Archives for April 2004

Chris Corrigan has posted a nice selection of Seamus Heaney‘s poetry, from which I take this:

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

(Via wood s lot.)

The site Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics provides just that, going into great detail where necessary about the history of the words used for concepts:

SUBTRACT. When Fibonacci (1201) wishes to say “I subtract,” he uses some of the various words meaning “I take”: tollo, aufero, or accipio. Instead of saying “to subtract” he says “to extract.”

In English, Chaucer used abate around 1391 in Treatise on the Astrolabe: “Abate thanne thees degrees And minutes owt of 90” (OED2).

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The Corpus of Electronic Texts “brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet, for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide. It has a searchable online database consisting of contemporary and historical texts from many areas, including literature and the other arts.” It has texts in Irish, Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and English. To take just one example, they have an up-to-date version (complete with bibliography) of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, for a crappy text of which I paid good money when I was in Ireland thirty years ago and was happy to do so.

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The Tensor has a post in which he discusses varying ways languages have of indicating questions, in both writing and speech; he discusses Japanese and Armenian, and the first two comments are about Latin and Klingon. In the course of the entry he links to the Wikipedia article on the history of the question mark, which I’d forgotten if I ever knew it. Neither he nor the Wiki, however, mention the fact that in Greek, the “question mark” looks exactly like a semicolon, something that amused me when I was learning the language.

As of May 1, there will be twenty official languages at the EU—and all of them will need to be translated into each other. Angus Roxburgh of BBC News explains the situation:

Twenty languages gives a total of 190 possible combinations (English-German, French-Czech, Finnish-Portuguese, etc), and finding any human being who speaks, for example, both Greek and Estonian or Slovene and Lithuanian is well-nigh impossible.
To get round this problem, the parliament will use much more “relay translation”, where a speech is interpreted first into one language and then into another – and perhaps into a fourth or fifth.
Clearly the scope for mistakes in this game of Chinese whispers is huge.
“If I’m first in the chain, and make a mistake, then everyone else down the relay makes the same mistake – or worse,” Jana Jalvi, one of the new Estonian recruits says.

Of course, one possibility would be to settle on a single language:

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I’ve just discovered a new (since February) blog called freemorpheme: The mad ramblings of a Graduate Student in Linguistics. Jason is taking a course in Second Language Acquisition and keeping a journal (“We are to relate the course material with experiences from our own lives”), and he reminds me of me:

The approach to teaching Japanese at CCSF seems to be informed by a bit of the cognitive school and a lot of the constructivist. There’s a splash of memorization here and there, but it’s not really stressed. The goal seems to be to get us talking: genuine, spontaneous communication. This is fairly challenging for me. Although I love foreign languages and have a self professed talent for them, I’m very shy about speaking them. I’m much better at memorizing tables and things and passing tests. I’m glad that I’m pushed to speak more, but I don’t always enjoy it. There are definitely places where I feel like the old school choral drills would be helpful to me. I want to go through all the verbs I know and recite the forms in order: ikanai, ikimasu, iku, ikeba; kakanai, kakimasu, kaku, kakeba; etc. I want to do it with the voice of the whole class behind me. I want to do it a hundred times. That way when I have to use one of these verbs, I’ll remember what it sounds like in the form I want…

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Chris Tessone at Protestant Polyglot (now with added polyglottism!) has posted an entry giving the Coptic resources he’s found on the web in the course of preparing for graduate work. As a lazy man, I appreciate having someone else do the legwork for me; thanks, Chris!

Last year Mark Liberman had a Language Log entry discussing the case of a woman who wrote “egg corns” for acorns. It turns out that this is fairly widespread, probably the product of a dialect in which egg is pronounced “aig.” Since then the eggcorn has become something of a mascot at Language Log; today Mark discusses it further, giving the example “hand few” used for handful and quoting Geoff Pullum to the effect that “eggcorns are tiny little poems, a symptom of human intelligence and creativity,” and ends with an Update mentioning a fact I should have recalled myself: the word acorn itself contains an earlier misunderstanding. As the OED says:

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A list of computer terms in Latin, to go along with the Old English ones. (Via Incoming Signals.)

An interesting John McWhorter post at Language Log:

Tonight an actor said AND THAT’S WHY I’LL TELL THEM AS SOON AS I CAN in rapid, casual style, but he inserted a note of falseness by pronouncing THEM as “THEHM” rather than the way any native English speaker would pronounce it in that sentence, “THUM.” “THEHM” did not aid clarity in any way — if he had said “THUM” the audience would have still known exactly what he was talking about. He said “THEHM” out of a sense that this is what the word “really is

But actually, “THEHM” is just the full form. “THEHM we can talk about,” for example. “Me and THEHM went yesterday.” But just as often, English makes use of a second form, the short one, THUM. By no means a lapse or mere static, THUM is absolutely required of anyone who wants to speak English without sounding like a Martian, or a competent but not quite acclimated newcomer to the language. But because our writing conventions “unravel” the language and transcribe both the full and short forms as THEM, the actor is often distracted into supposing that always saying “THEHM” is good form, “rendering the text properly” Actors erupt in these phony “THEHM”s all the time — I have even heard actors pull this when spouting the vibrantly choppy, earthy vernacular of David Mamet plays.