Archives for April 2005

The poet Brian Kim Stefans, a favorite here at LH, has written a review of W.S. Graham’s New Collected Poems that makes me want to run out and buy it. I was not familiar with Graham, but this five-line snippet, all by itself, tells me I’m in the presence of a major talent:

Yesterday
I heard the telephone ringing deep
Down in a blue crevasse.
I did not answer it and could
Hardly bear to pass.

Read the longer excerpts quoted by Stefans and see what you think. (Warning: occasional use of Scots dialect. Also, there seems to have been an HTML glitch that caused a large chunk of the review to be repeated; when you finish the poem beginning “Who is that poor sea-scholar,” scroll down until you get past its second occurrence and begin reading at the next paragraph, “In general, Graham’s poems favor the cyclic over the linear…”)

(Via wood s lot, which I have to thank for pointing me to Stefans in the first place.)

Christopher Culver has written an impassioned essay, “Why Esperanto Suppresses Language Diversity”, about why he has withdrawn from the Esperanto movement. Basically, his point is that despite its rhetoric about supporting language diversity, the movement is actually interested only in supporting Esperanto use, and in practice works to suppress diversity as exemplified by the use of other languages. He says:

Esperanto is so strongly obligatory that its use is expected among any two Esperantists even if they speak the same native language. The act of using one’s native language with an Esperantist of the same mother tongue, referred to with the Esperanto neologism krokodilado, is one of the great taboos of the Esperanto movement and generally invites a scolding from other members of the movement.
The argument may arise that people attend congresses for the sake of practicing Esperanto and therefore it is inappropriate to speak other languages. The first response is that, provided that they understand one another, it is never inappropriate for two people to speak the native language of one or the other, for to do otherwise is to rule out any true cultural exchange. A second response is that Esperantists cannot be expected to limit this insistence on Esperanto to congresses, for many Esperantists look to congresses as ideal environments. Many times have I heard some Esperantist say “How I wish the whole world were like an Esperanto congress!” The norms of congresses, including the censure of the use of any language other than Esperanto, would serve as models for all international communications, as well as for communication in international contexts between two people of the same native language.

He also says that “in sheltering them entirely from the local language, congresses give participants no true contact with the host country.” An interesting take on a movement I don’t know much about, and I’ll be curious to see what better-informed readers have to say.

Chris Tessone passed on to me the information that version 4.1.0 of the Unicode Standard has been published.

The following complete scripts have been added in Unicode 4.1.0:
* New Tai Lue (U+1980..U+19DF)
* Buginese (U+1A00..U+1A1F)
* Glagolitic (U+2C00..U+2C5F)
* Coptic (U+2C80..U+2CFF)
* Tifinagh (U+2D30..U+2D7F)
* Syloti Nagri (U+A800..U+A82F)
* Old Persian (U+103A0..U+103DF)
* Kharoshthi (U+10A00..U+10A5F)

To celebrate the occasion, R.M.Cleminson, Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Portsmouth, has prepared a new edition of the Budapest Glagolitic Fragments, fully Unicode-compliant; having downloaded the font he provides, I can now see the Glagolitic in all its weird glory, and if the idea appeals to you, you can do the same.

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In a sense, it’s unfair to blame William Safire for the false information he purveys in today’s column, since he’s taking it directly from a published book (by a linguist, no less) rather than making it up or vaguely recalling something somebody once told him. But I’m going to blame him anyway, because if he took more trouble to check his sources, he wouldn’t be so prone to these embarrassing gaffes. The one that gets my goat today is a nonexistent “Russian word” that’s been spreading across the internet like kudzu for years and that Safire has doubtless given vigorous new life to: “razbliuto, ros-blee-OO-toe, ‘a feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but no longer feels the same way about.'” Safire is quoting Christopher Moore’s In Other Words, a collection of “words and phrases that are impossible to translate neatly into English.” [I have deleted a lazy and unfair comment on Moore; now that I am working on a similar book myself, I realize how impossible it is to control every item, and it is clear to me that Moore was the victim, not the perpetrator. My apologies, sir!] In this case, Moore clearly picked up the “word” from another such book (they must be popular, because they keep getting published), I suspect Howard Rheingold’s 1988 They Have a Word for It, where it appears as “razbliuto (Russian): the feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but now does not.” Rheingold (who “writes on subjects involving science, technology and computers”) has the elementary decency to say where he got his entries, and this one comes from J. Bryan III’s 1986 Hodgepodge. There the trail goes cold, since I don’t have a copy of that “literate, lifelong miscellany, illuminated with flashes of comedy and rue” (if any readers can get their hands on one, please let me know if Bryan provides a source), but it doesn’t really matter. The origin is not as important as the basic fact that (listen up, now) there is no such Russian word. When I bought Rheingold’s book I was charmed by the definition but found the word impossible to analyze (the prefix raz- ‘dis-, un-‘ made sense, but the rest didn’t), and it was not in my dictionaries; as I’ve acquired more and better dictionaries, my suspicion grew into a certainty, and has been confirmed by a very funny thread at the group blog dirty.ru, where a member posted the following back in January:

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I’m having a hard time believing this is real, but April 1st was a long time ago:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure—a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

This is stunning—it will rewrite the history of classical and post-classical literature and provide work for generations of scholars. My own excitement was roused especially by word of “a large and particularly significant paragraph of text from the Elegies, by Archilochos, a Greek poet of the 7th century BC.” Archilochus (or Arkhilokhos, if you want to be Hellenic about it) has always been one of my favorite poets, and I still remember the thrill of the discovery thirty years ago of another substantial fragment; as soon as I got hold of a text (it took longer in those pre-internet days) I stayed up most of the night working on a translation. I can’t wait to see this one, not to mention all the other newly found masterpieces, once known by heart to every person of culture but long since forgotten. And I’m also looking forward to the “lesser work—the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.” (Via Mithridates.)

A few months ago I had a post on “Uncleftish Beholding,” a Poul Anderson piece written entirely in words of Germanic origin. You can see the crazed nineteenth-century origin of this idea at Inscape & Outlandishness, a LiveJournal post that opens with a fusillade from William Barnes’s An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878):

Some of the small word-endings end themselves with a dead breath-penning… [These] seem to betoken, mostly, an ending or shortening or lessening, in time or shape… of their body-words… Flap, flip, a quick flying; heap, hop, hip, small highenings or humps; pop out, to poke out quickly; clap the hands, to close them quickly; stub, a small stump; wallop, to wallow or well (roll) lightly… We may think that we have two very fine words in envelope and develop, whereas they seem to be nothing better than the Teutonic inwallop and unwallop….

It continues with a description of Barnes (“Barnes’s passion was the rootedness of English, its power to create ungrafted words, of its own thorny and inalienable stock. A quickset tongue, hedge-English: tough and insular, flowering and thorny…”), Joseph Wright (author of the English Dialect Dictionary), and others, including my man Charles Montagu Doughty, whose one-of-a-kind masterpiece, Travels in Arabia Deserta, deserves more readers than it has. The post ends with a list of Barnes’s suggested word-equivalents in purified English:

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Trevor of Kalebeul has created a language blog aggregator he calls Langwich sandwich, explained as “syndicated language-related blogs for my lunchtime perusal.” He adds:

Feeds update every hour. Comments and automatic registration work, should anyone so desire. I’ll make it pretty and a bit more functional some other time, like never.

(Via Naked Translations.)

There’s something oddly compelling about the word simurgh; it sounds exotic and wondrous, and when you find out (at an early age, if you’re lucky) that it’s “an immortal bird that nests in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge” and “is known to take children into its nest to nurse them or foster them,” the name seems somehow fitting. Now, the OED says Persian sīmurgh is from “Pahlavi sīn (Av. saēna, Skr. çyena) eagle + murgh bird,” but the first syllable sounds like the Persian word sī ‘thirty,’ a coincidence that led to one of the masterpieces of world literature, Fariduddin Attar’s Mantiq at-tayr or Conference of the Birds, available in many translations. I have the Penguin edition translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, who summarize the story in their Introduction as follows:

The birds of the world gather together to seek a king. They are told by the hoopoe that they have a king—the Simorgh—but that he lives far away and the journey to him is hazardous. The birds are at first enthusiastic to begin their search, but when they realize how difficult the journey will be they start to make excuses… [In the end the thirty who persevere] are finally admitted and find that the Simorgh they have sought is none other than themselves. The moment depends on a pun—only thirty (si) birds (morgh) are left at the end of the Way, and the si morgh meet the Simorgh, the goal of their quest.

Attar’s work has been an inspiration for artists both classic and modern, not to mention a great jazz record by Dave Holland, and the simurgh inspired a great MonkeyFilter post by the quidnunc kid, which I urge you to visit for many more links, including some gorgeous illustrations and a long and involving Mandean tale about the bird’s visit to the noble king Hirmiz Shah.

I just discovered the Collation of language names page on the OED site; created to help users deal with the plethora of varying abbreviations used in the days before they decided to simply give all language names in full, it’s a staggering demonstration of the number of languages to which reference must be made in fully describing English. (I was amused on the A page to see that the second item was “Aboriginal”; I assume that referred to any of the native langugages of Australia, and that it’s long since been retired in favor of actual language names. Oh dear, and a few lines below that is “African”—I hope that was retired a long time ago.)

Beth at Cassandra Pages has posted an entry that does an excellent job of recounting the kinds of interactions that can defeat us when we’re trying to operate in a second language, and the way it makes us feel:

“It doesn’t matter how long I live here or how hard I try,” I said to myself, miserably, “I’ll never master this language completely, and I will never, ever fit in….”

As I thought about it more, I decided that it wasn’t so much an inability to make myself understood – for I’m pretty good at that, using language or not – as it was not being able to understand others, and how humiliated I feel when they instantly switch to English, or turn their backs – whether the gesture is real or only felt. The switching, I’ve found, is often Canadian politeness, and most people will continue in French if you tell them you’re trying to learn and improve. I recognized that discomfiture was also coming from a bruised ego. I am not only a word person, and someone who wants to communicate and know other people, but I’m an over-achiever, and I can’t stand feeling stupid or unaccomplished, especially in this sphere.

I know exactly how she feels, and there’s a certain relief mixed in with my chagrin that I’m no longer living in a city where I always had the opportunity to actually practice my languages. It’s so much easier just to read them.

Addendum. Compare La Coquette’s adventures in French, courtesy of Tatyana in the comments below.