I mentioned translit.ru in a comment this morning, and michael farris said it should have its own post, so here it is. You just type English letters into the box (abcde) and Russian letters appear (абцде). As you see, c gets you ц, and you can use w to get щ (though shh will also work; it collapses sh, ch, zh, etc. automatically). I’ve used it every day since frequent commenter Tatyana told me about it. Thanks again, Tat!

A passage from Chapter VI of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (pages 196-97 in my edition); Doughty is in the town of al-Ula (“el-Ally,” as he calls it), where his interlocutor pokes fun at the Arabic spoken by the nomadic Bedouins with whom Doughty has been staying, and describes a brutally effective shibboleth:

” These Franks labour, said he, in the Arabic utterance, for they have not a supple tongue : the Arabs’ tongue is running and returning like a wheel, and in the Arabs all parts alike of the mouth and gullet are organs of speech ; but your words are born crippling and fall half-dead out of your mouths. — What think you of this country talk ? have you not laughed at the words of the Beduw ? what is this gòtar (went) — A-ha-ha! — and for the time of day their gowwak (the Lord strengthen thee) and keyf’mûrak (how do thy affairs prosper ?) who ever heard the like ! ” He told this also of the Egyptian speech : a battalion of Ibrahîm Pasha‘s troops had been closed in and disarmed by the redoubtable Druses, in the Léja (which is a lava field of the Hauran). The Druses coming on to cut them in pieces, a certain Damascene soldier among them cried out ” Aha ! neighbours, dakhalakom, grant protection, at least to the Shwâm (Syrians), which are owlàd el-watn, children of the same soil with you ! ” It was answered, ‘They would spare them if they could discern them.’ ‘Let me alone for that, said the Damascene ; — and if they caused the soldiers to pass one by one he could discern them.’ It was granted, and he challenged them thus, ” Ragel (Egyptian for Rajil), O man, say Gamel ! ” every Syrian answered Jemel ; and in this manner he saved his countrymen and the Damascenes.

As lagniappe, here’s a completely useless new word I learned from Doughty (p. 497): “If the thing fall to them for which they vowed, they will go to the one [oak grove] on a certain day in the year to break a crock there ; or they lay up a new stean in a little cave which is under a rock at the other.” Stean, saith the OED, is “A vessel for liquids (or, in later use, for bread, meat, fish, etc.), usually made of clay, with two handles or ears; a jar, pitcher, pot, urn. Now only dial. and arch.” It’s related to stone, and the last two citations are:

1888 DOUGHTY Arabia Deserta I. xvi. 450 If the thing fall to them for which they vowed [at the wishing-place], they will.. lay up a new stean in a little cave.
1908 A. BENNETT Old Wives’ Tale I. iii. 34 In the corner nearest the kitchen was a great steen in which the bread was kept.

Thanks to a MetaFilter post, I have learned that the Foreign Service Institute language courses (for a long time available only as occasional finds in used book stores, where I bought them whenever I saw them) are being put online. So far they have Cantonese, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Standard Chinese, and Turkish; presumably there will be more to come. The text is in pdf files, which is annoying, but they have audio as well, which makes up for it. Well done, Glen D. Fellows et al!

Update (Aug. 2024). The courses are now available here (and, apparently, elsewhere, but that site has a bunch of them and they’re free).

Joe Clark at fawny has a post that starts off discussing the “nonsensical stream-of-delirium lyrics” of a rock song and ends with the question “Has the phenomenon of an appearance of making sense when nonsensical words are uttered in a certain prosody actually been studied?” I imagine it has, but I wouldn’t know; I did, however, greatly enjoy the Eric Idle routine called “Gibberish” that he quotes in extenso. Here’s the beginning:

HOST: Ham sandwich, bucket and water plastic Duralex rubber McFisheries underwear. Plugged rabbit emulsion, zinc custard without sustenance in kippling-duff geriatric scenery, maximizes press insulating government grunting sapphire-clubs incidentally. But tonight, sam pan Bombay Bermuda in diphtheria rustic McAlpine splendor, rabbit and foot-foot-phooey jugs rapidly big biro ruveliners musk-green gauges micturate with nipples and tiptoe rusting machinery, rustically inclined. Good evening and welcome.
GUEST: Hello.

I think I’ll use the line “Machine-wrapped, with butter” in any situation where it seems to apply, which may be more than one would think at first glance.

Remember my joy at finding a copy of a book of pronunciations that originally appeared in a regular column in The Literary Digest over 70 years ago? Well, the BBC is putting pronunciations of names and words in the news on a blog written by its Pronunciation Unit (Martha Figueroa-Clark, Catherine Sangster, and Lena Olausson, named and pictured in the first post). Here‘s an entry on a town name I wasn’t familiar with:

“Today’s pronunciation is for the English town Chester-le-Street.
“Our recommendation, based on the advice of people who live there as well as published sources, is CHEST-uhr-li-street – the first part rhymes with ‘westerly’. Most English placenames with ‘le’ in them are pronounced in this way, rhyming with ‘me’ rather than the French-sounding ‘luh’.”

Thanks to komfo,amonan for the link!

Dedovshchina (дедовщина) is an extreme form of hazing that has been one of the more shameful aspects of the Russian military for decades. Some say it developed during World War Two, when prisoners were taken from penitentiaries straight into the army, others think it was a product of the ’60s, when the term of service was shortened and soldiers started punishing newcomers who had to serve a year less. Whatever the origin, it seems impossible to eradicate, despite horror stories like that of Andrei Sychev (see-CHOFF); Sunday’s NY Times had a story by Steven Lee Myers describing the situation, with depressing quotes like “By the military’s own count, disputed as conservative, 16 soldiers were killed by dedovshchina last year, while an additional 276 committed suicide” and (from the minister of defense) “I think nothing serious happened… Otherwise, I would have certainly known about it.”

However, none of this is Languagehat-related. This, from the sixth paragraph of the story, is:

The trial, however, has cast doubt on the military’s prosecution and showed how deeply rooted dedovshchina (pronounced de-DOV-she-na) remains in Russia’s barracks, still largely filled with conscripts despite overwhelming opposition to the draft.

The parenthetical information I have put in bold is wrong [or at least inadequate]. The simplification of shch to sh is reasonable anglicization, but the damn stress is on the wrong damn syllable: it’s di-duhf-SHCHEE-nuh [in standard Russian]. The accent is indicated at the Russian Wikipedia article from which I drew my information about the history of the practice. Now, I don’t expect Times reporters, editors, and proofreaders to know Russian, but is it asking too much that they check with a Russian before embarrassing themselves with an incorrect pronunciation? If you’re not going to bother finding out the facts, at least don’t make something up.

(It may be, of course, that there is an alternate pronunciation, in which case I’m sure one of my Russian-speaking readers will so inform me.)

Update. In the comments, the estimable mab informs me that there is indeed an alternate pronunciation, which was presumably used by whoever the Times consulted. Sorry, Times: my outrage was excessive. But if you didn’t deserve it today, you’ll deserve it tomorrow, as the parent told the naughty child.

Renee of Glosses.net has been preoccupied lately by having a baby; having accomplished that (mazel tov!), she’s now wondering how many languages might be too many. She writes in her LJ:

The kid calms down beautifully to Fáfnismál. The moment I sing the opening lines, he stops crying, listens attentively, and eventually dozes off or settles to eat… Oren and my mom beg me not to confuse the child with Old Norse. It is true that as a potential trilingual he has enough on his plate. I am truly not sure about the mechanics of this; my intuition tells me that it will work out more than fine, but there is no evidence either way (except Sybilla’s). To appease the grown-up audience, I temporarily switched to Beethoven.

As I told her, my immediate response is “the more languages the better,” but that’s not much help. Anybody have any actual knowledge about the effects of exposing a helpless infant to multiple languages? (Oh, and Sibylla is the protagonist of this book; go buy it if you haven’t yet!)

A correspondent sent me an International Herald Tribune article by Matthew Brunwasser about various linguistic issues that will arise when Bulgaria joins the EU:

With Bulgaria scheduled to enter the European Union along with Romania on Jan. 1, Cyrillic is becoming the bloc’s third official alphabet, after Latin and Greek; by the end of the decade, if Bulgaria succeeds in joining the euro zone, it may even appear on euro banknotes.

Although Bulgaria has no commitment to reciprocate by displaying signs in the Latin alphabet, “We are doing it,” says Nikolay Vassilev, minister for state administration and administrative reform. “More slowly than I would like.”…

Rusana Bardarska, a Bulgarian translator, said the hardest part of introducing Bulgarian was EU terminology, for which Bulgarian words may not exist. “Should we translate ‘communitarization,’ ‘convergence,’ ‘flexsecurity’ and ‘cohesion,’ or rather introduce them as new words in Bulgarian?” she asked….

Back in Bulgaria, however, spelling is a major problem, according to Vassilev, the government minister. Many Cyrillic letters have no Latin equivalent, or several possibilities. The result, he says, is that some Bulgarian cities are spelled seven different ways in Latin – even on signs within the same city.

“There is no other country in the world with a problem of this magnitude,” Vassilev said.

To address this, Vassilev developed “Comprehensible Bulgaria,” a transliteration system created by linguists so that all Bulgarian proper names would be rendered the same way in the Latin alphabet. The transliteration software is available for free on the ministry’s Web page.

The new spellings are now obligatory for state institutions, but people are free to continue transliterating their names as they like, and Vassilev expects it to take years for the public to adopt the new system…

The “no other country” thing is silly, of course (everybody always thinks their own language is uniquely unique), but I’d be curious to know which cities are spelled seven different ways. And I love “the Day of Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture and of the Slavonic Alphabet”; I’ll have to remember to celebrate it next May 24.

Christophe Strobbe wrote to me as follows:

I am a member of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, and one that came up in a comment on our documents (more specifically this section) is if there are languages in use on the Internet that don’t use paragraphs. I found your web log and noticed that you discuss languages from different language families and with different writing systems, so I wondered if you could shed some light on this or point me to a relevant resource. (Punctuation has not always existed, so there used to be more languages that didn’t use sentences or paragraphs, e.g. Classical Greek, but I’m looking for current examples.)

I told him I didn’t know of any, but I’d ask the assembled multitudes. So: any thoughts?

I’ve allowed my love of gravy to distract from my prescriptivist linguistic crusade!
And now you know how to improve your chances of getting into heaven. (Many thanks to John Emerson, also known to be operating under the alias of The New Yorker, for the tip.)