Archives for December 2010

Researchers at the World Oral Literature Project have compiled a database of language endangerment, described in a Cambridge press release:

An open database of endangered languages has been launched by researchers in the hope of creating a free, online portal that will give people access to the world’s disappearing spoken traditions. …
It includes records for 3,524 world languages, from those deemed “vulnerable”, to those that, like Latin, remain well understood but are effectively moribund or extinct.
Researchers hope that the pilot database will enable them to “crowd-source” information from all over the world about both the languages themselves and the stories, songs, myths, folklore and other traditions that they convey.
Users can search by the number of speakers, level of endangerment, region or country. … Of the 3,524 languages listed, about 150 are in an extremely critical condition. In many of these cases, the number of known living speakers has fallen to single figures, or even just one.

Here‘s a Telegraph story about it by Andy Bloxham, and here‘s a column by Dr. Mark Turin, director of the project, who says:

[Read more…]

Nicholas Ostler is one of LH’s favorite authors of language books; I enthused about his Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World in this post and about his Ad Infinitum in this one. Now Walker, the publisher, has sent me his latest, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel, and I’m enjoying it just as much. If you’re still looking for a Christmas gift for a language lover (who might be yourself), add it to your list.

I should start by pointing out that the Big Idea of the book—the question of whether English will continue to dominate the world as it does now and if not, what will replace it—is not of great interest to me. I mean, I’m curious, of course, just as I am about how the world will end, but we’ll find out about each when the time arrives, and in the meantime, speculation is basically navel-gazing. It’s great for late-night bull sessions, but is not to be taken seriously, any more than the many “Iran [or other Currently Prominent Phenomenon]: Threat or Menace?” op-eds that fill the broadsheets. Fortunately, Ostler is incapable of writing an extended op-ed; his interest, like mine, is in the details… or, as Deborah Cameron puts it from the other side of the fence in her review in The Guardian: “The Last Lingua Franca is not the easiest of reads: Ostler does not have the populariser’s gift for uncluttered storytelling, and is apt to pile up details without much regard for what the non-specialist either needs to know or is capable of retaining.” Different strokes, as they say. So let’s get to the details.

Ostler starts by distinguishing the use of languages, and English in particular, as native tongues from their use as lingua francas (or, as he irritatingly insists on spelling it, “lingua-francas”—punctuation is not his strong suit). This is an important distinction that is not often taken as seriously as Ostler takes it, and one of the things he does throughout the book is hammer home the implications in various situations. In the Preface he writes, “But when English is seen as a lingua franca [N.b.: he’s also not consistent], it becomes possible to compare it with many languages that had this function to a greater or lesser extent in the past. What forces spread them, and how did they fare in the long term?” This (to me) is the meat of the book and the most interesting part, especially the chapters on Persian, though of course others will skim it in hopes of getting an answer about the future of English. He then goes on to look at “language politics in the modern world” and try to figure out where things are going from here.

Since what delights me about Ostler’s books are the piquant and unpredictable details, let me cite a few of them here. On page 11, in discussing the language policies of Malaysia, he quotes a Malay sentence: “Bahasa jiwa bangsa, as they liked to claim: ‘Language is the soul of the nation’.” It’s always nice to get a sentence in the local language, but the great thing is the footnote: “This is a simple sentence in Malay, but all its words are derived from Sanskrit: bhāṣā jīvanam vaṃśaḥ ‘speech-life-stock’. This reflects the influence of Indian traders and adventurers in the early first millennium AD. Malay’s roots are ancient, but they are not purely indigenous.” He can’t resist that sort of sidelight, and neither can I.
On page 40, a footnote to a discussion of the divergence of Nahuatl dialects into different languages after Spanish was made the only official language in 1770 gives some striking examples: “‘He is not at home’ is expressed as x-aak in Guerrero, amo-hka in Tezcoco, am-iga in Morelos, amo yetok in Puebla Sierra, and mach nikaan kah in Vera Cruz. In Classical Nahuatl, this would have been expressed as amo i-chaan-ko (kah), literally ‘not his-home-at (is)’.” (However, he doesn’t actually call them different languages, saying rather “at least nineteen quite different forms, according to systematic tests of mutual intelligibility” and adding, “Some doubt whether [such tests] should be followed in total oblivion of Nahuatl’s common cultural past”; he takes the same, to me reprehensibly unscientific, squishy approach to the question of whether Chinese and Arabic are one language or many. Politicians have to let politics bend their view of reality, but it’s a sad business when non-politicians do the same thing.)

On page 49 he casually mentions Russenorsk, “used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among Russian and Norwegian traders on the arctic shores of Siberia”; I had never heard of it, and it’s so obscure there’s only one sentence on it in the Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, but it turns out somebody’s written a nice little Wikipedia article on it, with bibliography. And on page 98 he tosses in a reference to the Tajik family name Shansabani, “which seems to be derived (consider the consonants!) from the Pahlavi name Wišnasb“: hey, cool!

But even better are the careful explanations of difficult or unexpected situations. On page 86, for example, he quotes Ibn al-Muqaffa’ as distinguishing “five languages (besides Arabic) in Iran,” of which three are varieties of Persian: Pahlavi is said to be “the language of Isfahan, Hamadan, Nehavand, and Azerbaijan,” Dari “of the court … but also of the Sassanian capital city (Ctesiphon, on the Tigris), ‘though in Khorasan … the best Dari is heard in Balkh,” and Parsi “the language of Fars … but also of the mowhed Zoroastrian priests.” He says this tripartite division “is somewhat confusing since the accepted analysis of historical Persian only distinguished two (similar) main dialects over the preceding millennium: viz, Median (later, Parthian) in the northeast, and Old Persian (later, Pārsīg or Middle Persian) in the southwest. … But Gilbert Lazard (1993) has quite convincingly [explained that Parsi] is understood as traditional Persian…, Pahlavī had originally meant ‘Parthian’, and this may be what it means here, since the cities are about right for ancient Media…. Meanwhile, Darī refers in effect to New Persian: despite its title, this is the new, predominantly colloquial, version of the language, coming through in the capital but also out to the east.”

And his explanation of how Elamite was used by Persians after they had conquered Elam (now Khuzistan) was a real eye-opener for me. I had known they used it officially for proclamations and such, but I was thinking of it as comparable to the Romans using Greek, or everybody in nineteenth-century Europe using French—languages they themselves knew. Not so: “Persians indeed early made a virtue of illiteracy…. When a Persian needed to send written communication or to store records, it was done for him in Elamite, this being the beginning of alloglottography (writing down Persian by the use of some other language), which was to continue in Persia … for the next millennium… This did not mean that Elamite was widely learned, or even heard, by Persians. Rather Elamite-Persian bilinguals would be employed to use their writing skills, protecting their employers from the disconcerting experience of an unknown language by routinely translating the texts on request into, or out of, spoken Persian.”

Well, I could go on, but you probably have a sense by now of whether you’d like the book. If you want to know the future of English, you’ll have to read it—no spoilers here! Me, I think it’s a blast, and I look forward to Ostler’s next excursion into the multifarious history of the world’s languages.

Erin McKean recently pointed out a wonderful entry in her Wordnik site: queez-madam, listed only in the Century Dictionary and defined as “The cuisse-madam, a French jargonelle pear.” [Actually, it’s also in the Funk & Wagnalls unabridged and in the Merriam-Webster New International, 2nd edition. Thanks, Philip!] The locus classicus for the word, and indeed the only place it appears to have been used in English literature, is this remarkable sentence from Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, spoken by Andrew Fairservice: “He’s no a’thegither sae void o’ sense neither; he has a gloaming sight o’ what’s reasonable—that is anes and awa’—a glisk and nae mair; but he’s crack-brained and cockle-headed about his nipperty-tipperty poetry nonsense—He’ll glowr at an auld-warld barkit aik-snag as if it were a queez-maddam in full bearing; and a naked craig, wi’ a bum jawing ower’t, is unto him as a garden garnisht with flowering knots and choice pot-herbs.” I really should dive into Scott one of these days.

A Financial Times story by Christian Oliver and Kang Buseong describes the problems of linguistic integration in Korea:

The North and South Korean languages have grown apart so severely over 65 years of division that both countries have agreed to collaborate on a joint dictionary to stem the growing confusions. North Korea’s language is filled with ideological terminology while South Korean is awash with foreign words.

Thirsty South Koreans happily order a “juice” but North Koreans ask for “danmul” – literally “sweet water” – a word that is greeted in Seoul with either bemusement or derision depending on how forgiving the waitress is. …

[Read more…]

I have been asked about the history of the construction “X much?” as a rhetorical response (e.g., “Bitter much? Overanalyze much? Ad hominem much?”). Unfortunately, this is one of those things that is impossible to google, or even find information on at the Log (putting “much” into the search box seems to bring up half the posts on the site). So I throw myself on the collective knowledge of my readers: is anyone aware of studies of the history of this template, whether online or off?

Further update. The construction has been antedated to 1978! (Hat tip to Josh Millard.) [Updating the link in April 2022, I decided to quote the antedate here; it’s from SNL’s October 7, 1978, episode, with Gilda Radner as Lisa Loopner and Bill Murray as Todd:]

TODD: I really need your help with my history homework.

LISA: Well, Todd, you know if you sincerely need my help, you can count on it.

TODD: Oh, good. Because I’m studying all about [grabs at Lisa’s shirt neck and tries to peek down her shirt] underdeveloped nations!

LISA (shouting and smiling): Cut it out, Todd! Cut it out! [lightly swats him away] Stop it!

TODD (points at Lisa’s chest and mock laughs to a pretend audience): Underdeveloped much?

Yet another update. Josh Millard, aka cortex, has made a MetaTalk post about this, using data from the various subsites of MetaFilter, and linguist iamkimiam made the following interesting comment:

Just at first glance, I’m really in awe at how productive “much” is. It can appear with states, actions, nouns, verbs, in different tenses/aspects, punctuation, and on. It also seems to verb nouns in many instances. It has a pragmatic distancing function as well (separating the speaker from the proposition/topic that they are responding to). In that sense, the “much” tag carries some heavy evaluation. Also, discourse framing.

Update. I have done what I should have done in the first place, namely checked the OED, which just updated the much entry this year and has a section on this use:

colloq. (orig. U.S., freq. ironic). With a preceding adjective, infinitive verb, or noun phrase, forming an elliptical comment or question.
  The use was popularized by the film Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the television series derived from it.
1988 D. Waters Heathers (film script) 15 God Veronica, drool much? His name’s Jason Dean.
1988 D. Waters Heathers (film script) 86 Heather Duke. It was J.D.’s idea! He made out the signature sheet and everything. Now will you sign it. Veronica. (queasy) No. Heather Duke. Jealous much?
1992 J. Whedon Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film script) 8 A stranger, walking the other way, bumps into Buffy, doesn’t stop.‥ Buffy. Excuse much! Not rude or anything.
1992 J. Whedon Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film script) 25 Pike and Benny have entered the diner, quite drunk.‥ Kimberly (to the other girls) Smell of booze much.
1998 M. Burgess & R. Green Isabella in Sopranos (television shooting script) 1st Ser. 1 42 Anthony Jr. Probably I can’t go to that dance now either. Meadow. God, self-involved much?
2001 Cosmopolitan Dec. 178 You’ve seen them: the kinds of couples who finish each other’s sentences.‥ Jealous much? Damn right.

Words without Borders has an interesting interview with Roberto Bui, aka Wu Ming 1, a member of the Wu Ming writing collective, on translating Stephen King into Italian. I can’t say I’m as impressed with King’s style as he is, but I enjoyed his comments on it. I disagree with this point, though:

He plays with all the singularities of the English language, precisely the stuff that can’t be translated in any way! This is typical of, er, “monoglot” writers, by which I mean those writers who don’t care about what happens to their works when they’re translated into other languages.
There are basically two kinds of novelists: those who care about translations, like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, because they’re used to exploring foreign languages, and those who don’t care, like Elmore Leonard or Uncle Stevie, because they’re perfectly happy with inhabiting their native language, with no forays in other cultures and koines.

To conflate people who are “used to exploring foreign languages” with those who “care about translations,” and to imply that the latter don’t “play with all the singularities” of their language, is wrongheaded and insulting to almost everyone. To take two obvious examples, Joyce and Nabokov played with more singularities than most of us can even imagine, but they were also famously “used to exploring foreign languages,” and I find it hard to imagine anyone thinking they didn’t care about translations. It seems obvious to me that writing books and caring about translations are (or should be) two entirely separate activities, and anyone who deliberately restricts their palette when writing out of a concern for their translators is cheating both themselves and their readers. If there are “puns, neologisms, idioms, local slang and so on,” the translator will just have to deal with them however seems best. They do not indicate that the writer is a monoglot, for god’s sake. (Via wood s lot.)

I’ve posted about Jesse Sheidlower, Ben Zimmer, and Erin McKean before (and have links to projects by all three in the sidebar), but I didn’t realize they were all graduates of the University of Chicago, which has a nice online piece by Debra Kamin about them:

Getting people excited about the inner lives of words is the distinctive mission for a trio of University alumni who have become ambassadors of lexicography. Harnessing their Chicago educations in linguistics and English, the three “wordinistas” are putting a public face on modern language studies.[…] All of them are helping to shape perceptions about the importance of language, each with a slightly different bent.

I liked this quote from McKean: “I perverted all of the classes I took at the U. of C. to be about dictionaries in some way. I took feminist theory with Lauren Berlant, and I wrote my paper about the acceptance of ‘Ms.'” (Hat tip to Dave Wilton.)

Don’t miss Matt’s post at No-sword today on “the first Oriental branch of the Baker Street Irregulars, The Baritsu Chapter,” and how the name comes from a mysterious Conan Doyle reference to “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling,” which turns out to be a mangled allusion to a long-forgotten martial art called bartitsu, invented in 1898 by Edward William Barton-Wright, a British engineer who had spent the previous three years living in Japan. A must-read for anyone interested in Japan, Sherlock Holmes, or “the worst excesses of British mustachery.”

I have on more than one occasion had harsh things to say about the translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (e.g., here), but I recommend the half-hour Lapham’s Quarterly podcast available at this page (it’s currently at the top of the left column: “December 1, 2010 Pevear and Volokhonsky Podcast: Episode #6”). They have good things to say about Dostoyevsky’s style and the reasons some people compare him unfavorably to Tolstoy or say his prose is bad, and it’s interesting to hear their voices (what an odd accent Pevear has!) and to learn more about the history of their collaboration (they started out with poetry but have sensibly backed off from it, apart from the Zhivago poems). I also realized, listening to it, one reason for the problems I and others have with them: they are too comfortable with each other. They are clearly each other’s first and most important critics, as is only natural for a married couple, and I’m sure they would merrily add “and sternest!”—but of course that’s not true. They share a sensibility, an attitude toward literature and translation, and by bouncing their work off each other instead of a more objective outsider they never get the kind of painful but salutary criticism that would help them avoid solipsism. Instead, they get such criticism only when it’s too late, after the work is published (and then far too little of it, since for whatever reason most reviewers take them at their own evaluation as the only people ever to do a proper job of translating Russian prose). Note the outrageous statement “It turns out that [people who accuse us of translating too literally] don’t know English!” and Pevear’s comfortable response to a question about his response to reviews: “When they say it’s good, I agree with them!” (Whereupon everyone laughs comfortably.) I couldn’t help but notice also that Pevear calls Dudintsev “DOO-dintsev” rather than stressing it correctly on the second syllable, which confirms his lack of familiarity with the language. [I am informed that either pronunciation would sound normal to a Russian.] (I also noticed that in the process of insulting David Magarshack, both of them pronounced his name “Ma-GAR-shack” rather than , as I have always said, “MAG-ar-shack”; does anybody know which is correct?)
In general, I was impressed with their take on Russian literature (and I liked the fact that with unwonted modesty they said they were reluctant to translate A Hero of Our Time because it would mean competing with Nabokov), but I was disgusted with the smug contempt with which they dismissed other translators. (They were relatively nice to Constance Garnett, but that’s presumably because she’s long dead and so frequently dismissed by others that she’s no threat to their dominance.) In short, nothing surprising, but a good listen. Thanks for the link, Floyd!

Let’s go for a walk at sunset.
We’ll watch the snow blaze,
burn into night.
I’ve been waiting for night
to erase the meadow.
When the pictures are lost,
I can close my eyes,
I can vanish far
into sleep—where shattered
friends are waiting.
Their shaking hands reach
across the snow.
I run after one and cry—
leave me alone. He turns,
stares, opens his mouth
and can’t speak.
The day my father died
I went for a walk.
The cold leaves crashed
onto the lawn and flared.
His eyes flared. Look—
the sky is flaring. That’s it:
we’re finished with day.
At last I can curl
into myself
—as the snow keeps glowing,
those hands are reaching . . .
I heard the whispers: he’s gone,
leave him alone.
I stroked his hand for hours.
I don’t know how to stop.
  —Kathryn Levy

[Read more…]