Archives for September 2004

A nice site showcasing Hungarian literature in English translation, with pages on authors and their works; I haven’t had time to delve very far into it, but I’m intrigued by Orsolya Karafiáth, “a vamp and a poet of great formal talent in one person,” who “writes post-postmodern poems with romantic, sometimes sentimental and melodramatic overtones.” Oh, and there’s an “Online Dictionary” search box on the upper right that gives quite impressive results. (Via wood s lot; therein is also found a link to The Hungarian Quarterly, “Central Europe’s best English-language journal.”)

The great linguist Chao Yuen-Ren once wrote an essay in Chinese using only words which (in Mandarin) would be transliterated as shih (using Wade-Giles; shi in pinyin). You can see the text in characters and two transliterations, read the translation (“A poet by the name of Shih Shih living in a stone den was fond of lions…”), and hear both Mandarin and Cantonese readings here (in Cantonese, of course, the words do not all have the same consonants and vowels). It’s really quite a tour de force. (Thanks for the link go to P. Kerim Friedman, who got it from Muninn.)

Addendum. See also Suzanne McCarthy’s discussion of Chao’s thoughts on reading Chinese, with copious quotes.

This article by Robert A. Leonard is as good a summary of how Black English should be viewed as any I’ve seen:

Any professional linguist will tell you that, as a language system of communication, black English and standard English are equal, in the same way that French and Greek and Chinese and English are all equal. They do things differently, but there is no factual way to say one is better than the other…

But if black English is not deficient, why do so many people believe it is? Because black Americans have a history of powerlessness. And every society I know worldwide looks down on the speech of the powerless. We learn this attitude unconsciously when we learn the million and one rules and beliefs of our society. Most of what we know we learn without being explicitly taught — by observation and deduction.

And Leonard goes on to describe this wonderful experiment:

Texas researcher Frederick Williams asked white student teachers to watch videotapes and rate black, Mexican-American and white Anglo children on whether their English was standard and how fluently they spoke. The white children scored highest. But the videotapes were specially done. Even though the visuals showed different children, there was only one voice track: standard English. Stereotypes were stronger than reality.

That should be taught to everyone as early as possible in the educational process; it might help avoid a lot of ignorant prejudice.

Many thanks to Ted Harlan for the link!

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Another specialized multilingual site: Chess Pieces in Different Languages, the creation of Ari Luiro. Not only are the words for ‘chess,’ ‘check,’ and the pieces given in 64 languages, but there’s a nice historical introduction, piece by piece:

Words for chess queen in European languages are generally feminine, with a few exception. But outside Europe the chess queens usually don’t have gender or the piece is masculine. The Arabic firz or firzān (counsellor) was never translated into a European language although it was adopted. For example the Italians call the queen as donna (woman) or more common regina (queen in Italian). A Latin manuscript preserved in the Einsiedeln Monastery in Switzerland (997 AD) contains the first recorded mention of the chess queen (regina). In French usage reine ‘queen’ replaced fierce or fierge (from the Arabic fers) during the 14th century; during the next century reine was replaced by the word dame… Chess-players may have borrowed the word dame from the game of draughts. The transition from dame to queen would be natural, a desire to pair the central pieces…

Luiro’s native tongue is Finnish, so the English is a little awkward in places, but the information is great. And the languages are arranged more or less by family (though Finnish takes pride of place), so that you can compare, say, all the Turkic names; surprisingly, the words for ‘rook’ vary tremendously: Turkish kale, Azerbaijani top, Uzbek ruh, Tatar lad’ja (borrowed from Russian), Chuvash tura, Tuvin terge. Thanks, as so often, to aldiboronti at Wordorigins for the link.

The British Museum has put online its “93 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.” At the Comparing the texts page:

You can view the British Library’s copies of Shakespeare quartos separately or you can compare any two copies.
If you choose to see one copy at a time, you will get two pages on the screen as you would if you had the book open in front of you. To read the text you may have to enlarge the image by clicking on it or using the enlarge icon…
You can also compare the text of any two of the 93 copies. To do this, select a copy from the ‘View one copy’ drop down lists on the left hand search form above. Then select another copy from the ‘Compare with another text’ drop down lists on the right hand search form above. Even different copies of the same edition may not be exactly the same, because of the way the quartos were printed.
If you choose to compare two copies, you will see one page from each side by side…

It’s absolutely amazing to be able to flip through the 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet and read it as easily as if you had the book in your hand (if the museum would let you hold it). (BBC news story here, courtesy of xsjsx at Wordorigins.)

TAKASUGI Shinji (“surname first – Japanese way”) has, alongside a Teach Yourself Japanese site and a number of Japanese-language ones (all linked from his home page), a fascinating Number Systems of the World page that includes 60 languages, ranked in order of complexity. At the top is Nimbia (a dialect of the Nigerian Chadic language Gwandara), which uses a duodecimal system (gwom 10, kwada 11, tuni 12, tuni mbe da [12 and 1] 13, tuni mbe bi [12 and 2] 14; gume kwada ni kwada [(12 x 11) and 11, using a different word for ‘twelve’] 143, wo [12²] 144); at the bottom is Tongan (“Tongan has definitely the simplest number system in the world”: eleven is 1,1; ninety-nine is 9,9; &c), with many interesting languages along the way (including Polari!). (Via MzB at AskMeFi.)

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The Science of Word Recognition, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma, by Kevin Larson, discusses in detail “the history of why psychologists moved from a word shape model of word recognition to a letter recognition model.” The conclusion:

Given that all the reading research psychologists I know support some version of the parallel letter recognition model of reading, how is it that all the typographers I know say that we read by matching whole word shapes? It appears to be a grand misunderstanding. The paper by Bouma that is most frequently cited does not support a word shape model of reading…

Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word’s component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word. In addition to perceptual information, we also use contextual information to help recognize words during ordinary reading, but that has no bearing on the word shape versus parallel letter recognition debate. It is hopefully clear that the readability and legibility of a typeface should not be evaluated on its ability to generate a good bouma shape.

(Thanks to P. Kerim Friedman for the link, and my congratulations to him for being the #1 Google hit for “kerim”!)

I posted the following on Wordorigins yesterday:

In a (delightful) New Yorker article focused mainly on a South African friend’s quenchless craving for snoek (“He thinks about fried snoek and grilled snoek and dried snoek and snoek made into pâté…”), Calvin Trillin brings up another culinary item, using a word of whose existence I can find no other trace:

I took advantage of the stop to buy something I’d come across on a previous trip to Cape Town, a dosa-like object called a “salomey”—a sort of pancake filled with, in this case, chicken and potato. Jeffrey, who had never heard of a salomey, loved it. I told him to consider it a gift—not that particular salomey but the whole concept of salomies.

I was immediately suspicious because of the aberrant plural salomies; the plural of salomey should be salomeys. The fact that Google knows the word only as a given name (apart from this article) [this turns out not to be true] heightened my suspicion, and it’s not in any of my dictionaries (no, not even the Afrikaans one). I no longer trust the magazine’s once legendary fact-checkers. So: anybody know this word, or the dish in question under a name that might reasonably be mistaken for this?

One of the good folks at Wordorigins (thanks, Dutchtoo!) discovered that it was a Malay dish in origin and the usual spelling is salomi (cf this post, which refers to “a salomi, the original wrap of roti or flatbread filled with your choice of curry and salad”—and if your interest in food is wide-ranging, you’ll want to check out the blog, Kitsch’n’Zinc: Culinary musings from Cape Town), so I thought I’d ask my readers if anybody knew the etymology of the word. (Myself, I’d like a good salomi, but I’ll pass on the snoek; I don’t eat any sort of seafood.)

Update (Jan. 2021). I wanted to update the post, but not only is the Wordorigins link dead, but the Internet Archive says “Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.” Bah.

This seems to be Nicholas Whyte day at LH; not only did he provide the wonderful McDonald’s language quiz, he had earlier forwarded me an article (which I just read — I’ve been slowly catching up with my inbox) on the language brawl in Moldavia, where some people want to speak Romanian and others Moldavian, despite the fact that they’re the same language. The original TOL article (by Vitalie Dogaru) is not accessible unless you subscribe, but happily it’s been reproduced at LINGUIST-LIST. Here’s the gist of it:

The reason for this proliferation of ambiguities is highlighted in the conflict that produced the title Our Language Day. After 1989, when Moldova was still part of the Soviet Union, it was called Our Romanian Language Day to celebrate the decision, on 31 August 1989, to proclaim Romanian Moldova’s official language. Then, in 1994, three years after gaining independence, the country’s second freely elected parliament stated that the state language was “Moldovan.” The word “Romanian” was subsequently removed from the name of the holiday.

Linguists across the world are, though, in agreement: “Moldovan” is Romanian. Since the linguistic battle over the nature of Moldovan Romanian began in 1994, numerous international conferences, symposia, and workshops have demonstrated that, linguistically, there is no distinctly Moldovan language. There are no longer conferences on the issue. For academics, the issue has been resolved.

But not so for the Moldovan government and many Moldovans. For them, naming the language of the country’s ethnic majority is more than a matter of linguistics. The persistent question “Is our language Moldovan or Romanian?” has been mirrored in the paradoxical existence of publications written in the same language but which, below their title, carry the tagline “periodical in Romanian” or “periodical in Moldovan.”

And in the bookshops, a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary (the equivalent of an English-American dictionary) has become a bestseller, though as a curiosity rather than as an academic work. (The academic credibility of the dictionary were, in passing, undermined when Vasile Stati, its author, was unable to explain the meaning of a short story written by a talkshow host using only the distinctively “Moldovan” words taken from the dictionary.) In the classroom, the United Nations Development Program, which was trying to promote Romanian-language courses among ethnic minorities, two years ago tried to sidestep the problem by saying that its courses were taught in “the language that unifies us.”

You’ll have to read the complete article to learn the political background to all this, but I think the linguistic absurdity is quite striking all by itself. (Incidentally, the LINGUIST-LIST version has had the apostrophes and quotes stripped out; I’ve restored them from the e-mailed article.)

This is the most fun I’ve had in ages. Nicholas Whyte explains:

This set of pages was inspired by a visit to McDonald’s in May 2004. Along with our son’s Happy Meal, we got a small playstation-type game where you have to help a monkey catch bananas as they fall from the sky. I was amused to note that the instructions came in no fewer than 34 languages, spoken in and around Europe . It occurred to me that even without speaking a word of some of these languages, it is possible to work out what they are from their unique spelling peculiarities, and as we munched away I scribbled down my guesses.

Then I thought, why not see if other people find this an interesting process? So I’ve drawn up this interactive quiz – no scores, just the intellectual challenge at each stage of knowing how many guesses it took you to get the right answer.

In my hubris I thought I’d ace it, but it turned out I have a hard time distinguishing among the Scandinavian languages (despite my half-Norwegian bloodline). So it’s been a learning experience for me, and I hope it will be for you. Avanti! (Via Crooked Timber.)