Archives for May 2004

The site with 30,000 language links, created by Crystal Jones and Robert Behar Casiraghi. Lots of stuff here, including the Daisy Stories: parallel-text stories in languages from Afrikaans to Turkish. (Via wood s lot.)

I’m afraid this is only fun for those who know Russian, but if you go here you will see a random card from the catalog of the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. I got:
Elenskii, Nikolai Oktavievich, 1868-1939.
Aèroplan “Molniya.” Komediya v 4-kh d. N.O. Elenskago. [SPb] tip. t-
va “Ekateringofskoye pechatnoye delo”, [1910].
I love the fact that it’s in the old orthography, that it’s a play about an airplane from 1910, and that the name Oktavievich has been corrected (some sharp-eyed person like me changed a soft sign to an i). Somebody should do this for an American library… except, of course, we don’t use library cards any more. (Thanks to frequent commenter Tatyana for calling my attention to the Avva entry from which the card game comes.)
Update (December 2012). Alas, the main link is dead.

Margaret Marks of Transblawg, who brought us news of the unappealing term “brain up,” has a further report on quasi-English words as used in Germany. If you think you know what Bodybag means, you’re probably wrong.

I was recently asked by a correspondent to explain why so many sports teams, not to mention a famous brand of condoms, use the name “Trojans” when the original Trojans were, not to put too fine a point on it, losers. I happened upon a Crooked Timber post by Belle Waring on this very subject, with comments both humorous and enlightening. These, I think, provide the answer:

[Read more…]

A striking quote from Alexander von Humboldt:

It is to be supposed that the last family of Atures did not die out until a long time afterwards: since at Maypures – bizarrely – there still survives an old parrot that nobody, say the natives, can understand, because it speaks only the language of the Atures.

(From Ramage.)

There’s a very nice collection of images of Oxyrhynchus papyri from an Ashmolean exhibition online at Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts, “celebrating a hundred years of publication of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri.” “Daily Life” has everything from an invitation to a feast to an order to arrest a Christian; “Scribes and Scholars” has bits of authors from Sappho and Hesiod to the Hellenistic era. Fragmentary as they are, these scraps give us a picture of how the authors we read in modern books with word breaks and bound pages looked to people a couple of millennia ago. Via wood s lot. (Jim at UJG mentioned it last year, but I somehow didn’t pick up on it.)

The brief introduction to qene by Gebre Eyasus Gorfu is a detailed description of “an Ethiopian style of speech, where one says one thing while implying a different meaning at the same time and in the same sentence.”

Qene can usually be expressed in a poetic form or in a prose, containing the two parts of sem and werk (wax and gold), all within the same expression. The wax and gold analogy comes from the craft of the goldsmith during the making of jewelry. The image is first formed in wax, because wax is soft and pliable to carve. The wax is then covered with clay, plaster, or porcelain, which hardens. When the molten gold is poured into the plaster or clay, the wax melts away, leaving the gold, with the desired image. Thus, encrypting a hidden message in Qene is an ancient art of creating more than one meaning, where the apparent wax and the hidden, gold, are intertwined in the same sentence.

It’s a tradition going back to the fifth century, and was used against Ian Smith of Rhodesia in the ’60s:

That was when a certain Ethiopian cleric took up his Begena to express the following Amharic Qene in a song, as a form of solidarity with the people:

Ian Smith Teseyeme alu Kesiss
Be Englizu papas
Ejun zerega le-nechochu…
Meskelun le-tkurochu…

The Qene is hidden in the word meskel. It means cross: the cross on which Jesus was hanged, or the symbol of a cross priests usually carry, and would often use when blessing the people. But the same word, without any changes in stress, also means: to hang with a rope. The meaning of the poem then becomes clear:

Ian Smith
Was appointed a priest
By the English Bishop (Ex Prime Minister Harold Wilson)
He stretched out his hand to the whites,
And his cross/his hangings to the blacks…

I recommend the whole article, and I thank Pat Hall for the link.

Mark Liberman of Language Log has a very suggestive entry about the disfluency of the Wolof elite, as described in Judith Irvine’s “Wolof Noun Classification: The Social Setting of Divergent Change” (Language in Society, 7: 37-64 (1978)), at least as he remembers it:

…upwardly mobile men among the Wolof nobility cultivate inarticulateness as a sign of status. They make morphological errors—for example simplifying the Wolof system of noun-class indicators by moving nouns into the default category, as a child or a beginning adult learner might do—and they may even develop a speech impediment. If I remember right, men who rise in traditional Wolof society show these changes over the period of their life from youth to middle age, while less successful members of their cohort stay as glib and morphologically correct as ever.

He correlates this with the famed verbal skills of the griot class, “who are the lineage genealogists, musicians, and general carriers of gossip” and “serve as spokesmen for important members of the high-status group.”

So one of the symbols of high status is hiring someone to speak on your behalf; and skill in speaking comes to have low status, rather like skill in typing once had, back when it was something that only secretaries and journalists did.

A fascinating concept, and it may explain why American politicians seem to make a point of mispronouncing foreign names. They’re above all that.

The A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture has a section of Early Indo-European Languages Online that features material on Latin, Classical Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Classical Armenian, and Old Iranian.

…Grammars published as introductions to the early languages are produced on the pattern of those designed for instruction of secondary school students. They were expected to take eight years of Latin, six of Greek and then move to the study of Sanskrit and other less widely studied languages like Old Slavic, Armenian, and Avestan. Under curricula of today, few scholars find such a course of study acceptable.
Moreover, the important ability with respect to these languages is that of reading texts, with or without the help of translations. The online introductions in Early Indo-European Languages Online are designed to provide such ability. In this series, texts that in themselves are valuable for literary and historical as well as linguistic purposes are briefly introduced, glossed word-by-word, accompanied by grammatical descriptions, and followed by a complete glossary. For example, the third through fifth units of the introduction to Latin contain Julius Caesar’s descriptions of the early Germanic people, which we assume from our reading of Herodotus and other early historians might also apply to the Indo-European peoples several millennia earlier. Other texts are important selections of literature, such as the opening lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Still others are important theological texts.

Many thanks to Nephelokokkygia for this resource.

From The Morning News, The Non-Expert on the importance of editing.

Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week Andrew Womack illustrates, exhibits, and displays how proper editing makes English all that more the understandable.

Question: Gotta English question for you. Sometimes I see ‘hat, mittens, and gloves’ and sometimes I see ‘hat, mittens and gloves.’ I learnt it the first way, but which one’s right? I’m no editor. – Jim

Answer: The importance of writing at all is, of course always in question, especially for the recent rise of television, online, and blogging but the importance of consistent style in writing should, never be underesteemed. It’s using the common words in a consistent way which makes understanding others possible. If I say to one person, ‘This means this’, and then say to another person, ‘This means that, than the communication between us has become broken.

So who do we turn to? In times of we’re needed help? For a steady, understood usage and spelling of words & phrases that acts as the platform for which readers can comprehend—whats being said? without having to overanalyse it but just getting it, right?

The editor thats who!!

Read the rest, even at the risk of never being able to construct a decent English sentence again. [N.b.: It ends with a recommendation for “‘Hat, mitten’s, and gloves’.”] (Via Language Log.)