Archives for November 2005

Musil is one of those Great Authors I’ve always looked forward to reading one day but haven’t gotten around to; many of the writers I love most deeply come from that early part of the twentieth century and I have a fascination with the Austro-Hungarian Empire (all those languages!), so I expect to enjoy him when I finally read The Man Without Qualities (no, I’m not going to try reading him in German: life is too short). In the meantime, I’m happy to have Jerry van Beers’ Musil site; he’s been putting online everything he can find about and by Musil since 1997 (at first in Dutch, but he quickly added an English version), and it’s a real treasure trove. I got the link from wood s lot, who put up lots of Musil-related items yesterday (11.06.2005); my favorite snippet is:

“Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write in short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes and in writing, it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.
—Musil, from ‘The Paintspreader’ in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, 1936

A very handy page lists the various sets of terms used for the sizes of books and the paper they’re made from. Who can resist words like pott (OED: “originally bearing the watermark of a pot”), columbier (“F. colombier dove-cote, used in same sense”), demy, double elephant? Oddly, the OED entry for pott includes a citation from Frederick T. Day’s An introduction to paper: its manufacture and use (1962) that reads “Sizes of paper in the United Kingdom centre round fifteen designs: Foolscap, Demy, Medium,.. Pott, Elephant,.. Eagle and Columbier,” and yet there is no corresponding definition under eagle (nor is the word in the list of sizes). I both love and hate loose ends like that.

I must also say that like Matt of No-sword, from whom I got the link, I prefer the resonant older names like sexagesimo-quarto to the oafish new-style sixty-fourmo and its fellows.

An affecting poem by Maurice Leiter:

Lacking languages I stumble
in the darkness of translation
finding satisfaction second-hand
Here is Cavafy soft-spoken subtle
speaking free of affectation
or so it seems in this translation
said to be exemplary by many
But the curtain of my ignorance
keeps me from truly knowing him
nor is his work the sole example…

So learn those languages, folks; you don’t want to wind up, like the poet, saying “Too late I see my life’s great error”! (Via wood s lot.)

So I’ve been reading a book by James G. Cowan called The Elements of the Aborigine Tradition, and I’ve been putting up with balderdash like “This suggests that science has no way of answering problems posed by the spirit, however much it might claim to have identified the structure of DNA and the principles of life in the laboratory. The Rainbow Snake as an expression of world creation resolves that problem…” because he has a lot of interesting things to say about Aboriginal culture, but this, this is too much:

The etymology of the word ‘rite’ more properly suggests the origin of Aboriginal ceremony than does its obvious association with religious ritual. This, of course, is never far away, as most ceremonies are in one way or another religious. But the earlier etymological meaning, deriving from the Latin word recte meaning ‘in a straight line, perpendicularity [sic], uprightly’ goes nearer to the heart of what Aboriginal ritual means to them.

The etymological fallacy—using a word’s etymology as a guide to its current meaning—is bad enough, but at least it can get people to learn etymologies. This alleged etymology is just plain wrong. The word rite is from Latin ritus ‘ceremony,’ which has nothing to do with rectus ‘straight.’ Don’t publishers fact-check any more? (That’s a rhetorical question; I know they don’t.)

The erratic swings of my mental searchlight have focused once again on the native cultures of Australia, something that has fascinated me off and on ever since I learned about the complex grammar of the languages and especially since I bought Wally Caruana’s Aboriginal Art and fell in love with the stylized imagery, intimately linked with the tales of the Dreaming. Well, I just ran across the following entry in my Australian Oxford Paperback Dictionary:

Koori /kuu-ree, koor-ree/ n. an Aborigine. (Awabakal gurri ‘an Aboriginal person’.)
Usage Many Aborigines understandably dislike the use of ‘Aborigine’ or ‘Aboriginal’ since these terms have been foisted on them and can carry pejorative overtones: they prefer to use the word for ‘person’ from a local language. Because of the wide variety of Aboriginal languages, however, Koori has not gained Australia-wide acceptance, being confined to most of NSW and to Vic. Other terms are preferred in other regions: Murri over most of south and central Qld, Bama in north Qld, Nunga in southern SA, Yura in SA, Nyoongah around Perth, Mulba in the Pilbara region, Wongi in the Kalgoorlie region, Yammagi in the Murchison River region, Yolngu in Arnhem Land, Anangu in central Australia, and Yuin on the south coast of NSW.

Now, it’s clearly impossible for anyone but a specialist to know all these terms; my question to Australian readers is, do average non-Aboriginal Aussies tend to know the term for their own region, or is even that a matter of special knowledge? In other words, are these terms normal (like Inuit in Canada) or are they the province of the politically correct? (Note: I’m not making any judgments one way or the other, and I hope this doesn’t turn into a heated discussion of “political correctness”—I’m just trying to get a sense of actual usage.)

[Read more…]

I ran across Bernard Nežmah’s wonderful “Fuck this Article: The Yugoslav lexicon of swear words” (translated from “Ne vrediš ni pola pizde vode!” in Mladina) shortly after it came out late in 2000 and e-mailed the link to everybody I knew; now that I’ve been reminded of it by aldi at Wordorigins, I’m sharing it with you all. It’s a report on an international conference about Serbian swear words in Novi Sad, with many, many pertinent examples. A few excerpts:

Another participant, entomologist Dr Biljana Sikmić, is researching gradation units. The same gradations are found in the Slovene and Serbian lexicons of obscenities. She showed that the gradation is the same when the Slovenes say Ni vreden pol kurca! (you ain’t worth half a cock) and the Serbs say Ne vrediš ni pola pizde vode (you ain’t worth ha[lf] a cunt of water)…

Prof Dr Nedeljko Bogdanović, the doyen of Serbian swear-word studies, explained the difference between curses and swearing: the first merely degrades, while the second is malicious. So someone curses you with a blow to your favorite tree in your garden, throwing out: “May it never grow plums!” while someone swears at you to belittle your greatest pride: “Fuck you AND your plums!”

There is an old political joke: Do you know where the border between Serbia and Montenegro is?—It is where you stop fucking mothers and start fucking fathers!

I’m not sure I believe this, though: “When Vojvodinan Slovaks, Rusyns and Hungarians swear, they only swear in Serbian, saving their own languages for more noble expression.” Hungarians, at least, have some powerful swear words of their own.

I know you’ll all be as excited as I am to learn that the International Phonetic Association has approved the adoption of the first new symbol in twelve years into the International Phonetic Alphabet:

The symbol proposed by SIL represents the labiodental flap, a speech sound found in central and southeastern Africa. The IPA is the organization that sets the standards for the transcription of speech sounds in the world’s languages.

Dr. Kenneth Olson, SIL’s Associate International Linguistics Coordinator, proposed the new labiodental flap symbol, which is technically referred to as “a right hook ‘v’.” After review of Dr Olson’s proposal for the addition of the labiodental flap symbol, the IPA Council voted in favor of the addition. Linguists now have an agreed-upon standard for writing this sound when doing phonetic transcription—a very practical outcome of Olson’s research.

Dr. Olson encountered this speech sound when he was living among the Mono people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo… The labiodental flap sound is produced by drawing the lower lip back into the mouth well behind the upper teeth and then bringing it forward rapidly, striking the upper teeth briefly in passing. A few languages have an alternative pronunciation, called a “bilabial flap”, in which the lower lip strikes the upper lip rather than the upper teeth.

You can see an image of the new symbol on the left side of the linked page. Note, by the way, that the Wikipedia page on Mono refers to a “bilabial flap.” Tsk, tsk. (Via Tenser, said the Tensor.)

Songdog sent me a number of old Fried [Society] comics, and this one demanded to be posted at LH. On the right, we have the coiner of “no-assed”: “Sloppy, indifferent work is called half-assed. Your work, however, was thoughtful and well researched. In other words, it has no ass whatsoever.” On the left: “Half-assed is obviously just a contemporary, vulgarized variation on half-hearted. In this context, more ass is better, just as whole-hearted is better than half-hearted. Dr. Jaffe, let me congratulate you on a full-assed job, a term I just coined.” Read the opposing arguments and decide for yourself!