Archives for September 2004

A sign language developed by children at a school in Managua, Nicaragua, over the last 35 years and studied by a Barnard team led by Ann Senghas has been in the news recently (Barnard press release, BBC News, New Scientist, NPR audio; also, from five years ago, a long NY Times Magazine story with photos), and a number of people have sent me links (thanks Bonnie, Eve, and whoever I’m forgetting!). The Wikipedia entry has a good summary of events:

Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the newly installed Nicaraguan Government had hundreds of deaf students enrolled in two Managua schools. Initially, the education officials adopted “finger spelling,” using simple signs to limn the alphabets of spoken languages. The result was a complete failure, because most students did not even grasp the concept of words, never having been exposed either to spoken or to written language. The children remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers.
Initially, the students could only use crude gestural signs developed within their own families, but once the students were placed together, they began to build on one another’s signs. While the inexperienced teachers found it hard to understand their students, the children had no problem communicating with each other. A new language had begun to bloom. Within just a few generations, a mature language with rules and grammar was born.

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The Russian equivalent of shish kebab is shashlyk (more commonly spelled shashlik in English); it comes from the Caucasus, and I once had it on a Caucasian mountainside after waiting for an entire wedding party to be served, by which time I was so hungry I couldn’t tell you if it was any good. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about a cat.

Many years ago—well, fifteen years ago, as it turns out—my then wife and I decided to adopt one of a litter of kittens a friend had found on the street. She decided Shashlyk would be an excellent name for him, and he grew up to be a lean, agile, gray-furred adolescent, friendly to all comers and constantly seeking out new ways to sneak outside and explore the forbidden territory of the Astoria streets. I missed him after the divorce, and took pleasure in imagining his further adventures. Now word comes from my ex that the thread of his life has been cut: he had been depressed and refusing to eat, “a pile of skin and bones, unhappy and clearly uncomfortable,” and it’s finally all over. I hate to think of him that way, and I find it hard even to imagine him as an old cat; to me he’ll forever be the gray streak caught out of the corner of my eye flowing impossibly straight up a cabinet, or chasing his tail with endless enthusiasm, or staring wide-eyed at an invisible Martian in the corner, or sitting quietly in a kitchen drawer. Goodbye, kiddo; you were a good companion, even if you did stick those claws a little deeper into my thigh than was strictly necessary from time to time.

Wordful is a new language site from Australia whose creator says:

Words. How I love ’em. This is where I’ll share my love for word histories, names and anything else wordy that pops into my head.

This is obviously a good premise for a website, and he’s already turned up some wonderful stuff, like morkin:

I saw a dead possum on the road this morning. The poor morkin.

Morkin is an obsolete word meaning “A beast that has died of disease or by mischance.” … What a great word!

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Today’s wood s lot is entirely devoted to William Carlos Williams, who thoroughly deserves the tribute; I urge you to visit and check out the many links. Here I will merely quote the last of his nuggets, a parody by that funniest of poets, Kenneth Koch, of one of everybody’s favorite WCW poems:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

Kenneth Koch

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

After a long and stressful day at work yesterday I finally took the 9:02 out of Grand Central, settled into my preferred seat (next to the mid-car open area, where I like to stand or pace when I tire of sitting), and pulled out the Aleksandr Grin story I was reading (thanks, Tatyana!). A young brunette in a black dress settled in across the aisle, leaned against the window and extended herself over both seats, pulled out her cell phone and address book, and started making calls. When I realized she was not speaking English, I automatically began trying to identify the language. A few Slavic-sounding words or syllables—da, ale, chem—made me think it might be something West Slavic, but the closer I listened the more at sea I was. Suddenly I realized I was hearing glottalized consonants, and my whole frame of reference shifted: surely it couldn’t be… Georgian? But it was; as soon as I listened with that in mind, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t known it at once. If I’d been in Brighton Beach, I probably would have, but what are the odds of hearing Georgian on the Hudson Line train to Beacon?

The funny thing was that the more I listened, the more of my long-forgotten Georgian began surfacing. Modi, that means ‘come,’ doesn’t it? And vitsi is ‘I know,’ ara is ‘no’ (I’ll never forget the first time I heard a Georgian say ar vitsi [AHR-wits(i)] and thought “He just said ‘I don’t know’!”—ah, the joy of test-driving a language you’ve been learning), akhali is ‘new’… I had hoped to exchange a few words with her, but I never got the chance; she talked nonstop until she got off at Ossining. I wonder how much of it would have come back if I’d been able to listen to her for a few hours? Memory is a strange business.

Greg Lindahl’s home page links (under “Publishing”) to a series of Renaissance books he’s hosting, including a couple of dictionaries, Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (and its associated proverbs) and Florio’s Italian/English Dictionary, both from 1611; there are also books on fencing, dancing, music, and needlework, among others. In case you were wondering, Lindahl’s motivation has to do with the Society for Creative Anachronism, whose adherents go to a great deal of trouble to achieve authenticity. (Via misteraitch‘s MetaFilter post.)

This website describes “Days of the Week in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese”:

There’s something friendly and familiar about the names of the days of the week in English and other Western European languages. Each has its quirks (the Romance languages use Roman gods, the Germanic languages use Germanic gods, Spanish and Italian use ‘Sabbath’ instead of ‘Saturday’) but with a bit of background they fall into an interesting but reassuring pattern.

Not so Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese (CJV), which seem completely alien. Chinese and Vietnamese simply count the days of the week; Japanese uses a strange collection of elemental names reminiscent of primitive religion. Given that Chinese and Vietnamese can’t even agree which day to count from, the three languages seem to have little to do with each other, let alone the languages of Europe.

But this appearance is deceptive. A little delving reveals a much more complex picture that is every bit as fascinating as the languages of the West. Ironically, Japanese and Vietnamese turn out to be more faithful to traditional Western concepts of the week than modern English is.

It also has a comprehensive link section, which includes material on the Western systems. (Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

Reading the NY Times Magazine story “The Lessons of Classroom 506” by Lisa Belkin, I was taken aback by this: “As a kindergartner, Valente was the only disabled child in her grade…” (my emphasis). It would never have occurred to me to say anything but “kindergartener,” but I looked it up in Webster’s Collegiate and sure enough, the one preserving German morphology is the preferred spelling. So I present this as a public service for those in my former condition of ignorance, and while I’m at it I’ll mention that someone who runs a restaurant is a restaurateur, something that always seems to flummox people. (He’s a “restorator” because he runs a place that does the restoring.)

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Alan DeNiro’s Taverner’s Koans, “a one-room schoolhouse of experimental poetics,” has a Gallery of Underrated Poets that’s well worth exploring (as I could tell instantly from the fact that it included Lorine Niedecker). I’m not sure John Clare and Stephen Crane can be considered underrated, but I’m not going to quibble, since I’ve already discovered the wonderful Melvin Tolson and I’ve barely begun digging. Here’s a snippet from Tolson’s The Harlem Gallery (1965):

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Jonathan Mayhew at Bemsha Swing presents fourteen ways of looking at a Basho haiku and concludes that “the best version is probably the sum total or average of all these”; Mark Liberman at Language Log adds Bill Poser’s analysis of the original Japanese; Hugh Bygott at moments… discusses the syntax of the poem (is it a PAN string?) and suggests that it works as a continuation of a Tu Fu poem; Paul MacNeil mentions the historical context. If you prefer German versions, there are seven of them here. Much ado about seventeen syllables, and a lot of fun!