Archives for April 2005

Deep in south Poland is a town called Wilamowice. Like many towns in Poland, it has a German name as well, in this case Wilmesau. But this town has a third name, Wymysau, in a dialect of German spoken only there, Wymysojer. So obscure is this dialect (even Ethnologue ignores it) that Avva suspected that the Wikipedia article about it might be a clever fiction, along with Florian Biesik, who was said to have written poetry in it in the 19th century. But no, apparently it’s genuine; there are at least two scholarly articles and a book about it. So I guess we can accept this lullaby (from the Wikipedia article) as genuine as well:

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Edward Tregear’s Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary (1891), the work which made him a Fellow of the French Academy (according to this reference site, which misspells his name and thus is perhaps not entirely trustworthy), has been put online by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (which has put many other books online, including all 50 volumes of the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War). From Tregear’s preface:

Regarding the Maori speech of New Zealand as but a dialect of the great Polynesian language, the Author has attempted to organize and show in a concise manner the existing related forms common to New Zealand and the Polynesian Islands. Several attempts have been made to produce a Comparative Polynesian Dictionary, but so gigantic was the labour, so enormous the mass of material, that the compilers have shrunk back appalled in the initiatory stages of the work, and all that remains of their efforts has been a few imperfect and unreliable pages of vocabulary scattered here and there through books treating of the Malayan and Pacific Islands. The present work is, at all events, continuous and sustained; it does not pretend to be a dictionary of Polynesian, but to present to the reader those Polynesian words which are related to the Maori dialect; using the word Maori (i.e., Polynesian, “native,” “indigenous”) in the restricted sense familiar to Europeans, as applying to the Maori people of New Zealand…
No small proportion of the labour expended upon this work was exerted in providing examples of the use of words, both in Maori and Polynesian. Many thousands of lines from old poems, traditions, and ancient proverbs have been quoted. The examples might more easily have been given by the construction of sentences showing the use of the particular words, but, rejecting made-up examples as being in practice always open to adverse criticism, preference has been given to passages by well-known authors, where the words can be verified and the context consulted…
Although the dictionary relates to the classification of Polynesian dialects proper, Malay, Melanesian, and Micronesian vocabularies have also furnished comparatives.

Many thanks to Stephen Judd, who called my attention to this work in a comment on an earlier entry.

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I have previously declared my undying love for Pogo and his creator, Walt Kelly, and that thread unearthed a slew of readers who felt the same way, quoting Pogetry by the furlong: “The moon is a madness,” “Once you were two,” “Oh, roar a roar for Nora,” “The Keen and the Quing,” “I was stirrin’ up a stirrup cup,” and more! more! Now I discover a fellow acolyte in Neddie of By Neddie Jingo!, whose post Greetings from Fort Mudge not only reproduces Pogo cartoons, record covers, and campaign buttons and quotes a long stretch of dichotomous dialogue between Howland Owl and Churchy La Femme (Owl: “Mine is got the ingrediments of scintillating scientific achievement inherent in it.” Churchy: “Mine is too! It got the ungreedy minks of single-eightin’ sinus siftin’ an’ cheese mints inherited too!”), it not only provides the full text of the toponymophilic “Go Go Pogo” (“From Caravan Diego, Waco and Oswego…”), it links to an mp3 of Walt himself belting it out with (in Neddie’s mot juste) gusto. Tweedle de he go she go we go me go Pogo!

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Google has introduced yet another great feature:

What’s an “iwi“? What does “spiel” mean? Google Definitions is one example of how we work to make the world’s information more accessible: ask us what a word means, and we’ll try our best to get a good variety of definitions from all corners of the Web. So I’m happy to say that a handy feature just got handier; as of this week, Google Definitions is multilingual, and is indexing more sources than ever. Enjoy the peace of mind of knowing that the definition of voip is just one click away.

I got this via Margaret Marks at Transblawg; she says “What was interesting to me was the etymology of Bratwurst,” and I too was surprised to learn the first syllable is from Brät ‘meat without waste’ rather than braten ‘to fry/roast.’

The Japanese Page has all sorts of resources for learning Japanese; I was particularly taken with the Gogen – Word Origins page:

折り紙つき origami tsuki
Meaning: something very nice; certified to be good
Example: このレストランのピザは、折り紙つきのおいしさです。
kono resutoran no piza wa, origami tsuki no oishisa desu.
this-restaurant-‘s-pizza-as for-guarantee-‘s-tastiness-is.
I guarantee you’ll love the pizza in this restaurant.
Origin: It actually has nothing to do with origami. This ‘origami‘ actually refers to an official document certifying the authenticity of a sword (刀の鑑定書 katana no kanteisho). The tsuki means the sword comes with this guaranteed certificate. This paper was folded and thus called ‘ori’ (to fold) ‘kami’ (paper). It is now used to refer to objects in general.

(Via plep.)

Again via Stilicho, the IPA Phonetic Symbol Typer. As Dan says: Nɒt hæf bæd!

There’s no point my going on about what a great writer Bellow was; if this is news to you, go read him. But the hullabaloo about his death has led me to a couple of odd mysteries. For one thing, nobody knows when he was born. For somebody born in a Montreal suburb in the twentieth century, this strikes me as unusual. The NY Times obituary says “his birthdate is listed as either June or July 10, 1915, though his lawyer, Mr. Pozen, said yesterday that Mr. Bellow customarily celebrated in June. (Immigrant Jews at that time tended to be careless about the Christian calendar, and the records are inconclusive.)” So he was either a day or a month older than my father.

The other mystery, of more pressing interest to me, is about names. The Times obit calls his father Abram and says nothing about the original family name, which I had always assumed was Belov (stressed on the second syllable). But James Atlas’s biography calls the father Abraham Belo (adding that “the family called him” Abram) and says “Belo—the name derives from byelo, ‘white’ in Russian—became, through a Halifax customs official’s haphazard transliteration, Bellow.” Atlas is clearly no Russian scholar (the word for white is belyi, or byelyi if you want to represent the prerevolutionary yat’ by ye), but you’d think he’d get the family name right, particularly when -ov is such a common ending that the bare -o stands out like a sore thumb. Does anybody know anything more about this? (Incidentally, the novelist was born Solomon, “known as Shloime or Shloimke and later as Saul,” in Atlas’s words, and his uncles later “added an -s to their surname, modeling themselves after Charlie Bellows, a well-known Chicago criminal lawyer who had once been the Bellows’ neighbor. They pronounced it Bellus.”)

Something else I wonder about is whether Bellow knew Russian; it’s not clear from Atlas’s account:

His parents spoke to each other in Russian and Yiddish; he and his three siblings spoke English and Yiddish at home; on the streets of Montreal they spoke French, and in public school they spoke English. “I didn’t even know they were different languages,” Bellow wrote.

Atlas several times refers to his reverence for Russian literature and emphasis on his own Russian roots; in the ’50s he aquired a “habit of addressing his friends with patronymics (‘Dear Yevgeny Pavlovitch’)”—but none of this proves anything except affinity.

I can’t resist adding that Bellow was celebrated in Chicago socialist circles in the ’30s for a Yiddish version of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; Atlas quotes the lines
In tsimer vu di vayber zenen
Redt men fun Karl Marx und Lenin
[In the room where the women go
they talk of Marx and Lenin]
and
Ikh ver alt, ikh ver alt,
Un mayn pupik vert mir kalt.
[I grow old, I grow old,
and my belly button grows cold.]
Also, when he was told Thomas Edison was an anti-Semite, he replied “That’s why Jews light candles.” Alevasholem.

Addendum. There’s a fine appreciation by Ian McEwan in the April 7 NY Times; a taste:

Bellow lovers often evoke a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of “The Dean’s December,” who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of canine understanding, and a plea: “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog, and Saul Bellow, our master, heard us and obliged.

Update (Jan. 2016). I was hoping Zachary Leader’s new The Life of Saul Bellow would clear up the matter of the family name, but alas, he says pretty much the same thing as Atlas, except that he adds a new bit of confusion: “To explain this moment one must know something of Abraham’s history. He was born in Russia in 1881, the first son of Berel and Shulamith Belo (from the Russian byelo or bely meaning ‘white’).” The difference between the -ye- of byelo and the -e- of bely is just two different transliterations of the same vowel, and the byelo form is just as incoherent as it is in Atlas. And Belo still doesn’t look like a surname to me. Will no one get to the bottom of this mystery?

A hilarious/depressing post by the excellent Dan Hartung (about censorship of the comic strip Get Fuzzy) in his blog Stilicho (“a barbarian in the civilized world”—you know Stilicho, right?) led me to an investigation of the least respectable of the various meanings of the word beaver, which of course led me to the OED, where I discovered that the first citation of this meaning was:

1927 Immortalia 166 She took off her clothes From her head to her toes, And a voice at the keyhole yelled, ‘Beaver!’

(The next, from 1939, is from—wait for it—Finnegans Wake.) I did a little more investigation and discovered that Immortalia: An Anthology of American Ballads, Sailors’ Songs, Cowboy Songs, College Songs, Parodies, Limericks, and other humorous verses and doggerel is online, each edition lovingly photographed and the entire contents reproduced by John Mehlberg (who would like to hear from you if you happen to have a copy of one of the printings he knows of but has not seen). My hat is off to him, and you can see the actual limerick cited by the OED (number LIV, on page 166) here. (Um, not safe for work, in case you hadn’t figured that out.)

Update (2011). Alas, Dan has taken his blog down and Immortalia.com has been taken over by a link farmer, so there’s really not much point to this post any more. Ah well, I updated the dead “you know Stilicho” link to a Wikipedia entry, so at least one of the links works.

Update (2020). Apparently in 2011 I didn’t know about the Wayback Machine; I have now used it to restore several of the links, though neither the cartoon strip nor the Immortalia webpage (“Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.”) is available. However, an OCR of Immortalia, with downloadable PDF, is here.

I haven’t lambasted William Safire for a while now, and after his recent “Kifaya!” [archived], helpfully describing the meaning (‘enough!’), usage (political protest), pronunciation, and even derivation (quoting Hans Wehr’s Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic) of the titular exclamation, I was feeling downright charitable towards him. But no longer. His latest column [archived], called “Putin/Poutine,” is a nasty piece of work, spreading what he must know are lies in the service of an animus against the French that I thought was passé by now even among the most fervent conservatives.

His column makes two simple points:
1) The French spelling Poutine for the president of Russia “is pronounced poo-TEEN,” which is not how the Russians say it (“POO-tyeen”).
2) The reason for this is that they’re trying to avoid the spelling Putin, which “would be pronounced as putain in French — that is, sounding close to pew-TANH [– which] means ‘prostitute; whore.'”

Point 1 is true; point 2, the entire raison d’être for his column, is ridiculous. He must know perfectly well that Poutine is the only possible way to write the name in French, that there’s a standard way to render Russian names in French (Lénine, Staline, Khrouchtchev) and they’re simply following it. He must also know that the French can’t possibly pronounce it à la russe (unless, of course, they study Russian) because they don’t have a stress accent; stress aside, they do a better job than Americans do, with our alveolar t and reduced unstressed i. I hold no brief for Putin, a nasty piece of work himself, and anybody who wants to make fun of him has my blessing (perhaps by comparing him to québecois poutine, which Safire mentions only parenthetically, to “head off a torrent of e-mail from Quebec”). But his column is supposed to be about language, not politics, and even by his own standards I’d say he’s disgraced himself.

Update (Sept. 2025). In providing archived links for this post, I discovered that the last one, the “poutine” page, ends “For more information about poutine, try the Alta Vista or InfoSeek search tools.” Nostalgia!

A Japan Times article by Roger Pulvers has fun with the notion, dear to people in Japan, that Japanese is “the most difficult language in the world”:

No sooner had I closed my umbrella and entered the cab than the driver peered at me in the rearview mirror and said, in Japanese: “You’re not a Japanese are you.”
“No, I’m not,” I replied.
“Oh. Japanese is the most difficult language to speak in the world, you know. Isn’t it?”
Well, for the 15-minute ride home I strove to persuade my driver that this, in fact, did not seem to be the case. I pointed out the fiendish difficulties of the languages that I had studied in my life, Russian and, particularly, Polish being much more complicated in grammar and pronunciation, at least for a native speaker of English, than Japanese. I finished my discourse as we rounded the corner by my house.
“I mean, Polish, for instance, has elaborate case endings for adjectives, and even has a special one for the nominative plural of male animate nouns!”
Having listened attentively to my passionate, if pedantic, foray into the esoterica of comparative linguistics, the driver stopped the cab by my front gate, turned his head around to me and smiled broadly.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “Japanese is still the most difficult language in the world!”

So far, so amusing, but Pulvers goes on to say:

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