Archives for March 2009

Lameen Souag, in his Jabal al-Lughat post No, Berber isn’t descended from Arabic, rebuts some “unscientific jingoistic claptrap” that claims what the title denies. But the comment thread turns into a discussion of one of his examples, a Berber word that is borrowed from Arabic: “abrid ‘road’ < Ar. barīd بريد (confirmed by the Tuareg pronunciation of this word, abărid)." Lameen explains that "barīd (primary meaning in modern standard Arabic: post) comes from Greek beredos 'post-horse', which is from Latin veredus 'post-horse'," but then it turns out that "barīd might be a borrowing into Arabic from Persian, rather than Greek - in which case the word for this key tool of government has been passed on from one empire to the next ever since the Akkadians." It's well worth a read by anyone interested in these things.

In this thread, AJP directed my attention to Just the Right Word by Nicholas A. Basbanes (“Well known for writing about books, bibliophiles, and various aspects of book culture, Nicholas Basbanes has worked as an award-winning investigative reporter, a literary editor, a lecturer, and a nationally syndicated columnist”; the name is apparently pronounced /’bæsbeynz/). Here, Basbanes reports on “Breon Mitchell’s 2,000 dictionaries of exotic languages.”

His interest in lexicons grew out of his interest in linguistics and translation and his work as a professor of Germanic studies and comparative literature at Indiana, a position he still holds in addition to his duties at the Lilly.
“I started out to collect one dictionary for every language in the world, but then it became much more interesting to get the first dictionaries published,” he explained of his purpose. “Then I decided to limit myself to non-European languages and living languages. A further limitation was that I wasn’t going to collect any of the major languages of the world either, regardless of geography, and I would be the one to decide which are the major languages, based on the number of people who are speaking them.” …
“There are some other collections of dictionaries, but they generally focus on a particular language or two. I know of no institution that is specifically building a dictionary collection at all like this one, so there is a definite utility to it.”
Mitchell said that there are more than 6,000 active languages in the world, most of which have no dictionary at all. “The number of languages for which a dictionary exists is probably around 1,000, though it could be as many as 1,500.” …
“I was interested at first in what we might call the exotic languages or rare languages spoken by very few people. But some of these languages we might think of as rare are in fact spoken by millions,” he said, citing the languages of the Indian subcontinent, of native or indigenous populations of the Western hemisphere, and of African regions as examples. “There are more than 800 different languages in Papua New Guinea alone, which is the only country in the world, by the way, in which pidgin English is an official language.”Thus, Mitchell admits another category to his shelves: pidgin and Creole languages. …
Mitchell’s copy of an 1861 Zulu–English dictionary of 10,000 entries contains numerous annotations and corrections inserted by the book’s former owner, A. N. Montgomery, an author of books related to South African history. Mitchell’s copy of the 1878 revised edition of the dictionary is annotated and signed by the black African printer.
“I also collect gypsy languages and Inuit languages,” Mitchell said. “I have a very early Eskimo dictionary—a Latin–Greenlandic–Eskimo dictionary, printed in 1804 in Copenhagen.” He has Australian aboriginal dictionaries and a dictionary of Tokelauan, the language used by native peoples in New Zealand, American Samoa, and other Pacific islands. Another dictionary, of Rapa Nui, is the “first two-way dictionary of the language of Easter Island.” Yet another: a copy of the “first and only dictionary” of Nyoro, a Bantu language spoken by more than 500,000 people living east of Lake Albert in Uganda.
Mitchell estimates his holdings of Native American dictionaries at more than 125 languages, including one, of the Otchipwe language, acquired at Sotheby’s in the Frank T. Seibert sale in 1999 for $4,312.50, the most he has spent for any book in the collection. “With the help of the Internet, I was able to collect broadly around the world and assemble a really fine collection within about two years for very little money,” he said. He also noted that he has used all other conventional methods as well, including the development of good relationships with booksellers and the prowling of junk shops and antique stores.

I would love to spend some time exploring his collection, but I’m happy just knowing it exists.

The good people at Oxford UP sent me a review copy of The Oxford History of English Lexicography; they must have been pretty confident I’d like it, because it’s an expensive two-volume set, and their confidence was not misplaced. This is the best reference history I’ve read in a long time, and I feel confident in saying that if you love dictionaries, you need to set some time aside for reading it (assuming you can convince your library to spring for a copy).

OUP’s description says:

Part one of Volume I explores the early development of glosses and bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and examines their influence on lexicographical methods and ideas. Part two presents a systematic history of monolingual dictionaries of English and includes extensive chapters on Johnson, Webster and his successors in the USA, and the OED. It also contains descriptions of the development of dictionaries of national and regional varieties, and of Old and Middle English, and concludes with an account of the computerization of the OED.

The specialized dictionaries described in Volume II include dictionaries of science, dialects, synonyms, etymology, pronunciation, slang and cant, quotations, phraseology, and personal and place names. This volume also includes an account of the inception and development of dictionaries developed for particular users, especially foreign learners of English.

That gives you an idea of the contents, but the only way to show you its excellences is to quote extensively, which I shall do. (I will doubtless be posting further about the book, because I haven’t even finished the first volume yet.)

From the first chapter, Hans Sauer on medieval glosses and glossaries, we learn that “The first author who named his (Latin) compilation Dictionarius was apparently John of Garland (c.1195-c.1272), but this title was slow to catch on. The large and popular Latin dictionaries from the Middle Ages have titles such as Elementarium (i.e. for beginners), Derivationes (i.e. assembling word-families), Catholicon (i.e. a comprehensive collection), Medulla (i.e. the quintessence), etc. … The term ‘dictionary’ came to be used more frequently in the course of the seventeenth century.” Later he tells us that Johannes Balbus of Genoa was “the first lexicographer to achieve complete alphabetization (from the first to the last letter of each word).” Among the delightful trivia Sauer mentions are the “rare Latin lemma… bradigabo (badrigabo) in Épinal-Erfurt 131, the meaning of which is unknown; it was glossed as felduuop (Ép) / felduus (Erf), the meaning of which is also unknown,” and “the so-called ‘Tremulous Hand of Worcester'”:

In the first half of the thirteenth century, a monk at Worcester with shaky handwriting entered about 50,000 glosses in about twenty OE manuscripts, partly in early Middle English, but mostly in Latin. Apparently, even in the early thirteenth century, English had changed so much that Old English could no longer be readily understood and had to be explained. Why the Tremulous Hand took such pains to do this is, however, not quite clear.

From Donna M.T.Cr. Farina and George Durman’s chapter on bilingual dictionaries of English and Russian (yes, there’s an entire chapter on bilingual dictionaries of English and Russian!), we find that “The first English translations from Russian began to appear in the sixteenth century. By contrast, the first Russian translation from English, a geometry textbook, did not appear until 1625… The first English grammar to appear in Russian (1766) was published seventy years after the first Russian grammar was printed in England.” The first Russian lexicographer of English was Prokhor Zhdanov (Прохор Жданов), who in 1772 published a bilingual dictionary as an appendix to an English grammar he translated into Russian, and in 1784 published A New Dictionary English and Russian: Novoĭ slovarʹ Angliskoĭ i Rossīĭskoĭ—which can be perused at Google Books! In discussing the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Farina and Durman say:

The number of English teachers, governesses, and nannies increased; this is recorded in memoirs and travelogues published in Russian and in England, as well as in Russian literature. English merchants in Russia were numerous as well. Nikolai Karamzin (1792) tells how in London he encountered a group of English merchants who had gathered to speak Russian in the coffee house of the stock morket; it turned out that they had lived and done business in Saint Petersburg.

They provide detailed comparisons of the entries on particular words in a number of dictionaries (“A comparison of related entries in Grammatin, Banks, and Alexandrov (Table 6.3.3) demonstrates how the Alexandrov dictionary indicates a word’s ‘shades of meaning'”).

In N.E. Osselton’s chapter on “The Early Development of the English Monoligual Dictionary,” we find that Thomas Blount was “the first English compiler to provide etymologies for all (or nearly all) of the words entered,” and JK’s A New English Dictionary (1702) “established once and for all the practice of including the everyday vocabulary of English alongside ‘harder’ words: his letter D begins with a dab, a dab-chick, a dab-fish, to dabble, a dace, and a daffodell, and at the word girl he starts with the common meaning (‘A Girl, or wench’).” Nathan Bailey, in his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721), “devotes much attention to etymology, but he recognizes that this might put off readers with no knowledge of languages, and explains that the etymological information on each word has been put within square brackets ‘that they may pass it over without any manner of Trouble or Inconvenience’.” Benjamin Martin in 1749 developed the “useful new lexicographical device… of putting unassimilated foreign words such as legerdemain and pronto into italics.” It’s fascinating to me to watch the features of dictionaries that we take for granted come into existence over the centuries. Having taken us through the early 18th century, Osselton ends on this cliffhanger:

In one way or another, the works of the early lexicographers thus came to incorporate much of what we should expect to find in monolingual English dictionaries today. But pronunciation (beyond mere word-stress), the meaning of compound nouns, set collocations, phrasal verbs, particles, abbreviations, idiomatic expressions (other than proverbs), irregular plurals, all kinds of grammatical information—anything like a systematic coverage of these was to be for future generations of dictionary-makers.

I’ve barely scratched the surface, but further tidbits will have to await future entries [2, 3]. I think I’ve given enough material to suggest why I love this book so much that I’ve had to force myself to set it aside to do the editing by which I earn my bread. The book even smells good—not a minor consideration for me! This is a true triumph of scholarship and another feather in the cap for Oxford (I’m very much looking forward to the chapters on the OED).

I wasn’t planning to write about the minor contretemps caused by Secretary of State Clinton’s gag gift to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, of a red plastic button with the English word reset and an alleged Russian translation that turned out to be wrong; I figure everyone’s heard about it by now, and really, what is there to say other than “oops”? As Geoff Pullum says in his Language Log post, “peregruzka doesn’t mean ‘reset’… The word they were supposed to have printed on the device was ‘perezagruzka’.”
What prompted me to write was seeing the actual button at Anatoly’s post about it. It doesn’t say ПЕРЕГРУЗКА on the button, it says PEREGRUZKA. I wasn’t outraged about the mistranslation, since perezagruzka is a new term and isn’t in the dictionaries and I could understand how the mistake might have come about, but using Roman letters instead of Cyrillic? What the hell, people? Didn’t anyone realize they use a different alphabet over there?

Zipping through wood s lot, trying to get through my blogroll so I can set to work on my editing job, I was stopped in my tracks by this:

Bruno Schulz

Sergei Kruglov
Tr. Vitaly Chernetsky

The sun outside the window, a redhead lilith
Laughing, devoured the names of the three angels.
But I’m but a child, and I won’t get scared,
Father! I’ll draw her,
An incantation: pencil, paper.
On a metallic branch outside the window sits that Stymphalian bird
The spring of 1942
Filled with melancholy yearning, begging for flesh

You know, father, if God really is
A rabbi from Drohobycz — then we are done for!
But if He is just G-d,
With the bleeding meaty emptiness of “o” (as if
They tore out, clinging tightly with crooked fingers
Eight pages right from the very middle
Of the dense, piquant, quivering moist-rose-like
Book) — then
It’s all right, perhaps we’ll somehow come back to life.

Sometimes I get a strong sense from a translation that I’ll like the poet in the original, so I googled around and found the original, which I did indeed like (it’s below the cut if you read Russian—I got it from here). There’s more of Kates’s Kruglov here; it’s part of a section of Jacket devoted to “New Russian Poetry.” It’s always good to discover a new poet.
[Read more…]

An acquaintance asked me whether a form of semicolon deployment that occurs throughout an academic work from the UK, using semicolons where an American text would use em-dashes, is a UK publishing standard or just bad punctuation. Here’s a sample sentence (rewritten to remove identifiers):

His achievement in the book is to make the issue relevant; to bring the debate through a variety of discourses and transform the texts available to him into a poem whose scope encompasses every aspect of governance.

I responded that, as someone used to US standards, I didn’t like it, but I had no idea whether it was OK in the UK. Then it occurred to me that I probably have readers who know, so I thought I’d ask: if you’re used to reading British academic prose, does that semicolon work for you?

Archibald MacLeish famously ended his 1926 “Ars Poetica” with “A poem should not mean/ But be.” I learn from Peter Howarth in the LRB that Robert Frost put a nasty spin on this in a notebook entry: “A poem shouldn’t mean, it should be mean.” So much for the grandfatherly figure maundering about roads not taken, so beloved of careless skimmers of anthologies.

Jeffrey H. Gray’s essay “Poets’ Puffery” is a standard-issue grouse about the hyping of everything that gets published as “one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry” and the like (hey, no man cries “stinking fish”), but it has a nice excursus on disparaging references to earlier poets, irrelevant to his point but entertaining:

Nathaniel Evans (18th century) is “noted by most historians as a ‘fledgling versifier’ whose occasional verses were wholly ‘unremarkable.'” Elizabeth Akers Allen (19th century) “was considered a minor Victorian poet even by her contemporaries.” Her sentiments were “expressed competently, but with no attempt at innovation in style or content.” William Byrd’s (18th-century) “contribution to poetry is not at all significant.” Indeed, “he published merely a few short, uninteresting poems.”

In our present-day culture of inflation, such humble assessments are appealing. Faint praise is sometimes appropriate. Charles Henry Phelps’s “Love-Song” (1892), a political overture to Canada, makes a poor bid for immortality:

Why should we longer thus be vexed?
Consent, coy one, to be annexed.

But even William Cullen Bryant, surely a bright star of 19th-century poetry — the prodigy who, at 17, wrote “Thanatopsis” — is treated with disdain: “By the end of the 20th century, most critics pronounced him ‘minor’ when they took note of him at all.”

My own favorite entry, on Gertrude Bloede (19th century), sums up a poet’s bad dream of posterity: “Interest in her work, always limited, declined after her death.”

You can actually see a portrait of poor Gertrude here, along with a brief biographical sketch; she looks like she wouldn’t be a bit surprised by her posthumous reputation, or lack thereof. (Thanks, Paul!)

[Read more…]

I was scanning wood s lot when I hit on a link headlined “Inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias…” It was the work of a moment to discover that this was from Livy’s preface to his history of Rome and that it meant (as translated in this essay on the value of Latin) “From it [i.e., history] you can find examples for yourself and your country to follow,” but the word imitere threw me. It looks like an infinitive of the second or third conjugation, but the verb is a first-conjugation deponent: imitor, imitārī. My days as a Latin student are far, far behind me, and I became increasingly confused and hopeless as I pored over tables of conjugations. Fortunately I found William L. Carey’s Livy site for his Latin students, where each assigned passage has a pdf file, with a separate one for grammatical commentary. And his commentary is aimed at my level of neediness, because the one for this passage (pdf) says:

imitere = imiteris, present subjunctive of imitor, -ari, -atus sum, to imitate, copy. All verbs in –ris (i.e., the 2nd person singular of the present, imperfect, and future tenses of deponents and the passive voice of other verbs) are often syncopated to –re.

So it’s not an infinitive ‘to imitate,’ it’s second person singular subjunctive ‘that you should imitate’ (actually imitēre/imitēris, with long e). Thank you, Mr. Carey, and thank you, O great internet!

Martin Langeveld, an occasional LH commenter, has started a blog for papers presented at the Monday Evening Club of Pittsfield, Massachusetts (where I lived for a couple of years before moving east to Hadley), and his essay “Why we don’t all speak Dutch: Language extinction and language survival” has now been posted. He starts off talking about the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the odd persistence of their language:

The Dutch lost control of their colony in 1664, when the English took over, without firing a shot, during one of the periodic Anglo-Dutch wars of that century. However, the Dutch did not go away after the English takeover, nor did their culture fade away. In fact, despite the fact that only a tiny minority of immigrants to the New York region after 1664 came from the Netherlands, the Dutch language continued to be widely spoken in the New York region for over 200 years. Not until 1764 was English used to preach in New York’s Dutch Reformed churches. President Martin Van Buren (born in 1782 not far from here in Kinderhook and elected in 1836) spoke Dutch at home with his wife. The first 20th century president, Theodore Roosevelt, grew up hearing his grandparents speak Dutch at the dinner table in New York City in the 1860s. Sojourner Truth, the anti-slavery orator and associate of Frederick Douglass, was born as a slave in Ulster County, New York about 1797, and grew up speaking nothing but Dutch until she was eleven years old. Dutch was spoken in parts of Brooklyn into the mid 1800s and is quite likely the origin of the so-called Brooklyn accent.
Closer to the present, the Jackson Whites, a clan of mixed black, Indian and Dutch heritage still live in the Ramapo Hills of New Jersey. They spoke a bastardized form of Dutch, which still had some 200 speakers in 1910. This Jersey Dutch died out sometime between the 1920s and 1950s, although some Dutch-derived expressions apparently survive among their elders. Researchers in 1910 as well as in recent years found that some of them still knew a nursery rhyme called Trippe Trappe Troontjes, which was also mentioned by Teddy Roosevelt as the one piece of Dutch he remembered learnning from his grandmother; and on one of his African trips Roosevelt discovered that it was also known by the South African boers who had carried it there from Holland 300 years before.
In the early 20th century, Dutch researchers found other surviving pockets of Dutch descended directly from that of the colonial settlers of New Amsterdam, in the Hudson Valley as far north as Schenectady. I have found at least anecdotal evidence of families in the Catskills who spoke Dutch on a daily basis into the 1940s or 50s. So the language survived nearly three full centuries after the end of Dutch influence in North America. And who knows, it seems quite likely that somewhere in New York or New Jersey, there still lives a geezer or two who learned, on their mother’s knee, a smattering of that colonial Dutch.
Although it eventually died out, the survival of Dutch over such long time against all odds raises some interesting questions. Why did Dutch hang on, when the languages of other immigrants, like the Germans, Italians and Poles, typically disappear within a generation or two?

He discusses the issue in the light of the linguistic situation of Papua New Guinea; in the process he remarks that “as a child I also learned a Dutch dialect that is virtually extinct today. Official Dutch is really an artificial amalgam, codified in the 19th century, that bridges most of the dialects spoken in the Netherlands and Flemish Belgium. The dialect I learned is virtually useless outside the old-age homes on the island of Texel, and Dutch itself is a language that’s pretty useless outside of the Netherlands.” Much food for thought there.