Lameen Souag of the always interesting Jabal al-Lughat has turned up the blog Awal_nu_Shawi about the language Tashawit (or Tachawit [or Shawiya]):

Tashawit is a variety of the Berber language (a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family). It is spoken by Ishawiyen, the Berbers of Eastern Algeria. Our aim is to provide a free platform for the discussion and dissemination of ideas related to Tashawit. We seek to expose the beauty of shawi words and explore their creative dimensions in poetry, prose and music. We believe that AWAL, the word is the gate of cultural heritage, and that writing is the key to its permanence.

It mainly posts song lyrics, occasionally with English translations, as in this lullaby:

sussem
sussem sussem a 3alla memmi
ennig a3law i babak
babak iroH iba3dek
yewwi TarumiT ijja yemmek
sussem sussem a 3alla memmi
ennig a3law du qachabi
babak iroH ijja lwali.

Hush
Hush hush 3alla, my son
Let us weave a burnous for your daddy
Your daddy who took off and left you
He left your mother for a French woman
Hush hush 3alla, my son
I am weaving a burnous and a qachabi
Your father abandoned his family.

But there’s also a longish discussion of case markers in Shawi Berber. I wonder if there are other Berber blogs out there?

I’ve developed a pretty high threshold of interest for the eggcorns they investigate so assidously over at the Log: once you realize how common it is for people to get phrases wrong (free reign for free rein being a classic example in writing, for all intensive purposes instead of for all intents and purposes in speech), you get jaded. But Jeanette Winterson has renewed my enthusiasm, in a wonderful essay for The Times, by taking note of the stories people invent to account for what they take to be the idiom. She starts off with a beautiful example:

The other day my elderly country neighbour asked for a bit of help to get his new washing machine into the kitchen. That generation never use “it”, always, “he” or “she”, so I wasn’t surprised to hear the washing machine called “he”, but I was surprised by what followed: “My old washing machine, he’s given up the goat,” he said, in a broad Gloucestershire accent.
“The goat?” I replied. “Are you sure?” “Oh, yes,” said my neighbour, “ain’t you never heard that expression before, given up the goat?” “Well, not exactly . . . where does it come from?” “Ah well,” said my neighbour, “in the old days, when folks didn’t have much, and mainly worked the land, a man would set store by his animals, especially his goat, and when he come to die, he would bequeath that goat to his heirs, and that is why we say, ‘he’s given up the goat’.”

People are lousy at accurate reproduction, but they’re great at storytelling, and I could happily read an entire book of anecdotes like that. (Winterton herself “laboured long into adult life really believing that there was such a thing as a ‘damp squid’, which of course there is, and when things go wrong they do feel very like a damp squid to me, sort of squidgy and suckery and slippery and misshapen. Is a faulty firework really a better description of disappointment?”)

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Anyone interested in Old Russian literature owes a debt to John Bruno Hare, proprietor of the Internet Sacred Text Archive, who has put online the 1915 Leonard A. Magnus translation of the Слово о полку Игореве [Slovo o polku Igoreve], which can be and has been translated in various ways: the Lay of the Host of Igor, the Tale of Igor’s Army, or (as Nabokov has it) the Song of Igor’s Campaign. Don’t ask me why Magnus chose the word armament; yes, it once meant (in the OED’s words) “a force military or (more usually) naval, equipped for war,” but it hasn’t meant that for quite some time now, and it’s not “appropriate to the period” because it didn’t exist before the 17th century, so it seems pointlessly perverse. But never mind that, and never mind that Nabokov called this version “a bizarre blend of incredible blunders, fantastic emendations, erratic erudition and shrewd guesses.” Nabokov was hard on everyone, and besides, the Nabokov translation is both under copyright and out of print (hard as that is to believe), whereas the Magnus is free for the taking and now available to anyone with an internet connection. And it’s not just a translation: the bulk of the book consists of introductory material about the history of the MS, the history of Russia, the construction of the poem, the language and grammar, and so on (not to mention ten genealogical tables, which Nabokov admitted were extremely handy), and the text itself is presented in parallel columns with the original on the left, and not in modernized spelling either:

Не лѣпо ли ны бяшетъ, братие,
начяти старыми словесы
трудныхъ повѣстий о пълку
Игоревѣ, Игоря Сватъславлича?

Of course there are better texts available, but having the parallel translation there is extremely convenient. (Thanks for the link go to Plep.)

I’m a bit late with this, but I wanted to get enough of my books categorized that my own statistics page would make an impressive showing (I’ll bet no other LT users come close to 145 languages!). Anyway, LibraryThing has added a feature I’ve been wanting since the beginning, language support:

• Every book has three fields: primary language, secondary language and original language.
• Languages are drawn from Amazon, your library record or the whole LibraryThing collection…
• The catalog shows “language” and “original language” fields. Go to “change fields” to see them.
• Language can be edited within your catalog, much as tags are.
• Each language has its own dedicated page (eg., French). At present, these only show the most popular works originally in that language.

Now, I have some complaints about the system. It would be useful to have more than “primary” and “secondary” fields; I have a number of books that have three equal languages, like Moderní Perská Frazeologie a Konversace by Mansour Shaki, which has everything in Czech, Persian, and English. And the “complete” menu of languages is immensely frustrating; it includes extremely minor languages like Yapese and breaks French down into Old and Middle as well as the modern variety, but lumps all the Chinese “dialects” (actually separate languages) under the same heading, so that I have to file my Cantonese dictionary, phrasebook, etc., as if they were Mandarin. Meanwhile it perversely insists on breaking the single language Serbocroatian down into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, so that I have to decide for each book how to file it; I pretty much flip a coin, except that I give the original language of my Andric novels as “Bosnian”—it would probably piss him off, but books like Bridge on the Drina and Bosnian Chronicle are full of Turkish loan words and local expressions, and if you’re going to use “Bosnian” for anything it might as well be that.

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I absolutely have to pass on this AskMetaFilter comment by the learned and much-traveled polyglot zaelic; one begins to get a feel for how he came by his polyglottery:

In my family, when we spoke English we were generally being nice. For the nasty backbiting stuff we had a pool of languages that would always leave somebody out of the loop – Hungarian, Yiddish, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. I learned Romanian completely through the bitter invective of my Grandmother, who hadn’t taught it to her own kids, who in turn, used Russian as a secret language of hate. As adults it came as a surprise to find everybody in the family was fully conversant in Spanish — no one ever told anybody else, because it was only used to whisper nasty comments about people in private. And my Mom has just started to teach me abusive language in Turkish that she learned in the 1940s working at her family’s Sephardic Turkish restaurant in Budapest.

Wow. And I thought it was impressive that my mother’s parents could lapse into Norwegian when they didn’t want the kids to understand.
If any of you have similar anecdotes, the microphone is, as always, open.

I imagine the name of C.T. Onions is familiar to many of my readers; he joined the staff of the OED in 1895 and became a full editor in 1914 (he wrote the final entry in the first edition, “zyxt obs. (Kentish) 2nd sing. ind. pres. of SEE v“), and at the end of his long life he was putting the finishing touches on the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), published a year after his death. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to check the etymology of Onions, especially given that its bearer was perhaps the most famous English etymologist, but I just got around to looking it up (as I eventually get around to looking everything up) and discovered that it is not (as one might think) from the edible rounded bulb of Allium cepa but is one of a number of anglicized variants (Eynon, Enion, Inions, Onians, etc.) of the Welsh name Einion, which is from Latin Annianus (best known, though that isn’t saying much, as the name of an Alexandrian monk). It’s also pronounced un-EYE-unz, though as the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names informs us, UN-yunz “is appropriate for C. T. ~, philologist, grammarian and an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; also for Oliver ~, author.” But now that I look the latter up (never having heard of him), I find that the Wikipedia article says “pronounced oh-NY-ons.” Oh dear, oh dear—I hate it when reference works disagree! (Yes, I know, it’s only Wikipedia, where anybody can write whatever they want, but why would somebody insert such an odd bit of information unless they were basing it on something?)

I imagine Brits know this from childhood, but it had somehow escaped my notice that Tennyson not only hailed from Lincolnshire but wrote dialect poetry. I quote the beginning of “The Church-Warden and the Curate“:

Eh? good daäy! good daäy! thaw it bean’t not mooch of a daäy.
Nasty casselty weather! An’ mea haäfe down wi’ my haäy!

It’s not exactly “Crossing the Bar,” but it’s not without its charms. (Casselty is defined in the glossary as ‘casualty, chance weather.’)

It’s always fun to make guesses about unfamiliar words. The Tensor has a post on this very subject, introducing “two separate bits of terminology associated with modern sport fencing: homologated and maraging.” If you already know these words, you’re presumably a fencer (and I’d be interested to know how you pronounce the latter, since it seems to have undergone a curious process of foreignizing in some circles in the few decades of its existence). If you don’t, take a stab (so to speak) at the meaning of “homologated jackets, britches, and masks” and “maraging blades” (or, more properly as far as I can tell, “maraged blades”). Then pop over to The Tensor and get the facts (which suprised me).

Addendum (2019). I just ran across this post and was alarmed at my fecklessness in having left the important facts to be discovered by visiting a post at The Tensor which might vanish away at any time. As it happens, it’s still there, but just in case:

ho·mol·o·gate: To approve, especially to confirm officially. (From Medieval Latin homologāre, homologāt-, from Greek homologein, ‘to agree’, from homologos, ‘agreeing’) […]

The word maraging actually refers to steel subjected to a particular heat treatment process to greatly increase its hardness. It’s derived from the words martensite (a kind of crystalline mineral that forms during the process) and aging, so it’s pronounced like the English words mar and aging. Live and learn.

Pok-ta-pok, according to the OED, is “the Maya name of the sacred ball game of Middle America, called tlachtli by the Aztecs, which was played on a court as a religious ritual. The object of the game was to knock a rubber ball through a stone ring, using only the hips, knees, and elbows.” Now, when I ran across this entry, it struck me forcibly because I recently got Long Hidden: The Olmec Series, a (superb) new CD by my favorite living bassist, William Parker (review), and one of the longer tracks is called “Pok-a-Tok,” about which Parker says “Pok-a-Tok is an Olmec ballgame whose object is to knock a four and a half pound rubber ball through a small ring using only the elbows, wrist, and hips.” At first I thought Parker simply got the name wrong (he’s a musician, not a linguist, as is shown by his absurd statement that “the Olmec spoke a dialect of the Manding language”), but when I googled it I got a large number of hits, though not nearly as many as for pok-ta-pok. So does anyone know if there is any basis for the variation—for instance, is one the Maya form and the other the Olmec—or is “pok-a-tok” simply a widespread error? And can the word be analyzed? The OED says simply “[Maya].”

Update. Jesse Sheidlower, Editor-at-Large of the Oxford English Dictionary, informs me that the revised OED entry for this term explains that the form pok-ta-pok is itself an error; the correct word in Yucatec Maya is actually pokolpok, and the ta- form is an error introduced by Frans Blom in 1932 and repeated throughout the literature. The classical Maya name for the game was pitz.

Further update. The September 2006 quarterly update of the OED just came out, and they’ve put the revised entry (dated June 2006) online. The etymology now reads:

[Alteration of, or error for, Yucatec Maya pokolpok (1877 in J. PIO PEREZ, Diccionario de la lengua Maya).
  Blom states (p. 497 of the article cited in quot. 1932) that he adopted the word to signify the game after consulting Juan Martinez Hernandez ‘the outstanding Maya linguist of today’. This inaccurate name remained current for some time. The classical Maya name was pitz.]

Joel Martinsen reports on a Chinese publication that makes me wish I knew Chinese:

Among all of the copycat urban lifestyle magazines, the paparazzi rags, and the ever-changing array of undistinguished special-interest publications that make up China’s periodicals market, Yaowen-Jiaozi (咬文嚼字) stands out as one of the most delightfully peculiar magazines available. With a title variously translated as “Correct Wording,” “Verbalism,” and “Chewing Words,” it turns a critical eye to the misuse and abuse of language in Chinese society…
Perhaps there’s a bit of guilty pleasure to be had in unmasking the usage foibles of major papers, but it’s done with a wink rather than a warning of impending social breakdown. The strongest condemnation is reserved for those who should know better: copyeditors who let malapropisms slip by, sign-makers who splash typos across storefronts, and monks in TV shows who mispronounce their Sanskrit transliterations.
In 2005, the magazine featured a different evening paper’s errors in each issue, while this year the scheduled targets are television stations. In addition to biting the popular media over language misuse, Yaowen-Jiaozi also chews on pressing usage questions: What’s the pronunciation of 峠, which appears in names in translations of Japanese novels? What’s the correct usage of · ? What are the usage differences between 三部曲 and 三步曲?

What fun! But lest you think they’re nothing but “a curmudgeonly group of conservative language pedants,” they’re quite willing to accomodate change when it makes sense to them:

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