Archives for June 2004

I was watching a Scientific American Frontiers episode in which a scientist named Syndonia Bret-Harte was quoted, and I was struck by her name—not so much the last name, allusive though it is, as her given name, which a Google search showed to occur every once in a while (mostly in 19th-century names) but which I could not find in any reference works (dictionaries of names, Greek, Latin, &c). I won’t bore you with the details of how I tracked it down, but I eventually discovered that it’s a variant of Sidonia, whose most common English variant is Sidony. I’ve found two online explanations. The first is here:

Sidony: this name was formerly used by Roman Catholics for girls born about the date of the Feast of the Winding Sheet (i.e. of Christ), more formally alluded to as ‘the Sacred Sendon’. ‘Sendon’ or ‘Sindon’ (from Latin ‘sindon,’ Greek sindon ‘fine cloth, linen’) was used in Middle English for a fine cloth, especially one used as a shroud. The Sacred Sendon is supposed to be preserved at Turin. That ‘Sidony’ or ‘Sidonia’ =’Sindonia’ is shown by an example from Shropshire, 1793, ‘Sidonia or Sindonia Wilden.’ ‘Sidonie’ is not uncommon in France, and the Irish ‘Sidney’ is probably really ‘Sidony.’ No early example of the name has been found, but it seems likely that the surname ‘Siddons’ has this origin.

But the Dictionary of First Names has a more scholarly version:

From Latin Sid{o_}nia, feminine of Sid{o_}nius, in origin an ethnic name meaning ‘man from Sidon’ (the city in Phoenicia). This came to be associated with the Greek word sindon ‘winding sheet’. Two saints called Sidonius are venerated in the Catholic Church: Sidonius Apollinaris, a 4th-century bishop of Clermont, and a 7th-century Irish monk who was the first abbot of the monastery of Saint-Saëns (which is named with a much altered form of his name). Sidonius was not used as a given name in the later Middle Ages, but the feminine form was comparatively popular and has continued in occasional use ever since.

It was all worth it to discover the origin of the name of Saint-Saëns!

For a little added fun, the Czech equivalent (originally a diminutive) is Zdeněk (masc.)/Zdeňka (fem.).

No-sword has posted another entry (earlier LH posts on this here and here) about wacky Japanese verbal forms, this time involving an English suffix:

Here are some words that would probably be understood by a Japanese speaker my age:

• wakattingu
• komacchingu
• hashittingu

Can you spot the English? Yep, –ing. Present continuous tense. Of course Japanese has its own present continuous — –te form + iru (or just ru) — which if applied to those three words would make them look like this:

• wakatteru (literally “[I am] understanding”, generally used to mean something like “all right, all right, I get it”)
• komatteru (“[I am] troubled/in trouble”)
• hashitteru (“[I am] running”)

To make the borrowed –ing form, apparently one takes the –te form (stem + –te: wakar + te = wakatte, etc.), removes the final e, and adds ingu. So, for hashiru:
hashir-u –> hashir-te –> hashitte –> hashitt –> hashittingu

Two things are worth noting about this transformation:

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An ionarts post on the new French translation of Ulysses from Gallimard includes a tantalizing excerpt of Bruno Corty’s interview with the head editor of the translation, Jacques Aubert, in Le Figaro Littéraire. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to get to the original interview (you get redirected to the Figaro home page; if you’re interested, a Le Monde interview with Aubert is here), but I’ll quote a couple of exchanges from the translation:

In 2000, Joyce’s grandson asked Gallimard to start a new translation of Ulysses, to be placed under your leadership. Why did you choose a team instead of a single translator?

It was clear to me from the start that this new translation should be entrusted to several people. This was not only to give in to the spirit of the times, by influence, by example, for a project like a new translation of the Bible. We were ordered to publish it in 2004, and the work that had to be done made it seem difficult to me to conduct this work in a rigorous way with only one translator. Group translation is not the easy solution at all. Particularly in this case, where there are resonances, echos, and repetitions in the text that are furthermore subjected to variation throughout.

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An LA Times story by Ken Ellingwood reports on belated efforts to preserve Ladino (discussed at LH here and here):

More than 500 years after Jews were expelled from Spain, an effort is afoot here to save Ladino, a medieval dialect that helped preserve the exiles’ culture as they scattered across Europe and the Middle East.
Ladino, also called Judeo-Spanish, is slowly dying. Israel is believed to have the largest number of people — perhaps as many as 200,000 — who can speak or understand the language. But many are older than 60.
Recognizing that the oldest generation of Sephardic Jews soon will disappear, some Israelis are trying to pump life into the flickering language — collecting written works, recording Ladino love songs and teaching Ladino to young people.

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That’s the Catalan word for ‘dictionary,’ and I’ve just discovered the wonderful Diccionari català-valencià-balear, where you can enter a Catalan word and get definition, pronunciation, and etymology with historical excursus, for example:

TIBIDABO topon.
Muntanya de 532 metres, situada al nord de la ciutat de Barcelona, la vista de la qual es domina esplèndidament des del cim d’aquella.
    Fon.: tiβiδáβu (Barc.).
    Etim.: del llatí tibi dabo, ‘te daré’, frase presa de l’evangeli de Sant Mateu quan conta que el dimoni temptà Jesucrist des del cim d’una alta muntanya dient-li: «Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me». El nom medieval de la muntanya del Tibidabo era Collserola.

(Via a kaleboel entry in which Trevor bashes poor Bill Poser for alleged sloppy dialectal description. Bill defends himself manfully, and MM quite properly complains about the lack of comments at Language Log. Yes, yes, comment spam, I know. Delete it, what’s the big deal? Your readers want to kvetch in situ! Oh, and I found the Battle of the Linguists via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey.)

I knew the things would come in handy:

Being Bilingual Could Protect Your Brain
–Robert Preidt

MONDAY, June 14 (HealthDayNews) — Being fluent in two languages could protect against age-related cognitive decline, says a study in the June issue of Psychology and Aging.

Researchers from York University in Toronto compared the results of 154 bilingual and monolingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon Task, which measures reaction time and aspects of cognitive function that decline with age.

All the bilingual people in the study had used two languages every day since the age of 10.

The study found that both older and younger bilingual people performed better than those who spoke just one language. Being bilingual offers widespread benefits across a range of complex cognitive tasks, the authors concluded.

(Thanks, Bonnie!)

The Australians are fond of the phrase “Yeah no,” according to a June 11 Bridie Smith article in The Age:

The verdict from Monash University chair of linguistics Kate Burridge is that the apparently non-committal expression will stick around. And, like it or loathe it, linguists say “yeah no” is a surprisingly effective communication tool.
“It’s not going to disappear,” Professor Burridge says. “It’s always hard to predict with language change, but it looks like its use is on the increase.”…

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The OED’s June 2004 Newsletter is called “19 April 2004: a day in the life of the OED” and contains descriptions of what the various editors, managers, planners, &c did on that day. It’s full of great tidbits of the lexicographical life. One entry that puzzled me was:

Katherine Martin, Assistant Editor (North American Editorial Unit)
I was working on a draft entry for the verb other (and the related adjective othered). Due to the complex and philosophical nature of these terms (and our mutual interest in the subject matter), Abigail and I decided to split them up — she took on the noun othering — so that we could discuss the definitions in detail and share our research.

Is anyone familiar with this verb “to other”? I’m guessing that it means something like ‘to render alien or unfamiliar’ (like German verfremden), but I’d like to know more.
(Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)
Update. The draft entry is up, and here it is:

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A correspondent has very kindly apprised me of an addition to the Online Books Page, namely A briefe and a playne introduction, teachyng how to pronounce the letters in the British tong, (now comenly called Walsh), by W. Salesburye (London, 1550)—it’s available as a pdf file, accessible from here. It’s a 39-page booklet doing just what the title promises, even if the continuation is perhaps false advertising: “…wherby an English man shal not only w[ith] ease read the said tong rightly: but markyng the same wel, it shal be a meane for him with one labour and diligence to attaine to the true and natural pronuncation of other expediente and most excellente languages.” At any rate, here’s the description of ch:

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George[s?] Coedes (more properly Cœdès) was a remarkable scholar who “bestrode the field of Southeast Asian study for over half a century.” What I am concerned with here, however, is his name. I don’t know how to pronounce it. For a long time, apparently assimilating it to words like cœlacanthe, I pronounced it “say-DES” (to myself, that is—I don’t think I’ve ever had occasion to discuss him with anyone else). But it occurs to me that it could equally well be “ko-eh-DES” (like coefficient). Since I have no idea of his family background or the origin of the name, I am at a loss. Does anybody know? (And by “know,” I mean have actual information, like how they say it at the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient where he taught for many years.)
[Note: o-e ligatures added in Cœdès and cœlacanthe.]

Update (July 2008): French Wikipedia says “prononcer ‘cédesse’.”