Archives for August 2003

There is a translation of “Oedipus Rex” into Solomon Island Pijin, and according to the web site “Bikman Edipusu” has been staged in Honiara at least twice. Now that’s a cultural gap to cross; wonder how it goes over? (Thanks to Alan for the link.)

1) The Discouraging Word recounts the experience of listening to the letters-from-listeners section of All Things Considered concerning the pronunciation of “schism,” which I myself also heard. Like the good folks at TDW, I was pleased that ATC stood up for their use of skizem and justified it with the relevant usage note at the American Heritage Dictionary. I myself unthinkingly said skizem until I read somewhere that it was a grave solecism to say anything but sizem; I adopted that ecclesiastico-British version until I realized it was false to current American usage, and am now trying to reprogram myself. It’s damnably hard to know how to say words that are not in common use.

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Via wood s lot, this selection of “short narrative works in German from the late 18th to the end of the 19th centuries, featuring verified texts from documented editions and, whenever possible, English translations.” Goethe, Schiller, Hofmann, Kleist, the Brothers Grimm, and more.

I’m looking forward to seeing the new (15th) edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, even though Chicago isn’t the style bible where I work. A NY Times story by Dinitia Smith lays out some of the changes (aside from the inevitably extended coverage of web addresses):

¶Capital letters. The old manual recommended using small capitals in some cases, like AM and PM. But it is difficult for writers on a word processor to switch from regular size capitals to smaller. “In the new edition we now prefer lower case a.m. and p.m., with periods in between,” Ms. Samen said, “and we are saying small caps are an alternative.”
¶Ordinal numbers. The Manual used to prefer 3d and 2d, but it is now O.K. to use 2nd and 3rd, “like the rest of the world,” Ms. Samen pointed out.
¶Dates. Previous editions recommended the British style: 1 July 2003. Now one can write them “the way everybody does it in real life,” Ms. Samen said: July 1, 2003.

As a linguist (ret’d), I welcome the approval given to sentences beginning with “and” or “but” (a study apparently showed that 10% of “sentences in first-rate writing” so begin). And as an editor I am delighted that they are retaining the time-honored en dash (–), however much Jim at UJG may deplore it. Sorry, my friend, but some things are sacred.

Do you vaguely wonder how well you remember a language you half-learned a while back? Try the Proficiency Tests provided by Transparent Language. They’re not very hard (I got 97/150, or 64%, on Latin, a language I was getting rusty at almost 40 years ago), but they don’t take long and are quite enjoyable if you enjoy that sort of thing. (Those of you who still have nightmares featuring multiple-choice exams should probably tiptoe on by.) A tip of the pileus to Des for the link.

Des, who is “far too busy with prinsessor for such trivia,” has tossed me a link to a Guardian story by Stephen Oppenheimer about, yes, the Origin of Language. I’m too enervated by the muggy weather even to do the kind of quick runthrough I did for my earlier entry on a similar NY Times story (also featuring Chomsky, chimps, and Dr. Michael Corballis, but with fewer skulls and more clicks), so I will simply join with Des in suggesting that “language was invented specifically to allow groundless speculation of how language developed.”

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Jonathon Delacour is back and better than ever after his extended hiatus. His latest post describes his efforts to decipher a four-character Chinese sign on a Darlinghurst Road strip club; it provides an excellent example of the difference between Chinese and Japanese, even though “they use the same characters.” Intercultural understanding isn’t as simple as all that, even when it comes to strip joints.

A useful collection of scholarly summaries of subjunctive use in English (as in “I wish I were a bird” or “God save the Queen”). (Via graywyvern.)

Addendum. Jim at UJG has a good post on the history of modal verbs.

I’m a city boy, having lived most of my life in major metropolitan areas, and I feel strongly that cities provide a congenial home for what is best and most hopeful about humanity (although of course humanity’s worst features find expression there as elsewhere). This essay by Aleksandar Hemon about his native city Sarajevo puts it well:

One of the things in the nationalist imagination is the belief that the city spoils the purity of the people who come to live in it, which is exactly what I liked about Sarajevo…
You cannot keep cities pure ethnically or in any other way. They cannot be clean.
Sarajevo, in that sense, was very impure, both because it had the biggest percentage of so-called mixed marriages, and because throughout history a lot of people ended up there…
Villages vanish and suburbs vanish – not enough of them! But cities don’t die.

Hemon’s essay is part of a BBC series called “Sense of the City,” which also includes Ingrid Bengis on St. Petersburg, which I had already read thanks to Beth, and half a dozen others, which I look forward to. (Via Moorishgirl, who is well worth reading in general; she recently linked to an interesting Guardian story about Russian bureaucrats “trying to keep literature dealing with the purges of the Soviet era away from schoolchildren.”)

An online version of Herman Rempel’s Kjenn Jie Noch Plautdietsch? A Mennonite Low German Dictionary; the introduction goes into the history of the language, and the guide to use gives some basic grammar and pronunciation, highlighting the differences between the Old Colony and Molotschna Mennonites. A useful resource for a little-known dialect. (Via Scott Martens, whose ancestors spoke it.)