Archives for September 2004

A NY Times article by Charlie LeDuff taught me a new word: “The bodies are then sent to the Frye Chapel and Mortuary in Brawley and tended by Francis Frye, an 86-year-old crosspatch.” My first assumption was that the word I’ve bolded was some arcane job description, but it turns out it means ‘a peevish, irascible person; a grouch’ (AHD). I like this word a lot, and intend to use it as a self-description when I get the chance: “Don’t mind me; I’m just an old crosspatch.”

I’m not sure what to say about this AP story, except to point out the remarkable sentence I’ve bolded, in which “they” has a singular referent:

BRANSON, Mo. – A Branson man has put a face to the anonymous references people often make to “they” by changing his name to just that: “They.” The former Andrew Wilson, a 43-year-old self-employed inventor, was granted legal permission last week by a circuit judge to change his name. It’s just They, no surname. He also has changed his driver’s license to reflect his new name.
They said he did it for humor to address the common reference to “they.” “‘They do this,’ or ‘They’re to blame for that.’ Who is this ‘they’ everyone talks about? ‘They’ accomplish such great things. Somebody had to take responsibility,” he said.
Now, his friends are getting used to his new name. “They call up and say, ‘Is They there?'”
He acknowledged the name could drive grammarians crazy.

Well, I guess his friend Craig Erickson said it best: “Not only is he making a statement about his name, but he’s messing with the entire English language.”
(Thanks to Bonnie for the tip!)

A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (the Hyakunin-isshu), translated by William N. Porter [1909]:

This is a collection of 100 specimens of Japanese Tanka poetry collected in the 13th Century C.E., with some of the poems dating back to the 7th Centry. Tanka is a 31 syllable format in the pattern 5-7-5-7-7. Most of these poems were written about the time of the Norman Conquest and display a sophistication that western literature would not achieve for a long time thereafter. These little gems are on themes such as nature, the round of the seasons, the impermanence of life, and the vicissitudes of love. There are obvious Buddhist and Shinto influences throughout. Porter’s notes put the poems into a cultural and historical context. Each poem is illustrated in this edition with an 18th century Japanese woodcut by an anonymous illustrator… In this text I have put the Japanese, English and the notes on one virtual page per poem, and supplied page numbers for the apparatus.

A fine web presentation (by John Bruno Hare) of a fine (if antiquated) translation-cum-annotation. (Via wood s lot [09.22.2004].)

A sample:

THE RETIRED EMPEROR YOZEI

YOZEI IN

  Tsukuba ne no
Mine yori otsuru
  Mina no kawa
Koi zo tsumorite
Fuchi to nari nuru.

THE Mina stream comes tumbling down
  From Mount Tsukuba’s height;
Strong as my love, it leaps into
  A pool as black as night
  With overwhelming might.

It was a frequent custom in the old days for the Emperors of Japan to retire into the church or private life, when circumstances demanded it. The Emperor Yôzei, who was only nine years of age when he came to the throne, went out of his mind, and was forced by Mototsune Fujiwara to retire; he reigned A.D. 877-884, and did not die till the year 949. The verse was addressed to the Princess Tsuridono-no-Miko. Mount Tsukuba (2,925 feet high) and the River Mina are in the Province of Hitachi.

Koi here means the dark colour of the water from its depth, but it also means his love, and is to be understood both ways. Note also mine, a mountain peak, and Mina, the name of the river.

I have just learned that titch (or tich) is a UK colloquialism meaning ‘a very small person or amount,’ with an associated adjective titchy. (It is apparently derived from one “Little Tich,” a music-hall comedian of a century ago who stood only four feet high; the “Tich” is by way of ironic contrast with Arthur Orton, the gigantic “Titchborne Claimant” in the celebrated impersonation case of the 1870s.) I am glad to know this, but the way in which I learned it infuriated me: I had occasion to look up the Russian word mákhon’kii and found it defined, in the authoritative Oxford Russian Dictionary, as “titchy.” Just that. Now, how in the hell am I supposed to know what “titchy” means? It’s not in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate; fortunately, I have the Cassell Concise on hand, and was able to find out. But I consider it the height of chauvinism and irresponsibility to use parochial definitions like that in a dictionary that is intended to serve the entire English-speaking world. (And yes, I would consider it just as bad if a US-based dictionary used local colloquialisms as definitions.)

It might seem normal these days for church services to be conducted in the language the congregation actually speaks, but it’s a big step in Greece, where the church has stuck to the New Testament Koine of two thousand years ago. According to a Kathimerini article:

Worried that worshippers cannot understand services, Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Church of Greece, has instructed churches in the Athens area to start conducting New Testament readings in Modern Greek later this month, a report said yesterday.

Until now, the New Testament has been read in the original Hellenistic “Koine” or common language, a version of Greek spoken from the late fourth century BC to fifth century AD. Christodoulos is anxious that the young especially do not understand this form of Greek and cannot follow services, according to the Eleftheros Typos daily.

In a major step for a Church that clings to its traditions, the archbishop received approval from the Holy Synod to start a pilot scheme in Athenian churches on September 19 which will see New Testament texts read in the original language before they are read again in Modern Greek.

Let’s hope it doesn’t cause riots.
(Thanks for the link, Dimitris!)

Incidentally, in researching this post I ran across a Wikipedia article on “Greeklish,” the online writing of Greek in Latin characters. Who knew it was so complicated?

I’ve complained about misaccenting of Russian (and other) names before, and I’m happy to see a similar complaint at Language Log (by guest blogger Barbara Partee):

All through the television coverage of US Open tennis tournament this year, the names of many of the Russian women tennis players were pronounced incorrectly. I recently hunted around on the Internet for anything I could find about it, and found this article by Neil Schmidt in the Cincinnati Enquirer (August 18). The article includes a pronunciation guide, which is taken directly from the WTA’s own pronunciation guide. [Oct. 2024: The link is dead but can’t be updated: “Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.” Bah!]

Amazingly, more than half the names are listed with the stress on the wrong syllable…

The kicker is that “the WTA stands by its pronunciation guide” and suggests that “many players might adopt Americanized pronunciations when they speak with foreign reporters.” A shame if true; it’s not really any harder to say sha-RAH-pava than “Sha-ra-POH-vuh,” and why wouldn’t you want your name said correctly?

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The Guardian has excerpts from the correspondence between Scarlett Thomas, author of Going Out (in which “twentysomethings languish in the suburban wastelands of Essex, engaging the world primarily through e-mail, the Internet, and American sitcoms and movies”) and her Russian translator, Den(n)is Borisov. I would have preferred it if they’d cut out most of the chitchat (“My dog is called Dreamer”) and focused on the translation questions, but there are enough of the latter to make it an interesting read; I learned almost as much as Borisov:

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Today’s NY Times has an article (by Stacy Albin) called “You Say Prosciutto, I Say Pro-SHOOT, and Purists Cringe.” I had hopes for this article; the local variant of Italian spoken in New York and New Jersey (I don’t know if it extends to other parts of the Northeast) has always fascinated me, and I’d love to see a good analysis of it. But this being the Times, my hopes were not particularly high, and they were not fulfilled. As was to be expected, the article nods in the direction of actual linguistics (“In fact, in some parts of Italy, the dropping of final vowels is common”) but basically wallows in the lowest sort of purist chauvinism (“As for the linguistically challenged, who mangle ‘prosciutto’…”). Anyway, here are some excerpts:

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Having previously paid my respects to my other favorite comic strip, I wish now to do the same for Calvin & Hobbes. I am moved to do this by my discovery (via Incoming Signals) of an enthusiastic web page called, with simplicity and accuracy, “25 Great Calvin & Hobbes Strips.” You probably already know the strip, and if you don’t an introduction is only a click away, so I won’t say anything other than that I desperately wish Bill Watterson would start doing it again. The “25 Great Strips” page is wildly enthusiastic (and rather insulting to other comics), but its excesses are those of love and therefore forgivable. And it includes the one with the punch line “You know what’s the rage this year? …Hats.” So I can’t resist posting it.

But you’d better go there fairly soon, because it could well go the way of “Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn’s.” Copyright is a harsh mistress. [2022: A Wayback Machine capture of Martijn’s site from 2000.]

According to a Guardian article by Giles Tremlett, Gabriel García Márquez has been barred from the International Congress of the Spanish Language for “making trouble” by saying things like “Spelling, that terror visited on human beings from the cradle onwards, should be pensioned off.” Magdalena Faillace, Argentina’s secretary of state for culture, who is hosting the meeting, “told Spain’s El Pais newspaper that it was the academies of language which had insisted the Colombian Nobel winner be banned”; the Real Academia denies responsibility. Whatever the details, the banning of a great author shows what happens when you allow prescriptivists actual power over events. Let them write their querulous plaints about how everything is going to hell in a handbasket if they must, but languages are (as always) in the hands of those who use them, and prosper best when they benefit from the attentions of writers who use them particularly well, by which I do not mean academicians. (Link via wood s lot.)

And yes, I realize the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot and it doesn’t matter a damn whether Gabo is at the stupid Congress or not, but it gives you an idea of what might happen if Academies had actual power.

Update. The latest story at El Pais indicates that the Argentine government has invited García Márquez after all; it’s unclear whether he’ll accept.

Update (July 2022). It turns out he didn’t wind up going; see PlasticPaddy’s comment below.