Archives for April 2004

Another great online discovery: Richard Burton’s maniacally detailed translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night, complete with footnotes.

Moreover, holding that the translator’s glory is to add something to his native tongue, while avoiding the hideous hag-like nakedness of Torrens and the bald literalism of Lane, I have carefully Englished the picturesque turns and novel expressions of the original in all their outlandishness; for instance, when the dust cloud raised by a tramping host is described as “walling the horizon.” Hence peculiar attention has been paid to the tropes and figures which the Arabic language often packs into a single term; and I have never hesitated to coin a word when wanted, such as “she snorted and sparked,” fully to represent the original. These, like many in Rabelais, are mere barbarisms unless generally adopted; in which case they become civilised and common currency.

Lose yourselves, gentle readers…

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Another enjoyable specialty site courtesy of Wordorigins. Some examples:

EEL THING: Erysipelas
MORMAL: Gangrene
MORPHEW: Scurvy blisters on the body

Not to mention the mysterious DEATH FROM TEETHING.

Joseph M. Romero’s “Life Among the Lexicographers” is a description of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) and its creators, and it discusses both particular dialect terms and the decisions on whether to include them. This is a neat example of both:

When in doubt, DARE editors tend to err on the side of inclusion. Many words are amply attested—that is, there are plenty of recorded uses. Others appear only once. Should poorly attested words be excluded? The phrase trade-last, for one—meaning a kind of quid pro quo—”I’ll say something nice about you if you say something nice about me first”—is found scattered throughout the country, especially among older speakers. A regional variant, last-go-trade, is found in the middle and south Atlantic and has an entry of its own; but what about Alaskan trade, which means exactly the same thing but appears only once in the sources available to DARE? “It was important to include Alaskan trade even with only one instance, because it’s a wonderful example of the process of folk etymology,” says Hall. “Someone who is unfamiliar with the folk tradition of trading compliments hears the phrase last-go-trade, doesn’t quite understand it, and tries to make it meaningful by substituting a word that is familiar. Since Alaska is, to most Americans, a far-away and exotic place, it makes sense to the hearer that the unusual custom would be an Alaskan trade.”

(Via wood s lot, which has good links on slang as well today.)

The dictionary’s website is very informative, but I can’t (or don’t know how to) link to individual sections. If you’re interested in helping them with the fifth volume, click on the QUERIES link at the left and see if you know any of the terms they’re asking about, from slang-jang ‘A dish containing oysters, onions, pickles, peppers, etc’ to turkey apple, turkey haw ‘A hawthorn (Crataegus mollis).’ Your strange family word may be a lexicographer’s lemma!

Konrad Lawson of Muninn has a fascinating post about the construction of the Qiang (K’iang) nationality out of an ancient catchall term.

The Qiang, which are now one of 55 recognized “nationalities” in China, with a population of about 220,000, have connected themselves historically to the much broader Han historical category which until very recently referred to a broad range of ethnic groups classified as barbarians on China’s periphery. While I can think of a few other potential examples, this is a nice twist on a common theme in the formation of national identity. Instead of linking itself to an empire, a language, an island, etc. that could help the newborn Qiang nationality to distinguish itself from some Other, the Qiang nationality was born out [of] Han China’s own “Other.” The fact that there was no linguistically, culturally, or even geographically consistent historical community which corresponded to what the Han called the Qiang is, like all formations of national identity from Norwegians to Japanese, pretty much irrelevant.

According to Wang, from the late Han to the Ming periods, the concept of the Qiang was something close to “those people in the west who are not one of us” and included a huge range of people along [the] eastern edges of [the] Tibetan Plateau. Over time, the Chinese empires would come to classify these peoples into smaller and smaller distinct groups and those who were called the Qiang by the Han shifted (linguistically, not physically) further and further to the West until this bumped into Tibetan cultural communities that the Chinese categorized as the Fan 番. Ultimately, the Qiang ended up being the small group of mountain dwellers in the small geographic area they occupy today (the upper Min River Valley).

Anyone at all interested in ethnicity and the “invention of tradition” should read it.

Lawson also has an excellent post on the history of Chinese character reform movements in Taiwan. Like him, I had thought the story of character reform was “the mainland Communist regime pointing to their characters as ‘progressive’ and a contribution to increased literacy through simplification,… the Taiwanese, with their more complicated characters boasting that they alone preserve China’s written culture with its beautiful and semantically rich characters.” But it turns out that there was a movement for character reform in Taiwan as well—supported by Chiang Kai-shek! A survey by “the Taiwanese newspaper 聯合報 from April 1954” showed that “a solid majority of Taiwanese supported the reform movement, which collapsed shortly thereafter.” I’d like to know more about that episode, which has been pretty much forgotten (at least nobody mentioned it when I lived in Taiwan in the ’70s).

Update. See Joel’s Far Outliers entry on why alphabetization, which Mao favored, never happened on the mainland:

The Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, represents the climax of China’s disillusionment with its traditions. But, ironically, the upheaval helped protect the characters. When the chaos finally ended, the Chinese no longer had an appetite for radical cultural change, and both the public and the government rejected further attempts at writing reform.

Margaret Marks of Transblawg ponders the question (Spiegel link, in German) of how to handle English loanwords caught in the clutches of German grammar:

In principle, says the article, treat the words just as the English language treats words from the German: bratwurst, bratwursts, abseil, abseiling (but I write Land, Länder in English texts and can’t bring myself to write Amtsgerichts – or bratwursts for that matter).
Sometimes you can avoid the problem by using a German word: not forgewardet or geforwardet, but weitergeleitet; not gevotet, but abgestimmt; not upgedated, but aktualisiert; not gebackupt, but gesichert.
But sometimes the English word is simpler than the German: gestylt, gepixelt, gescannt, simsen (to send SMSs), chatten.

Access to the electronic Middle English Dictionary is currently free on a trial basis.

The print MED, completed in 2001, has been described as “the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America.” Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available. This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary.

Grab it while you can! (Thanks, as so often, to aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

Eddie at Romanika has a long and excellent post on the differences between the two major varieties of Portuguese, taking off from the fact that Portuguese soap operas are now being imported into Brazil, dubbed into… Portuguese. The Brazilian variety. Eddie has many things to say about this, including the differences in pronunciation and grammar and his own personal experience communicating with Brazilians. Check it out.

Update. Avva has a thread (in Russian) discussing what other pairs of dialects/languages might have similarly asymmetrical dubbing/translation needs (Hochdeutsch and Swiss German? Egyptian and other Arabic dialects?).

I just discovered Erika’s blog, kitten.ofdoom.com, whose subtitle is “Linguistics, fiber arts, politics, and assorted randomness.” Her latest entry discusses a subject of considerable interest, how translators deal with a text that “makes a reference to or quotes something that is originally in not the language of the text, but in the target language that the translator is transposing the text into or… that is most familiar to the audience from a specific source in their own language.” Her example is a Bible quote, not perhaps the best because the version she cites is probably (as she says) just something other than the familiar King James text; I dealt with it in my entry on the movie Lost in Translation, but someday I should do a more comprehensive treatment. Her blog’s been around since last October, at which time she was writing haiku in Japanese

Another wonderful specialty word site, this time giving the histories of elements and their names, as well as translations of those names into as many languages as the site’s creator, Peter van der Krogt, could find.

I am not a chemist, but a (map) historian much interested in the origin of names. On several of the sites listing elements you will find historical notes and often an explanation of the origin of element names. However, mostly, the authors of these pages copy each other and the same errors and mistakes are repeated. I tried to do some new etymological research on the element names, and find the original articles where the discoverer of a new element announced his find and explained the naming.

The major part is formed by 115 pages, each describing one element. These pages can be accessed in a number of ways: by name (in dozens of languages), atomic number, date of discovery, discoverer, name origin etc. (see list to the left)…

There’s a list of updates; the latest is:

17 April 2004: Two new languages, Armenian and Mokshan. Elements 101-110 in Latvian added (thanks to Janis Vindavs).

Have I mentioned that I love the internet?

Via an anonymous comment at Cannylinguist, whose entry on German borrowings in English is amusing and worth reading in its own right.

Renee of Glosses.net has a very interesting entry today on the Russian word that was originally keif and is now kaif (when and why did it change?); it’s from the Arabo-Persian keyf ‘opiate; intoxication; pleasure, enjoyment’ (borrowed into English in various forms, listed in the OED as kef ‘a state of drowsiness or dreamy intoxication, such as is produced by the use of bhang; the enjoyment of idleness; dolce far niente’). The word was used by Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and others, but it’s come down in the world, as Renee says:

Today ‘kajf’ is famous from the jargon of narkomany (drug abusers), where it can denote any drug. But kajf is in no way limited to drug culture. Poimal kaif/slovil kaif lit. “caught some kajf” is “I had fun”. The expression v kaif as in eto mne v kaif ‘this is fun to me’ is extremely prolific (about 790 Google hits today). Two frequent verbal formations from kajf [are] kajfovat’ “to have fun/ to be high” and kajfanut’ “to get high”.

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