Archives for September 2004

Greek Grammar on the Web is a website run by Marc Huys (apparently since 1999) that gives “a listing of web sites on ancient Greek language and grammar, combined with a description of the contents and a personal appreciation… Apart from being inevitably somewhat subjective, this appreciation is given from a scholarly as well as a didactic point of view.” The Advanced Study section, for example, links to Greek Prose Style (“excellent web site presenting the contents of a course taught at the City University of New York… in Greek prose style and prose composition. Via these pages you can access directly more than 90% of the materials contained in the 200-page workbook which Hansen produced for the course”), pdf files on historical phonology (“containing a concise survey of the historical evolution of vowels, diphthongs and consonants from Indo-European to Ancient Greek”) and Greek voice (by Carl Conrad, “distinguished classicist at Washington University of St. Louis… In it he confronts fundamental misconceptions governing the traditional teaching of the voices in Ancient Greek”), and other useful sources. (Via wood s lot.)

Politics, Language and Cultures of the Arab World is a new blog by miladus whose title admirably describes its ambit; its latest entries are on Maps of the Islamic world and Arabic Culture Through its Language and Literature, the latter on an interesting-sounding book by Muhammed Haran Bakalla that “covers the linguistic origins of Arabic dialects and history, and includes chapters on Arab linguistic scholarship and the development of the Arabic script” as well as “all aspects of Arabic literature, from pre-Islamic poetry to major Arab literary figures such as Al-Mutana[bb]i, Bashar [does anybody know who this is?], and Al-M[a]’arri, from the Arabian Nights to modern Arab poetesses, from proverbs to literary criticism.” (Thanks to PF for the link.)

Update (Aug. 2022). The blog petered out in January 2005, mutated into a course description in 2006, and vanished altogether sometime after 2018.

Joel at Far Outliers has two posts on a very interesting subject: what is the best way to write a language? Specifically, should you stick to the “scientific” method of one symbol per phoneme, or should you use a “messier” method that may suit the speakers better? I have long thought that “one symbol per phoneme” was a needless goal that has resulted in excessively elaborate alphabets, frequently requiring special symbols that make it difficult to write the language using normal keyboards and printers, and Joel agrees:

People could write fewer vowels and consonants than would be optimal in isolation, while relying instead on sentential, semantic, or social context to reduce ambiguity. But this approach would make linguists feel rather less useful.

See his posts on Marshallese Spelling Reforms and Yapese Spelling Reform: “That Damn Q!”:

A simpler, underspecified writing system would allow more Yapese to write their own language without having to run everything by someone with sufficient linguistic training to understand the New Orthography. It would take literacy out of the hands of experts and give it back to the people who need it most.

After leaving Montreal (with regret), we drove down through Vermont and visited Amherst, Massachusetts, where I finally got to see Emily Dickinson’s house. But first (the earliest tour was at 1 PM) I dropped in at the excellent Amherst Books, where I couldn’t resist buying Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1926, a wonderful Fantagraphics reprint of a year’s worth of George Herriman‘s Krazy Kat comics. Now, I’m going to make a wild leap here, and those of you with sensitive constitutions may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, but I think Dickinson has far more in common with Herriman than with the lady poets she’s usually compared to (Sappho, say, not that we actually know anything about Sappho). Dickinson is perhaps America’s greatest pure poet (in the sense that she has no interest in propagandizing for religious or political sects or in telling stories) and Herriman is without question America’s greatest pure comic-strip artist (in the sense that he has no interest in writing for the market or in telling stories); her self-limitation to an apparently simple hymn form for her verse is as striking as his self-limitation to an apparently simple triangular structure for his strips (Ignatz heaves a brick at Krazy and is chastised by Officer Pupp), and both have been condescended to for these alleged faults, which in fact allowed them to refine their art and bring it to unmatched levels. The difference, of course—apart from medium, gender, era, and other trivia—is that Herriman found outside support and Dickinson did not. I quote from Bill Blackbeard‘s introduction to the Fantagraphics book:

[Read more…]

First off, I want to thank everyone who left informative comments on my Hiatus post. (I should add that wolfangel was quite correct that people would often switch to English when they heard I wasn’t a native speaker, but I got a fair amount of French conversation in anyway.) I learned the word dépanneur ‘convenience store’; I heard the affricated d and t; I did not notice the tense/lax vowels or the –tu questions; I did notice the contractions (chais &c) and a feature nobody mentioned in the comments, the raising of nasalized vowels: vent sounded almost like vin (with /æ/ as in hat), and vin had a high [e] and sounded diphthongized ([veiN]) — in fact, one guy said matin so that it struck my ears as [matiN]. In general, men spoke with heavier dialect than women, and some of them were virtually incomprehensible.

We spent our time mostly in the francophone area north and east of our hotel, so we dealt with a lot of French-speakers, but all of them were willing to accommodate my non-francophone wife except for one Metro ticket-seller who answered her “Do you speak English?” with a brusque “Non.” People seemed by and large bilingual; a striking example of this occurred during our dinner at the (very good) Bistro Côté Soleil on rue St-Denis, when we sat next to two women, the younger probably a grad student in art and the older perhaps her faculty advisor. The younger spoke almost entirely in French and the older almost entirely in English, but they clearly understood each other perfectly and occasionally dropped into the other’s language (both had fairly heavy accents). Other people switched back and forth in the course of a few sentences. I’ve been in many multilingual cities and some with a very widespread minority language (often Spanish in the US), but never one where two languages met on such equal terms. Whatever contortions Québec has had to go through to get where it is today, I’m impressed with the result.

I’m too tired to get into the linguistic aspects of my visit, but I want to thank Beth and J. for welcoming us, pouring good wine into us, and making such good conversation that we hated to leave; I also hated to have to make such a short appearance at the Yulblog meeting of Montreal bloggers, particularly since the first person I met there was Zénon and I would have loved to have the chance to talk more with him. He’s as interesting in person as his blog, which presents all manner of things: philosophy, art, poetry, and (yes) language (Mots français d’origine gauloise). In general, we found Montreal a wonderful city and hope to be able to spend much more time there. More details to follow.

Just a quick note to say I’m back after an action-packed vacation; I feel as if I’d been away for two weeks rather than five and a half days. I’ll be writing at some length about my visits to Montreal and Amherst, but first I have to despam my poor abused blog. Sorry about the infestation (though it seems to have amused some of you — it’s an ill wind, &c &c).