Archives for November 2005

I love bilingual texts that have both morpheme-by-morpheme interlinears and prose translations, and there are several of them at this Project Gutenberg reproduction of the Smithsonian Institution’s Illustration Of the Method of Recording Indian Languages by J.O. Dorsey, A.S. Gatschet, and S.R. Riggs (from the First annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80, published 1881): “How the Rabbit Caught the Sun in a Trap” in Omaha, “Details of a Conjuror’s Practice,” “The Relapse,” and “Sweat-Lodges” in the “Klamath Lake dialect” (not sure what language that is—Klamath-Modoc?), and “A Dog’s Revenge” in Dakota. (Via wood s lot.)

Just when I thought I knew all the minorities of Europe, along comes another one. An article by Tomasz Kamusella describes the situation of the Silesians:

The Silesians began agitating for recognition after World War I, when the status of Germany’s Upper Silesia became uncertain. A turning point in their story came in 1922, when Upper Silesia was divided between Germany and Poland, disregarding the yearning of many of the area’s 2.3 million inhabitants for an Upper Silesian nation-state with German and Polish as its official languages (the interwar Union of Upper Silesians, the main proponent of independence put its membership at half a million). Until then, the multilingual but homogenously Catholic Silesians had used German in school and for official business, and Polish in their dealings with the Church. At home, both prior to and after the division of their homeland between Poland and Germany, they continued to speak their local Slavic dialect interlaced with numerous Germanic loanwords and grammatical structures, which they termed “speaking in our own way” (po naschimu) or “the Silesian language.”
Neither Berlin nor Warsaw would stand for that. For Berlin, the Silesians became “in-between people” and, for Warsaw, a “nationally labile population.” Policies of enforced Germanization and Polonization took hold on either side of the borders of Upper Silesia. During World War II, the entire region was reincorporated in Germany, which nullified the achievements of Polonization. After 1945, the process was reversed, with all of Upper Silesia being granted to postwar Poland along with other formerly German territories. Millions of what Polish authorities called “indubitable Germans” were expelled, but those Silesians referred to as “autochthons” or “ethnic Poles insufficiently aware of their Polishness” were allowed to stay on, after being were sifted out from “indubitable Germans” by a process of “national verification” that was not, in truth, too rigorous: to qualify, it was enough to speak some of the Upper Silesian Slavic dialect, or just to have a Slavic-sounding surname…

I don’t know to what extent there is a genuinely distinct Silesian dialect—R.G.A. de Bray’s Guide to the Slavonic Languages (1951), the only reference book I have that mentions it, says only that such dialects “are chiefly characterized by the pronunciation of true nasals in all positions”—or whether there is a widespread sense of micronationalism among the Silesians, but I thought I’d pass along the information. (Thanks to John Emerson for the link.)

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin recently responded to what he describes as “a regular flow of comments and observations about language” from listeners; my response after reading it is to wish he’d stick to journalism and ethics and leave language alone. My esteemed copyediting colleague fev at Headsuptheblog has done a wonderful demolition job, of which my favorite bit is a response to this gem:

Mr. Everest also raised a question about when to use the plural possessive on the radio.
For example: should we say “John Roberts’ confirmation” or “John Roberts’s confirmation?” Mr. Everest is advocating the latter.
In print this is a constant issue. My esteemed colleague Ian Mayes is the readers’ editor (aka, the Ombudsman) at the Guardian in London. He has referred to this inappropriate use of the apostrophe as a dropping by that mythic creature, the *”Apostrofly.”

Sez fev:

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Jabal al-Lughat has a very interesting post called ” A comparative linguist of the 10th century”; it begins:

Yehudah ibn Quraysh was a rabbi of the late ninth/early tenth century from Tahert (modern Tiaret, in Algeria.) Shocked to hear that the Jews of Fez in Morocco were neglecting the study of the Targum (an Aramaic translation of the Bible), he wrote a letter to them intended to establish that they could not and should not get by on the Hebrew alone – because other languages, especially Aramaic and Arabic, are essential in elucidating the Hebrew. In the process, he casually noted most of the correct sound correspondences between Hebrew and Arabic, and ended up writing what amounts to an extensive comparative dictionary of the three languages, even throwing in 9 Berber comparisons and 5 Latin ones at the end. He definitely hedges his bets on the cause of this obvious similarity between the three languages, but seems to come surprisingly close to the correct explanation – common descent – at times… something to bear in mind next time you read about Sir William Jones having founded comparative linguistics in 1798.

The post goes on to provide a quote from Yehudah, in both translation and Arabic transcription (it was originally in the Hebrew alphabet).

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Amidaworld has a post called “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Classic Asian Literature” that moves from the discovery of Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases (provided for many books) to the insight that they can serve as a handy thumbnail sketch of the book itself:

But let’s use this to save some time and read some massive works in, say, 10 seconds or so. I love this one: The Tale of Genji‘s SIPs: saffron flower. Yep, that’s it. “Evocative,” no?

How about those massive Chinese novels? Journey to the West (vol. 2—1 was unavailable): hooped rod, two little fiends, auspicious luminosity, poled the luggage, travel rescript certified, vast magic powers, his muckrake, brazen ape, white jade steps, cloudy luminosity, subdue the fiend, his iron rod, great snow fall, ginseng fruits, bronze mallet, various fiends, iguana dragon, preparatory mass, steel crop, immaculate vase, our rescript, treasure staff, gloomy complexion, testimonial poem, reverted cinnabar. Could you give a better summary in 4 lines or so?…

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I just heard a radio news announcer say “In Beijing… uh, Beizhing…” My wife gets nervous when I swear at the radio, so I’ll say it here: there is no /zh/ sound in Mandarin Chinese! Why on earth do people insist on looking at a pinyin j, which is pronounced pretty much exactly like an English j, and reading it as if it were French? Stop it, all of you, just stop it!
This has been a public service announcement, brought to you by Hatters for Better Language Use.

The Interactive Irish Lessons site has a series of lessons based on Mícheál Ó Siadhail’s excellent book Learning Irish; you can read about Ó Siadhail (a fine poet as well as linguist) here and in this LH thread. I may as well point out that Ó Siadhail is pronounced as if it were written O’Shiel, which it often is in Ulster; according to this site, elsewhere “it is usually anglicized as Shields, Sheils, Shiels or Sheilds.” (Via Plep [Nov. 4].)

OK, there’s not actually an exclamation mark after the name of Mel Gibson’s new movie, but it sounds so apocalyptic! that way. As you may have heard, it will be filmed in “a Mayan dialect”; now Ben Zimmer reveals that the language in question is Yucatec Maya (Wikipedia article, brief introduction: “My favorite Spanish loan word is chinga’an, which means broken and came about from the Spanish overlords saying ‘chinga’ when something broke”). Go to Ben’s post for a good analysis of the linguistic situation; go here for some interesting speculation on the possible apocalyptic content of the film. I’m just going to point out that Gibson’s “translation” of the Greek word ἀποκαλύπτω as “new beginning” (I assume it’s Gibson’s) is ridiculous. As you can see from the Liddell-Scott link, it’s a verb meaning ‘uncover; disclose, reveal’; the last book of the New Testament is called Αποκάλυψις Ιωάννου ‘John’s revelation,’ and the over-the-top nature of the things he revealed about the future (beasts with ten horns and seven heads, blood to the height of the horses’ girdles, etc.) gave rise to the modern meaning of apocalyptic, which I expect will be fully exemplified in the sanguinary Mr. Gibson’s film.

How did I miss this? This is what I get for skipping the book review section. Some months ago HarperCollins published Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler, and John Derbyshire’s review makes it sound like a must-read:

Nicholas Ostler is a professional linguist and currently chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. His loving fascination with languages is plain on every page of Empires of the Word, and in the many careful transcriptions — each with a brief pronunciation guide and a translation — of passages from Nahuatl, Chinese, Akkadian, and a host of other tongues. Ostler actually has a feel for languages that, he has convinced me, goes into something beyond the merely subjective…

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I’m afraid my delay in reading last week’s New Yorker means that it’s no longer on newsstands (and the article isn’t online), but if you can find a copy, the November 7 issue has an article by David Remnick called “The Translation Wars” [archived] that discusses the history of English translations of Russian literature, beginning with the sainted/damned Constance Garnett (“She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on”) and focusing on the husband-and-wife team of Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (she provides him with detailed trots, he turns them into literary English). The saga of how they got their first translation (The Brothers Karamazov) published is depressing at first (Random House responded: “No, thanks. Garnett lives forever. Why do we need a new one?”) but turned out happily, and they’re now well off and working on War and Peace (and keeping the French in French, hurrah!). Aside from a pointless rehash of the many-times-rehashed Nabokov-Wilson spat (“Your translation of Onegin sucks!” “No way, it’s your Russian that sucks!”), it’s well worth reading.

But since you probably can’t read the Remnick piece, I’ll share a nice bit of Georgii Adamovich I just ran across in his essay on Remizov: Разговорный язык слагался у нас, как впрочем и везде, в стороне от грамматических насилий, под различными перекрестными влияниями, одно отбрасывая, другое усваивая, и как всякий подлинно живой организм переваривая, претворяя в свое то, что было чужим. [Conversational language among us, as everywhere, has been formed apart from grammar’s violence, under various reciprocal influences, rejecting one thing while adopting another, and like every genuinely living organism digesting and making its own that which had been another’s.]