumpy [Brit/Austral, humorous] sexual activity
isepiptesis (eye-sep-e(p)-tee’-sis) [rare] a line on a map or chart connecting localitites reached at one date by different individuals of a species of migratory bird (an isochronal line)

And today’s word is:

esne [obs. except Hist.] OE designation of a member of the lowest class; laborer: serf

Fun and educational! (Found at Shoepal, who also links to a site called Word Detective, with long and amusing investigations of odd words and phrases.)

I was reading a TLS review of a book about Darwin’s researches into barnacles (see, I told you I’d read anything, but you didn’t believe me) and it occurred to me that I didn’t know the etymology of the word “barnacle.” Well, after much investigation, I still don’t, but nobody else does either; the OED says all that can be said, which isn’t much: “ME. bernekke, bernake, identical with OF. bernaque, med.L. bernaca, berneka… Ulterior history unknown.” However, there is much more to be said about the more recent history of the word, and the American Heritage says it well:

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For those of you unfamiliar with The Exile, it’s a sort of Moscow-based bastard son of The Weekly World News and Hunter S. Thompson; their “In Brief” section tosses in a goodly dollop of The Onion. If you’ll go to this one and scroll down to the last entry, “Russia Language Richer,” you’ll find a perfect distillation of the kind of idiocy purveyed by linguistic nationalists the world over:

The Russian language is richer than the English language, according to a report issued by a panel of Russian experts.
Russian is more expressive and has many more words which have different meanings, whereas English is more direct and simple….
The study also cited the fact that “everyone knows this.” The report will be officially published as soon as certain last-minute technical difficulties are overcome.

The sad thing is that so many people would read such a parody about their own language without ever realizing they were being mocked. (Via Mildly Malevolent.)

Robert Hartwell Fiske indites yet another indictment of that frightful thing, the Modern Dictionary. You know: bad words oust good, decline of literacy, what are we coming to. The usual. I wouldn’t bother you with it except that it inspired a sensible post over at CalPundit, who is one of those rare people able to simultaneously regret a change and accept the pointlessness of further whining:

I would certainly vote against “alright,” for example, but am willing to concede my decades-long battle against it because, after all, it’s been a decades-long battle and I seem to have lost

And the comment section is full of good healthy debate (in which, needless to say, I could not resist participating). Thanks for the link, Jeremy!