Archives for July 2005

An interesting article, “Proverbs and prejudice: El Indio in Hispanic proverbial speech” by Shirley L. Arora (De Proverbio, Vol. 1, no. 2, 1995):

The proverbial speech of Hispanic America preserves, even today, numerous traces of the interaction between explorers, conquerors, or settlers and the native populations they found in the various regions of the so-called New World, while printed sources record others that have apparently disappeared from current usage. Many, though not all, of these expressions involve stereotypes of the Native American, some resembling those found in English, others diverging markedly from them.

A little long and could have used editing, but there’s a lot of good data there. (Via dhruva‘s MetaFilter post.)

Avva has announced a wonderful find: the original source of the epigraph to Nabokov’s Dar (The Gift, currently my favorite of his novels). The epigraph reads:

Дуб — дерево. Роза — цветок. Олень — животное. Воробей — птица. Россия — наше отечество. Смерть неизбежна.
П. Смирновский.
Учебник русской грамматики.

[The oak is a tree. The rose is a flower. The deer is an animal. The sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.
P. Smirnovskii, Textbook of Russian Grammar]

It sounds too good to be true, and one could be forgiven for assuming Nabokov made it up, but Avva links to an image of the actual page; the quoted line, which can be seen in its full splendor at the top of his entry, is at the upper left of the page image. (It turns out to be a series of examples illustrating section 10, which concerns gender; I’m not sure how the examples help, since only the last uses an adjective to make explicit the gender of a noun—the rest are simple equations of two nouns, though it’s true that examples of all three genders are given.) This makes me very happy.

Daniel W. Mosser has a good website on “The Evolution of Present-Day English” that has pages on each phase of the history of English, starting with Indo-European. I’m too familiar with the material to be sure of this, but it seems pitched at a level accessible to everyone, whatever their prior acquaintance with the subject. (Thanks to aldiboronti at Wordorigins for the link.)

[Read more…]

John Emerson of Idiocentrism (where incidentally you will find a new section on “Frankophilia”: “All the way back to the Chrétien de Troyes and the Song of Roland, the French have had a knack for lewdness, irony, and the freedom of women”) sent me a link to a page called “A Non-Exhaustive Euro-Hannic Transcription Engine: English, French, German, and Chinese Romanisations of Chinese.” Very useful comparative charts, and as an added bonus (since it’s on a Marxist site) you get the amusement of occasional references to “comrades” and injunctions like “‘Jiang Zhongzheng’ (adopted after entering politics) is a more admiring name for Chiang Kai-shek than is ‘Jiang Jieshi’—and thus to be avoided.”

Avva has a thread about words that one knows from one language and feels the lack of in another; he kicks it off by saying that he misses the English noun mind in Russian and Hebrew, the Hebrew word stam ‘simply, just’ (he explains its wide range of uses here) in English and Russian, and the Russian word ved’ ‘you see; you know; after all; isn’t it?’ in English. If you read Russian, you’ll find lots of interesting suggestions.

I have previously posted about the use and abuse of y’all, and I thought I’d mention that there’s a vigorous discussion going on at MetaFilter about the fact that “The use of ‘y’all’ is slowly but steadily gaining acceptance in standard English far outside…’the South’.” There are a few idiots and bigots, but in general I’m pleased with the standard of discourse, which has risen noticeably (on language-related topics) in the three or four years I’ve been following the site.

From the Dagestan and Chechnya entry in The Penguin Companion to Food:

Still on the topic of sheep, Chenciner observes that both main types of sheep are eaten: the plains sheep with fat tails, and the mountain sheep without. He quotes from Thomas Love Peacock (1823):
The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter,
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.

[Read more…]

An article by Howard W. French in today’s NY Times does a surprisingly good job at describing the complex linguistic situation in China:

DATIAN, China – As a crowd formed around a rare foreign visitor in this town’s open-air market, the conversation turned quickly from the price of dried fish and fresh fruit to how many dialects people here could muster.
Hoisting her cherubic 6-month-old daughter, Lin Jinchun, a 29-year-old dumpling seller, claimed that she could speak two, drawing a quick counterclaim of three from her mother, Lin Guimei.
What was the third dialect? someone asked. “Putonghua,” the mother answered, counting the standard national language of China as if it were just another minor tongue. Meanwhile others, shouting above the din, chimed in that they could speak four, five or even six tongues…

[Read more…]

I got another birthday present today (I like these birthdays that stretch on and on): Alan Davidson’s magisterial Penguin Companion to Food (available in hardcover as The Oxford Companion to Food). I have been keenly interested in this book ever since I learned about Davidson, but I didn’t think I’d actually get my hands on it except at a library. Now I can play with it to my heart’s content; my first of what will doubtless be many quotes from the book is the entry “Laksa” (by Charles Perry, “the leading authority on early Arabic cookery”), which will give an idea of the interest the book has for me as a lover of languages:

[Read more…]

Lepcha is a language of the Indian state of Sikkim and nearby regions; it’s a Sino-Tibetan language, but its exact relationship to the others is apparently in dispute. It’s spoken by the Lepcha people (self-designation: Róng), and it has its own script dating to the 17th century. Now there’s a proposal for encoding the rather complex script; you can read all about it at abecedaria.
Addendum. Since the discussion in the comments is almost entirely about morae (or, if you prefer, moras), I’ve added “mora” to the entry title. The discussion is over my head but very interesting: thanks, Tim and Suzanne!