Archives for August 2003

THEODORE ROETHKE.

August 2, 2003 by 3 Comments

I haven’t read Roethke for a while, but I cherish my old 1975 Collected Poems, and thanks to wood s lot I’ve just found a delightful essay by Scott Ruescher about that very edition (with pictures!). He quotes a number of excellent poems; I’ll put up one he doesn’t, the first in the collection:

Open House

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.

My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I’m naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.

The anger will endure,
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure.
I stop the lying mouth:
Rage warps my clearest cry
To witness agony.

You can read more Roethke (indeed, much more Roethke) in the commemorative issue of Kingfisher.

[Read more…]

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.

August 1, 2003 by 21 Comments

The Encyclopedia of North American Indians has entries on many facets of Native American life and civilization, including languages; there are separate articles on Algonquian, Cherokee, and half a dozen other languages and families. From the Cherokee page:

Cherokee has a relatively small inventory of sounds, with only seventeen meaningful units—eleven consonants and six vowels. In addition, two prosodic features, vowel length and pitch accent, also affect meaning. The absence of bilabial stops and of labio-dental spirants (f and v sounds) leaves the bilabial nasal m sound as the only consonant requiring lip articulation. The m sound has very limited distribution, occurring in fewer than ten aboriginal words. All of these are uninflected nouns with uncertain etymologies, suggesting that the m sound is a relatively recent addition to Cherokee… All other meaningful units of sound, or phonemes, constitute regularly occurring correspondences with sounds of other Iroquoian languages.

It’s interesting that “the Iroquoian family is one of the few language families in the world that has no bilabial stops (b and p sounds)”; another blow to the idea of universals.

Addendum. I ran across what looks like a very interesting book, American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts by Shirley Silver and Wick R. Miller. The table of contents includes things like Grammatical Systems (Possession: Example from Acoma; Gender: Example from Plains Cree; Number: Example from Shasta; Person Reference: Examples from Aztec and Shoshoni; Classifying Verbs: Examples from the Apachean Languages; Evidentials: Examples from the Andes), Cultural Domain and Geographic Orientation, Language and Counting Systems, Worldview and the Hopi, Language Communities (in the Great Basin; in the Pueblos; of the Creek Confederacy; of the Aztec Empire), California Storytellers and Storytelling, The Written Word, Multilingualism, Lingua Francas, Language Contact, The Use of Language as a Tool for Prehistory… Well, let’s just say it packs a lot into 433 pages. I want to have a look at it.

Further addendum. The comments contain a description of a typeface and font company, Tiro, that makes a point of international language support and has created fonts for Cherokee and Inuit, among others. Thanks, Marian!

Incidentally, I found the Encyclopedia site because the Salishan page turned up in my referrer logs; my thanks to whoever came here from there!

HEBREW HOGWARTS.

August 1, 2003 by 3 Comments

A day in the life of a Hebrew-German translator. (Via Transblawg.)

CORPUS SCRIPTORUM LATINORUM.

August 1, 2003 by 2 Comments

Forum Romanum has a growing online library of Latin literature:

This collaborative project aims to create a digital library of the entire body of Latin literature, spanning from the earliest epigraphic remains to the Neo-Latinists of the eighteenth century. As a first step toward this end, we maintain an up-to-date catalogue of all Latin texts that are currently available online, making CSL a single, centralized resource for locating Latin literature on the internet.

The A’s alone, from Abaelardus to Avitus, are a mind-boggling list. (Via Mirabilis.ca.)

« Previous Page