Archives for April 2004

The crossword was invented over 90 years ago (here‘s the very first one, from December 1913), and after the publication of the first collection in 1924 became popular around the world. They’re online in Russian, Arabic, Norwegian, Latin, and doubtless many other languages. And you will want to take a timeless moment to contemplate the Zen crossword. (From Ben Goetter scartol‘s MonkeyFilter post.)

Thanks to a comment by pf on an earlier entry, I have discovered Typographica, a typography blog—or, as they describe it, “a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design.” It’s edited by Stephen Coles and Joshua Lurie-Terrell and has been around since May 2002; one of the first entries (by Lurie-Terrell) would have been equally at home here at LH:

There Are 10’s of Thousand’s of Way’s to Apostrophisize

Why does the New York Times use 80’s and 90’s (for example) as shorthand for referring to decades/eras? They aren’t possessives, but rather contractions of 1980s, 1990s, etc. Most journalistic and typographic stylebooks suggest using ’80s and ’90s — makes sense to me. What’s the deal? I wrote the paper to ask but no response.

(Except that I would have italicized New York Times.) The only downside I can see to reading it is that their book reviews are going to tempt me to further overload my poor groaning shelves.

I’ve resumed reading Robert St. John’s gripping war memoir From The Land of Silent People, and I’ve been noticing usages that take me aback and remind me the book is from a different era. Not the outdated slang or the references to things that no longer exist, like the New York Herald-Tribune—those are expected—but things like this:

One car had finally gotten to Podg[o]rica, picked up the major, and come on to Cetinje, and here they were, eating a four-course dinner and drinking some of the finest champagne any of us had tasted since the second world war began.

I have rarely been so startled by lower-case letters; I don’t think I’ve ever seen the phrase as anything but “Second World War.” But this was written in 1942 and the scene is taking place in April 1941, before the US had entered the war, and at that time the war didn’t yet have a proper name—what we think of as World War One was then just the Great War or the World War, and this new one was clearly another “world war” but not yet the Second World War or World War Two.

Another example: “I lost sight of the boy bugler of Corfu when a bomb landed within a few rods of the entrance to our tunnel.” Rods? Most mildly bookish people are probably still aware of the word rod as a unit of length (and of course Simpsons fans will recall Grandpa’s “rods to the hogshead“), but I doubt many could tell you how long the unit is (five and a half yards—I looked it up), and I’m pretty sure nobody’s used it in normal prose like that, expecting the reader to know offhand what’s meant, in decades. My final example made me laugh out loud on the train:

    “This thing is getting damned monotonous,” Hill grumbled.

    “Yes,” I said with some sincere bitterness, “it’s like a phonograph when the needle gets stuck in a groove and keeps playing the same bars of music over and over again until you think you’ll go crazy unless someone shuts the machine off.”

We have here the rare opportunity to see a cliche in the very process of formation; the phonograph record was new enough that such a simile was still reasonably fresh and could be expanded on without risk of boring the listener. I wonder how long it took for the image to get boiled down to “broken record” or “stuck needle”? Now, of course, the cliche is becoming purely verbal, since vinyl records and needles have pretty much given way to CDs and beams of light.

My final quote has nothing to do with any of this; I was struck by it and felt like including it here. The scene is Belgrade, during the “Bloody Sunday” German bombing that destroyed much of the city; an American diplomatic limousine has just sped through a crowd, refusing to stop and take a badly wounded woman to the hospital. The angry crowd shakes its fists and shouts.

I wanted to shake my fist too, but I didn’t. If you had been there you would always remember, as I’ll always remember, how they all yelled “Amerikanski!” when they shook their fists. It wasn’t a pretty word, the way they said it. It gave me a funny feeling inside my head and inside my stomach. I was too tired to figure out how to ask these people standing in the center of the street not to blame America. To tell them that all Americans aren’t like that. I wanted to say something, anything, to make them forget what had happened. I tried to say in French to the woman with the blood on her head that I was sorry. She could tell, no doubt, from the way I talked French that I was an American, too. She told the other people standing there, and Chinigo and I had to get away fast, because all of them started shaking their fists at us and saying “Amerikanski!” between their teeth, just as they had said it to the back of the limousine.

But that was long ago, and in another country.

The Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is “a digital archive of recordings and texts in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America.”

The heart of the collection is recordings of naturally-occurring discourse in a wide range of genres, including narratives, ceremonies, oratory, conversations, and songs. Many of these recordings are accompanied by transcriptions and translations in either Spanish, English, or Portuguese. These works contain a wealth of information about Latin American indigenous cultures as well as knowledge about the natural environments that the people live in. AILLA also publishes original literary works in indigenous languages, such as poetry, narratives, and essays.

The archive also collects materials about these languages, such as grammars, dictionaries, ethnographies, and research notes. The collection includes teaching materials for bilingual education and language revitalization programs in indigenous communities, such as primers, readers, and textbooks on a variety of subjects, written in indigenous languages.

You have to register to use most of the archive, but it’s free and definitely looks worthwhile. (Via wood s lot.)

Addendum. There’s a very interesting discussion of indigenous languages, literacy, and the uselessness of government statistics going on in the comment thread.

A historic Belgrade “square” (more like a short boulevard, comparable to Wenceslaus Square in Prague or Times Square in NYC) is called Terazije, which means ‘scales.’ (The word is from Turkish terazi, which is from Persian terâzu, from Middle Persian terâzug; if anyone has information about its further provenance, please let me know.) This is an odd name for a town square, but I would have assumed it was either populated by merchants or the site of a municipal weighing machine (like Trongate in Glasgow, tron being a Scots word for “a pair of scales or other machine for weighing merchandise; a public weighing apparatus in a city or (burgh) town” [OED])—but most sites that discuss its name claim that it comes from the Turkish name for a water tower that used to stand in it. This sounds implausible on the face of it, but “Marko Serb” in an Illyrium Forums discussion says “Two high ‘towers’—water collectors—were located here, resembling a scale (scales) and this is how the place got its name.” Which would explain it, if there were two such towers there and if they resembled a pair of scales and if that became the popular name. How is one to know? And other sites give the more obvious explanation (for instance, this one says “The word Terazije means ‘weighing scales’ in Turkish, and during some 400 years of Ottoman rule — and well into the 19th century — this was a street of merchants and craftsmen.” That’s more believable, but then why is the water-tower one so common? And shouldn’t the principle of Lectio difficilior potior favor the latter? What we need are facts, and facts are hard to come by when speculation is so easy and enjoyable.

Geitner Simmons, an editorial writer with the Omaha World-Herald, has a long and interesting post (at his blog Regions of Mind) about Southern speech, beginning with a striking quote from Thomas Nelson Page’s 1897 book Social Life in Old Virginia: Before the War:

Quite a large crop of so-called Southern plays, or at least plays in which Southerners have figured, has of late been introduced on the stage, and the supposititious Southerner is as absurd a creation as the wit of ignorance ever devised. The Southern girl is usually an underbred little provincial, whose chief characteristic is to say “reckon” and “real,” with strong emphasis, in every other sentence. And the Southern gentleman is a sloven whose linen has never known starch; who clips the endings of his words; says “Sah” at the end of every sentence, and never uses an “r” except in the last syllable of “nigger.” With a slouched hat, a slovenly dress, a plentiful supply of “sahs,” and a slurred speech exclusively applied to “niggers,” he is equipped for the stage. And yet it is not unkindly meant: only patronizingly, which is worse. That Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Lawrence, and other visitors whose English passes current, declared after a visit to America that they found the purest English speech spoken in Virginia, goes for nothing.

(The Page book is online at what Simmons rightly calls the “terrific Web site” Documenting the American South.) He then quotes extensively from Michael Montgomery’s analysis of the history of the “Southern accent” in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and ends with one of the best nonstandard verb forms I’ve ever seen:

[Read more…]

I just learned about a regionalism I hadn’t been aware of: “Do what?” as an equivalent of “excuse me?” or “pardon me?” when someone says something you didn’t catch. According to this AskMetaFilter thread it’s native to the Texas hill country, North Carolina, and Alabama; any of you from other areas know and/or use it?

This fascinating site gives the origins of all sorts of company names. Who knew that Apache got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA’s httpd daemon, resulting in “a patchy” server, or that Canon is from Kwannon, the Japanese name of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy? Once again, aldiboronti comes up with a great post at Wordorigins.com.

Not only a new word for me, but a new concept. Bunyip is, according to the OED, “The Aboriginal name of a fabulous monster inhabiting the rushy swamps and lagoons in the interior of Australia”; Cassell calls it [apparently wrongly—see comments] “the fabulous rainbow serpent that lives in pools,” while this website says:

This is a fierce creature from Australia. Amphibious by nature, it has the appearance of a giant seal or even a hippopotamus, It is greatly feared, for it enjoys the taste of human flesh, particularly the more tender flesh of women and children.

So the details are fuzzy, but the general idea is clear, and the word is very satisfying to say. Bunyip!

It came up in the course of a fine discussion of swearing by Gail Armstrong at Open Brackets:

Even though my ability to swear is relatively unfettered, there are some words I just can’t say, and I rarely use foul language in writing – something to do with seeming permanence perhaps, plus the sense that, on paper, you irremediably imperious bunyip will be more effective than you fucking knob.

And she in turn links to a delightful History of Swearing (in the UK), which begins with 1900:

Shot by an anarchist while standing on a Brussels railway station, The Prince of Wales utters the immortal words, “Fuck it, I’ve taken a bullet.”

I hope I can exhibit similar sangfroid should the unfortunate occasion arise. (You know the translation of Voici l’anglais avec son sangfroid habituel? “Here comes the Englishman with his usual bloody cold.”)

TranslationDirectory.com has a page of Articles on Translation Business & Linguistics on widely varying topics, from the general (The Translation Profession, Solutions to Common Problems for Freelance Translators) to the quite specific (Aspects of Scientific Translation: English into Arabic Translation as a Case Study, Trados—Is It a Must?). A mixed bag, but there’s probably something of interest for anyone invoved with professional translation.

I was particularly taken with Moderately Irritating Recurring Idioms and Mannerisms, by Miriam Hurley (“ATA-accredited, Italian-to-English Translator”), with its long lists of possible ways to render Italian terms into English, e.g., for ambito:

sphere
realm
context
within
domain
area
scope
in terms of
with a view to
will also include
for that purpose/on that occasion
as part of
as far as the … is concerned/with regard to
through/by
in the case of
in the ___place
within the scope/according to
in their sphere of activity
purview
within the framework of
for the purposes of
extent
range
compass
field
as part of
in the context of
in
environment
circle
ambit
confines
region
area
orbit
province

(Via Taccuino di traduzione.)