Archives for August 2009

When asked, What is an intellectual? he said: ‘An intellectual is a participant in his own society, listening to people. That kind of truth cannot be put anywhere by us, not in words, never put in its place. The human mind can apprehend, not comprehend.’

Our native language shapes us, does it not
even as it shapes itself upon the page?
The languages you’ve learned, in life and college,
carve and emboss characters in your thought?

      Hebrew’s ornate iron, its quirks around the line
      (vocal or consonant) in you have wrought
      the odd intransigent openness — and untaught
      much we grew up to mimic — or disdain.

Myopic, skeptical, sometimes distraught,
slowly your readers see themselves as foreign,
trotting for safety through our little warren
of walled ways. Now, perilously, we’re out

in a big world of foreigners, finding that they are not!
Ink on white paper keeps informing those
who learn, to listen long, until there glows
within the friendly signs of being understood.

      Urdu’s visual/inner shapes I’ve not
      seen on the page to see in you. I know
      Persian and Arabic’s fluid music though
      (to the eye); which to your nature also brought

a spare poetry. Such surprises dot
and wink away through universal
(meticulously measurable)
spaces, and what’s been sought
within shines there, articulate, through the night.

  Margaret Avison
From Always Now: Volume Three.

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Ben Zimmer, linguist, lexicographer, and executive producer of Visual Thesaurus, has posted his interview with me, which I think came out pretty well. On Thursday he’ll be posting my introduction to the U.S. edition, which was omitted from the first printing, so anyone who bought the book will be able to enjoy it then!

Oh, and while I’m on a self-promotion binge, here‘s a nice write-up by Diana Page Jordan. Everybody has their own favorite insult from the book; hers is “an affectionate term Icelandic moms have for their children — rassgat (RAHS-gat) — litla rassgati mitt. It means my little asshole.”

The Permanent Committee on Geographical Names of the British government has a number of documents listed on its website, many of which are available online as pdf files; I’m looking forward to delving into “Algeria: Language and Toponymy. How politically driven language policies have impeded toponymic progress” (November 2003), “Language Evolution in Bosnia” (August 2006), and “Iran: Religion, Nationalism and Toponymy: The complex ongoing interconnections between Persian and Arabic” (June 2003), among others. But the one I want to focus on now is “An Introduction to the Toponymy of Burma” (October 2007; pdf, Google cache). It starts with an “Outline of Post-Independence History” and a description of the various ethnic groups, then continues to the languages:

The situation is in fact greatly complex, as is suggested by a linguistic survey begun in 1917, which identified 242 languages and dialects before it was abandoned as being beyond the capacity and resources of the administration to accomplish. About three-quarters of the population of Burma, that is to say some 40 million people, speak one of the Tibeto-Burman languages. These are mostly Burmans who speak Burmese, almost the only language spoken in much of the central plains. Native Burmans seldom speak any indigenous language other than Burmese, but many educated non-Burmans do speak Burmese as a second language, so Burmese can serve as a medium of communication away from the central plains also. Burmese exists in both a literary/ceremonial and in a colloquial form, the language itself being known as myanma (h)batha in the former but generally as bama (h)batha in the latter. This important distinction between myanma and bama is encountered again in the debate over the country name itself…
[The ruling SLORC in May 1989 established the Commission of Inquiry into the True Naming of Myanmar:] The effect of this committee’s work on toponyms within Burma is dealt with elsewhere in this paper (Section E). But the most internationally visible result of their work concerned the country name itself [changing “Burma” to “Myanmar”]. The claim behind this move was that words deriving from the noun “Burma” could only properly relate to the Burman ethnic group. In order properly to encompass the entire spectrum of ethnic groups within the country, the word “Myanmar” should be used. This argument is still used today by the SPDC authorities. However, the crucial element of this clause is to be found in the words “laws enacted in the English language”. Law 15/89 was openly directed at the English language specifically. It had no effect whatsoever on the Burmese language where, as has been noted at the end of paragraph 9 above, the word employed continued to be myanma in literary/ceremonial form and bama in colloquial form. And the law effectively disadvantaged non-Burman ethnic groups, who had become accustomed to forms of “Burma” denoting the whole country, but to whom myanma and its derivatives were totally alien words which were redolent only of the language of the dominant ethnic group.

Nice to see a government committee put things so plainly and straightforwardly. After that come sections on Toponyms within Burma, Population and Related Information, First- and Second-Order Administrative Divisions, and Name and Spelling Changes in Burma. And at the end is a nice map showing the major rivers and cities (including the new capital, Nay Pyi Taw). Well done, PCGN!

I started reading War and Peace in Russian a little over a year ago, and Saturday I finally finished it. (I took quite a bit of time off between the four parts, or I would have finished sooner.) Like Proust, the man needed an iron-willed editor. Actually, an apter comparison would be with Beckwith, since in each case the book is damaged at the end by a long, largely irrelevant, amateurish section that should have been omitted. But let me start with the good stuff.

I’ve read it twice in English (in college and in the mid-’90s) and now in Russian, and each time the characters come to life in the same mysterious way. How does Tolstoy do it? From the protagonists to the minor walk-ons, they have the unruly undeniability of actual people, and the reader gets sucked into their messy lives no matter how many postmodern deconstructions of narrative he or she may have absorbed. I get mad at Prince Andrei with the same sort of exasperated affection I direct at my own brothers, not with the distanced feeling of irritation I experience with, say, Proust’s Marcel. I want good things to happen for Pierre and Natasha much more than I do for any characters in Hemingway. It’s a great gift, that ability to infuse life.

And he certainly doesn’t do it with fancy prose. There’s nothing in Tolstoy as gorgeous as, say, this bit from Goncharov’s 1849 «Сон Обломова» (“Oblomov’s Dream,” which became the ninth chapter of the novel when it was published a decade later): “Но лето, лето особенно упоительно в том краю. Там надо искать свежего, сухого воздуха, напоенного — не лимоном и не лавром, а просто запахом полыни, сосны и черемухи; там искать ясных дней, слегка жгучих, но не палящих лучей солнца и почти в течение трех месяцев безоблачного неба. Как пойдут ясные дни, то и длятся недели три-четыре; и вечер тепел там, и ночь душна.” (‘But summer, summer is especially intoxicating in those parts. It is there that you must seek fresh, dry air, filled — not with lemon or laurel, but simply with the smell of polýn’ [I’m not sure if it means ‘wormwood’ or ‘mugwort’ here], pine, and bird cherry; there seek clear days, lightly burning but not scorching rays of the sun, and almost three months of cloudless sky. When the clear days come, they last for three or four weeks; and the evening is warm there, and the night sultry.’) To read that in Russian is to want to read it aloud, and to read it aloud is to want to memorize it. Tolstoy doesn’t work that way; his prose can be very effective (see my discussion here), but basically it’s workmanlike and often clunky. No, he’s not a prosateur but a storyteller, and storytelling is a gift, perhaps an unanalyzable one.

I’ll go on to talk about the end of the novel, so if you want to avoid spoilers (who will die and who will live? and who will turn out to be a false embodiment of the motive force of history?), don’t proceed below the cut.

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I’m on the very last chapter of War and Peace, almost finished marching through the (extremely tedious and annoying) Second Appendix, and I’ve been held up (or, if you will, have seized the opportunity to take a break) as a result of running into the name Иисус Навин [Iisús Návin], which is how Russians refer to Joshua. I’ve known his Russian name for a long time, and I’ve known that they have to use his patronymic to distinguish him from Jesus Christ because in Russian, unlike in Western European languages, there is no differentiation between Joshua (Yehoshua) and Jesus (Yeshua, a shortened form of Yehoshua)—they’re both Iisús. What I had not given much thought to was why his patronymic is Навин rather than Нун [Nun], which according to tradition is the name of his father. I decided to investigate, and was coming up empty when I happened on a page called “Имя Иисуса Навина в традиционной экзегетике” (Word doc, Google cache), which says in a parenthetical aside that “Наве” [Nave] and “Навин” [Navin] are used instead of “Нун” [Nun] “благодаря ошибке переписчиков первых манускриптов” [‘thanks to a mistake by copyists of the first manuscripts’]. Does anybody know the background of this mistake and why it persisted in the Orthodox tradition? While I wait for enlightenment, I’ll go finish the book.

(N.b.: My next post, either later today or tomorrow, will be a summing up of my reaction to War and Peace, so if you could hold off on your responses to my irritation with the appendix—which I will go into in detail—until then and focus for the moment on Navin/Nun, plus of course the usual derails, I will be grateful.)

Update. The summing-up post from the next day.

Some things are silly and useless, and yet irresistible. Such is the case with Translation Party. There’s a good description at TechCrunch:

The site is incredibly simple: you enter any English phrase you can think of, and it uses Google’s automated translator to convert it into Japanese. And then it translates it back into English. And back into Japanese. At each step along the way, the words you began with gradually take shape to form something entirely different and (hopefully) awesome. The retranslations continue until you reach what the site calls ‘equilibrium’, when the English and Japanese words translate back and forth into exactly the same thing. Fortunately, it usually takes at least a few steps for your words to reach equilibrium, and the resulting sentences are often hilarious.

TechCrunch gives the example of “May the Force be with you,” which reaches equilibrium with “October 5 power, to please”; you can find many more examples at MetaFilter, whose snarky and obsessive denizens are a perfect audience for this.

Exciting news for writing-system aficionados: the Yonhap News Agency reports that “A minority tribe in Indonesia has chosen to use Hangeul as its official writing system, in the first case of the Korean alphabet being used by a foreign society.” The tribe in question is on the island of Buton, in or around the city of Bau-Bau (which the Yonhap story gives as “Bauer and Bauer”); a Korea Herald story specifies the language as “Jjia jjia,” which would suggest that it’s Ethnologue’s Cia-Cia (population 79,000, alternate names Boetoneezen, Buton, Butonese, Butung, South Buton, Southern Butung). As Victor Mair at the Log says, “That’s one small step for [an] alphabet, one giant leap for the Korean people [and their economy].”

On their website, the Village Hat Shop of San Diego has a nice page of hat-related idioms, from “talking through your hat” to “go s**t in your hat” (as they decorously spell it). The write-ups are enjoyable (for “at the drop of a hat” they say “Fast. [Dropping a hat, can be a way in which a race can start (instead of a starting gun for example). Also, a hat is an apparel item that can easily become dislodged from its wearer. Anyone who wears hats regularly has experienced the quickness by which a hat can fly off your head.]”), and they include a couple of translations of foreign idioms (“my hat instead of myself” is “an expression from Ecuador, home of the ‘Panama’ hat. It means what is says; it is preferable to give up your hat than your life”), but you shouldn’t pay much attention to the attempts to provide origin stories: “as tight as Dick’s hatband” has always been dear to my heart, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with Richard Cromwell. (“Dick’s hatband” is an 18th-century phrase for “anything makeshift,” in the words of the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, which adds “The identity of Dick is not known — ‘some local character or half-wit’ [OED] — but his hatband was presumably an improvised and absurd object.”)

Thanks for the link, Robin!

I just discovered that there is an adjective azygos, meaning “not being one of a pair : single <an azygos vein>” (per M-W). No, not “azygous” (which is an alternate spelling), azygos. Very weird; does anybody know how such a perverse word came to be? I mean, English adjectives just don’t end in -os.

I found this word via Memidex, an interesting “free online dictionary/thesaurus”; the About page says “The original Memidex database was derived from the high-quality WordNet database developed by Princeton University, and used by Google and others. Several features have been added or exposed, and tens of thousands of additions and corrections have been applied to the initial database.” It’s published by Serge Bohdjalian, who was good enough to send me the link to his site.

Mark Liberman at the Log has a post on Ben Schott’s NY Times op-ed piece “Twittergraphy,” which features telegraphic code books and has an image from the third edition of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code (1891); Mark links to the Google Books version of the book and looks for the words “language” and “hat,” which turn out to be code for “Do not leave” and “If you can help” respectively. In the comment thread, Nick Lamb says that if someone does the requisite ASCII formatting, he will be “quite happy to knock together a web site where visitors can enter words or sequences thereof and get them translated.”
Incidentally, I seem to have forgotten my own blogiversary the other day. Languagehat opened its doors for business on July 31, 2002; it’s hard to believe it’s been so long, but I figure if I can last seven years, I can keep going indefinitely, as long as you folks keep providing feedback. Some valued contributors have fallen away over the years, so don’t leave if you can help!