Archives for May 2008

A couple of items of linguistic interest in today’s NYT Magazine:
1) William Safire’s column investigates the odd but pleasing word wackadoodle, an insult (comparable to kook(y) or nutjob) which he traces back to a 1995 use in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I plan to use it whenever it seems appropriate. He also, impressively, refuses to take the bait offered by a reader who deplores the phrasing “I approve this message” (rather than “approve of”); he writes:

The O.E.D. makes clear that in both the sense of the 1380 “to pronounce to be good” and the 1413 “to confirm authoritatively,” the verb stood alone; no of followed. In the 17th century, the construction approve on appeared, followed by approve of. For reassurance, I turn to Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, who concludes that “for the two most relevant meanings of approve, the verb without preposition is both the earliest form and the one that continues through to the present.”

2) Virginia Heffernan passes along the sad news that the OED will not publish a paper version of the new revision. I can understand the decision, but still—what happens when the internet collapses, hey? What price your fancy websites then?

This passage from Isaac Babel’s story “My First Fee” (Мой первый гонорар) nicely captures the dilemma of a young man who wants to write but knows good writing too well to be satisfied with his own efforts:

Nothing was left for me but to search for love. Naturally, I found it. Whether luckily or not, the woman I chose turned out to be a prostitute. Her name was Vera. Every evening I stole along behind her on Golovinsky Avenue [in Tiflis, now Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi], unable to bring myself to start speaking. I didn’t have money for her, and as for words—those tireless vulgar and burrowing words of love—I didn’t have them either. Since my youth all the powers of my being had been given over to the composition of tales, plays, and thousands of stories. They lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. Possessed by a devilish pride, I didn’t want to write them down prematurely. To write worse than Lev Tolstoy seemed to me a pointless pursuit. My stories were destined to outlive oblivion. Fearless thought, exhausting passion, are worth the labor spent on them only when they are arrayed in fine clothes. How to sew such clothes?

A man lassoed by an idea, silenced by its serpentine gaze, finds it hard to foam with the insignificant, burrowing words of love. Such a man is ashamed to weep from sorrow. He lacks the wit to laugh from happiness. A dreamer, I had not mastered the senseless art of happiness. For that reason I had to give Vera ten rubles out of my scanty earnings.

(The story was written in the 1920s but not published until 1963; the translation is mine. The original Russian follows.)

Мне ничего не оставалось кроме как искать любви. Конечно, я нашел ее. На беду или на счастье, женщина, выбранная мною, оказалась проституткой. Ее звали Вера. Каждый вечер я крался за нею по Головинскому проспекту, не решаясь заговорить. Денег для нее у меня не было, да и слов – неутомимых этих пошлых и роющих слов любви – тоже не было. Смолоду все силы моего существа были отданы на сочинение повестей, пьес, тысячи историй. Они лежали у меня на сердце, как жаба на камне. Одержимый бесовской гордостью, – я не хотел писать их до времени. Мне казалось пустым занятием – сочинять хуже, чем это делал Лев Толстой. Мои истории предназначались для того, чтобы пережить забвение. Бесстрашная мысль, изнурительная страсть стоят труда, потраченного на них, только тогда, когда они облачены в прекрасные одежды. Как сшить эти одежды?..

Человеку, взятому на аркан мыслью, присмиревшему под змеиным ее взглядом, трудно изойти пеной незначащих и роющих слов любви. Человек этот стыдится плакать от горя. У него недостает ума, чтобы смеяться от счастья. Мечтатель – я не овладел бессмысленным искусством счастья. Мне пришлось поэтому отдать Вере десять рублей из скудных моих заработков.

First off: bulbulovo is back! Those of you who (like me) had started to think of the blogroll link as a sentimental reminder of the good old days can go back to clicking it regularly. And the latest post is a doozy. I didn’t even know there was a practice of writing Arabic in Syriac script, let alone that the name for it could be written “Karshuni, carshuni, carchouni, carschouni, karschuni, karšūnī, karshūnī, karschūnī, garshuni, garschuni, garšūnī, gerschuni, gershuni, geršūnī or even akaršūnī and akarschūnī.” The intrepid bulbul does his best to disentangle the word’s history and usage, and I commend his discussion to all fans of obscure and useless knowledge.

A few years ago I did a post about the pronunciation of the tribal name Wampanoag that wound up (thanks to reader Martin) discussing revival efforts as well; now Martin sends me a link to a very interesting Technology Review article by Jeffrey Mifflin on the revival, covering the ground from John Eliot’s 1663 Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament [Entire Holy his-Bible God both Old Testament and also New Testament], the first Bible published in Ameri­ca, to three-year-old Mae Alice, “the first native speaker of Wôpanâak for seven generations.” It’s well worth the read, and I hope there are many more such revivals.

I’m trying, I really am. When I was younger I was an intolerable snoot (to use DFW‘s silly term), picking apart texts and holding up errors (real or factitious) with repellent glee. Years of linguistics courses, followed by more years of absorbing their descriptive approach, not to mention the tolerance that comes with middle age, have left me readier to roll with the punches, accepting the fact that the language changes faster than I can change with it, amused by my own irritation with usages I happen not to like. Even within the history of this blog, I’ve grown less eager to seize on linguistic misdeeds found in my endless reading; life is short and one can’t expect reporters and editors, increasingly pressed for time, to get everything right. I’ve even stopped expecting The New Yorker to live up to its former hard-earned reputation for accuracy. But some things are too much to be borne.

In this week’s issue, one of the “Talk of the Town” segments, Word Feast by Lauren Collins [archived], is a chatty squib about the practice (imposed by a new general manager) of poetry readings before the “family meals” at the Union Square Café (which was one of my favorite restaurants back when I lived in NYC and could afford to eat at such places). My pleasure at the thought of people sharing poetry is, unfortunately, more than outweighed by my resentment at bosses who force their employees into jolly group activities. But that’s neither here nor there; the bone I wish to pick is with the very last sentence, describing the aftermath of the reading:

“Did we order forks, by the way?” someone asked, which could be considered iambic quadrameter.

This is so egregiously stupid a sentence, in two completely different but equally easily avoidable ways, that I am compelled to bring it here for public keelhauling.

In the first place, there is no such word as “quadrameter.” I can, alas, believe the twentysomething Ms. Collins was never exposed to even the most basic analysis of poetics in her doubtless expensive education, but could she not have opened a dictionary? And more to the point, did no one at the magazine (once famed, let me repeat, for its eagle-eyed editors and fanatical fact-checkers) read that sentence and say “Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right”? The word is tetrameter, which comes from Greek tetra- ‘four-‘ (combining form of tettara ‘four’) and metron ‘measure’; it has been in standard English use for four hundred years. The fact that “quadrameter” is a bastard, half Latin and half Greek, like television, would be annoying if it were a real word, but it’s not—there’s not even a nonce usage recorded in the OED (which I certainly hope will ignore this citation).

Secondly, no it could not “be considered iambic quadrameter,” or even iambic tetrameter. This would be iambic tetrameter: “The forks! The forks! We must have forks!” The quoted sentence has no meter at all; if you inserted an extra syllable—“Did we order the forks, by the way?”—it would make a nice anapestic trimeter, and if you read it with a slight pause where the inserted word would be you could fit it into such a context (“How delightful a banquet we’ll have!/ Did we order forks, by the way?”), but it is neither iambic nor tetrameter, and no amount of strained emphasis will make it so. The last paragraph of that story is so wrong, so bad, that it should shame the once-proud magazine that ran it.

Claire of Anggarrgoon has a post on the Papuan language Diuwe, about which the Ethnologue entry says only “below 100 meters.” The code for the language being DIY, Claire thought a fuller description of the language would make a good “DIY effort”:

Therefore let me start the ball rolling by claiming that DIY is the only language which supports the hypothesis that altitude affects air stream mechanisms. Its consonant inventory contains 3 stops, four fricatives, 5 laterals, six approximants and seven vowels.

Mark Dingemanse of The Ideophone (who alerted me to this project) picks up the ball and runs with it:

Hidbap is Diuwe’s closest neighbour both geographically and phylogenetically. It is a language spoken above 100m but below 200m in the same area as Diuwe, that is, 12 miles southwest of Sumo, east of the Catalina River. Like Diuwe, it has exactly 100 speakers. The languages are quite closely related, though there is no mutual intelligibility due to the presence of a large bundle of isoglosses at the 100m isoline. This bundle of isoglosses is largely due to the fact that speakers of either language avoid crossing into each other’s territories at all cost…

There is much more, ending with a call for other language bloggers to “enlarge our sample of altitude-affected inventories to get a better view of the phenomenon.” Alas, I’m up to my ears in actual work at the moment, but I hope others will rush in where Foley¹ fears to tread!

[Read more…]

An interesting discussion of transliteration at the complete review, in the context of a new translation of Der Weltensammler, called The Collector of Worlds, by—well…:

Ilija Trojanow was born in Bulgaria, but his family left the country when he was very young and he has lived all over the world. He writes in German, and has always published his books under the name ‘Ilija Trojanow’.

Of course, Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic letters, and were one to transliterate his name from those into English one would do so differently than into German: the German w is the English v-sound, and a y is the obvious choice where the Germans use j. And, apparently seeking to get the pronunciation right, Faber is publishing The Collector of Worlds as by: Ilya Troyanov. Which does give English-speaking readers a better idea of how to pronounce his name.

The problem with this is that Ilya Troyanov is better-known as—indeed, very well known as: Ilija Trojanow. Even in the English-speaking world.

Two of his books have even been published in English translation—Mumbai To Mecca and Along the Ganges (get your copy at Amazon.com)—and they were published under the name: Ilija Trojanow.

When he appeared at the PEN World Voices festival last year it was as: Ilija Trojanow. (See now The Messiness of Now, an adapted version of his conversation at the festival now up at the PEN site, which is where we learned about the forthcoming translation.)

Perhaps most obviously to the point, in this Internet age, consider the Google results for the searches of his name:

* “Ilya Troyanov”: “30 results”
* “Ilija Trojanow”: “about 46,300”

You think maybe anyone who goes looking for information about this new Faber-author “Ilya Troyanov” on the Internet might wind up missing something?

My first reaction was “of course it should be Ilya Troyanov in English!” but as I read on I realized that, though it would have made sense for his first English publisher to have retransliterated the name, by now it’s pretty silly, and if his preferred transliteration makes it difficult for English-speakers to say his name correctly, that’s just the way Troy crumbles. (I added the alternate transliteration to his Wikipedia page; we’ll see if it stays. Oh, and by now “Ilya Troyanov” gets over 900 hits.)

Conrad’s latest post at VUnEx is his usual exhilarating excursion through byways of history that one might have thought dusty until he poured champagne over them; he begins with a delightful passage from Borrow‘s Lavengro (“‘He—he—he! you must know that in Lasan akhades wine is janin.’ ‘In Armenian, kini,’ said I; ‘in Welsh, gwin; Latin, vinum. But do you think that Janus and Janin are one?'”) and continues, via Abravanel, to Annius of Viterbo’s Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium.

Now Annius’ big idea was to get lots of fragments from ancient historians—Berosus of Chaldaea, Myrsilos of Methymna, Fabius Pictor, and so on—draw them all up, and weave them into a holistic history of the ancient world… The same basic idea had been done before by writers like Josephus and Eusebius; the only problem with Annius was that all of his fragments had been entirely fabricated, and by him.

Now that’s what I call breathtaking chutzpah, and his Wikipedia entry points out that not only his citations were sham: “His expertise in Semitic philology, once celebrated even by otherwise sober ecclesiastical historians, was entirely fictive.”

OK, I know everybody’s sick of Nabokov by now, and I’m trying to post about other things, but I ran across a quote I like so much I have to share it. I’ll tack on a couple other Nab-related items at the end for those who still have an appetite for Nabokoviana. This is from one of the lectures he gave at Wellesley in 1946, and it perfectly expresses how I view life and learning:

The more things we know the better equipped we are to understand any one thing and it is a burning pity that our lives are not long enough and not sufficiently free of annoying obstacles, to study all things with the same care and depth as the one we now devote to some favorite subject or period. And yet there is a semblance of consolation within this dismal state of affairs: in the same way as the whole universe may be completely reciprocated in the structure of an atom, . . . an intelligent and assiduous student [may] find a small replica of all knowledge in a subject he has chosen for his special research. . . . and if, upon choosing your subject, you try diligently to find out about it, if you allow yourself to be lured into the shaded lanes that lead from the main road you have chosen to the lovely and little known nooks of special knowledge, if you lovingly finger the links of the many chains that connect your subject to the past and the future and if by luck you hit upon some scrap of knowledge referring to your subject that has not yet become common knowledge, then will you know the true felicity of the great adventure of learning….

(Quoted in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd.)

In other Nabokov news, Dmitri Nabokov, VV’s son, after years of dithering and agonizing, has decided to defy his father’s dying wish and publish the incomplete manuscript of his last novel, The Original of Laura. I approve of the decision (if you want things burned, burn them yourselves, persnickety creators—once you’re dead they belong to the living) but I don’t expect to be bowled over by the book.

And here‘s the Barcelona Review Nabokov Quiz from 1999. It’s difficult!

An interesting jeu d’esprit at Waggish:

pick a work of literature or philosophy (or poetry, if you can make it work) and a sentence from that work that, if the sentence had been excluded from the work, would have made the greatest difference in the work’s interpretation/reception/history in the following years.

As david feil says in the comments:

It seems that there are several different types of sentences that can be turned up by this question. There are sentences which change the way you read the text, whether it is an explicit instruction (like your Wittgenstein) or a cryptic clue. There are sentences that are so eruptive that they anchor the rest of the text (Conrad’s “The horror, the horror” or Faulkner’s “I don’t hate the South, I don’t hate it” [from Absalom, Absalom—LH]). There are sentences where the text reaches its most crystallized coherence and turns into some sort of poetic easiness. There are sentences which for arbitrary reasons have been given a lot of critical attention (“My mother is a fish.” [from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—LH]) but despite their immediate impression don’t really define the text as a whole at all. And then there are the sentences which an individual latches on to as their personal lens of the text, but might have nothing to do with the general reaction…

I think we can eliminate the last category as irrelevant to the spirit of the game (and with my irritating editorial nitpickiness I must point out that “I don’t hate the South” is as apocryphal as “Play it again, Sam”; after Shreve asks “Why do you hate the South?” Quentin responds “I dont hate it,” going on to think “I dont hate it … I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!“—right up there with “yes I said yes I will yes” in the Memorable Endings sweepstakes). In terms of the original formulation of the question, what comes to my mind is “‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.'” (Through the Looking Glass, Chap. 6) Interesting thing to consider, no?