Archives for August 2003

This amazing collection of links to sites on Russia, the former Soviet republics, and Eastern Europe is a cornucopia so copious I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. It’s divided into categories: General, Journalism, Institutions for Research and Exchange, Culture, Politics & Economics, Ethnicity & History, Society & Life, and Others; each category row is divided into regional columns: General, Russia, Siberia & Far East, Central Eurasia, Eastern Europe, Others. The site was created by the Slavic Research Centre of Hokkaido University, Japan, and brought to my attention by wood s lot.

A varied selection of ways to say “Man, it’s hot” in all sorts of languages. Some are pedestrian: Ham meod! (Hebrew) It is very hot! Shaub ilyom (Arabic) Warm today isn’t it. Others are more imaginative: Dukhota takaya, tolko venikov ne khvatayet! (Russian) It’s so stuffy, the only thing that’s missing is the birch twigs! Zew gai bae la! (Hong Kong Chinese) Chicken leg is burning! And of course the Scots are not content with anything banal: Ahm pure mankey wi’ the heat oot there! (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)

Or so said a German court in ruling that a translator was entitled to the higher rate he had been promised for an urgent translation by the Dortmund public prosecutor’s office. After the fact, the prosecutor’s office wanted to pay him a lower rate; the court said it was all right in theory to break the agreement (!), but the higher rate should apply in this case because Latin-American Spanish is harder to translate than Castilian (!!). On the other hand, the court decided that spaces should be left out of the count because they “are not part of a system of graphic signs that are used for the purpose of human communication” (sie nicht zu einem System graphischer Zeichen, die zum Zweck menschlicher Kommunikation verwendet werden, gehören); supply as many exclamation marks as you like. This fine specimen of judicial bizarrerie comes courtesy of Margaret Marks.

An amusing little quiz at The Volokh Conspiracy:

In English, the names of most European countries are at least related to their names in the native tongue, e.g., France/France, Ireland/Eire, Russia/Rossiya. Which European countries have English names that have virtually nothing to do with their local names?

See the link for his definition of Europe (basically, it excludes the Caucasus, which is reasonable) and, of course, for his answers, which are also the ones that I came up with (give or take a little hairsplitting, and what’s the fun of such a quiz without hairsplitting?). Thanks to Stephen Laniel for the link.

This impressive (and complicated) site “uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make distinctive features of early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek… The Greek texts in the Chicago Homer are derived from the electronic texts used in the Perseus Project.” Read Using the Chicago Homer, Understanding the Chicago Homer, and A Tutorial: What Can You Do with the Chicago Homer? (can’t link to ’em: frames; just scroll down past ENTER and click the links), and you’re good to go. (Thanks, Kenny!)

There’s a tempest in a verre d’eau going on in a corner of the Francophone sector of Blogovia over the issue of whether it is Franco-patriotic for a native speaker of French to blog in English; specifically, François Nonnenmacher of padawan.info has been taken to task for doing so. In a funny and impassioned entry, Non, je ne suis pas un traître, he defends himself, finding particularly outrageous the complaint that by blogging in English rather than French he marginalizes himself. The comment section is lively and admirably civilized, and those who can handle French should pay it a visit. Myself, I am acutely conscious of my position as willy-nilly a purveyor of the hyperlangue du jour, so I am only going to say two things about it. The first is that I believe everyone should blog in whatever language(s) they feel comfortable blogging in; the second is that “Bin fuck alors !” is one of the most wonderful sentences I’ve seen in ages. (Thanks for the link go, as so often, to Jim at UJG.)

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Mikhail Viesel has done an online version of Natalya Stavrovskaya’s translation of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities). Although most of the site is accessible only for Russian-speakers, the explanation page is available in English: “…Invisible cities online is oriented primarily not towards representing the text per se (as in Pale Fire), nor to its studies and analysis (as Decameron Web), but towards the creation of a complete esthetical impression. In other words, it ought to be treated as an art-project: not to study Calvino’s work, but to delight in it.” Besides the intrinsic interest of the description, there are links to other, similar projects. (Via Avva.)

A paper by Rolf Herwig on “The Interrelation between Adverbs of Manner and Adverbs of Degree”; Herwig investigates the use of mild(ly), sad(ly), and warm(ly) in a large corpus, concentrating on the degree to which each has been “delexicalized” (come to be used as a simple intensifier). Near the beginning there is an interesting discussion of perceptions of language change:

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A new study, as reported by BBC News, concludes that “people who speak Mandarin Chinese use both sides of their brain to understand the language,” as compared to “English-language speakers who only need to use one side of their brain.” Interesting if true; I’ll await further research before drawing any exciting conclusions. I’m not impressed by the idiotic quote “Native English speakers, for example, find it extraordinarily difficult to learn Mandarin.” (Thanks, Ron!)

I’ve always loved the word “loosestrife,” without having a mental picture of the actual plant (sadly often the case with me and plant names). Now I have two. I’m visiting my wife’s family in the Berkshires (the wooded hilly region of western Massachusetts), and I was told that the attractive purple flowers fringing the pond were purple loosestrife, an invasive species that “now poses a serious threat to native emergent vegetation in shallowwater marshes” throughout the northeast. And when I asked what the pretty clusters of small white flowers in a vase were, I was told they were gooseneck loosestrife. Gooseneck loosestrife! Isn’t that a wonderful phrase? I’ve been mumbling it to myself ever since. (And they do look astonishingly like the heads of geese.)

Addendum. Incidentally, “loosestrife” is an interesting word; it pretends to be a translation of lysimachia, but that Greek word is actually derived from a personal name, Lysimachus (or Lysimakhos if you’re into that sort of thing).