If you like Borges, you’ll probably enjoy Ahua, the Water Language by “N. Aalberg” (actually Richard Kennaway). It’s my favorite kind of constructed language, the purely conceptual; if I want details of morphology, I’ll go to one of the many slow-cooked varieties proffered by actual languages that have been in use for centuries. Sample bits from the description:

As in France, so in Ahua: to speak the local language is at once compulsory and forbidden. Speaking in one’s own language one will be indifferently tolerated; speaking in Ahuan one will be even more indifferently tolerated. Either way, the Ahuans’ conviction that outsiders are forever barred from Ahuan culture by their inferior understanding is upheld. The Ahuans believe that no-one can learn the Ahuan language, and they do everything possible to ensure that this is the case.

In Ahuan, everything not absolutely essential to the meaning is omitted. That which remains is referred to obliquely, by allusion, again with the minimum of detail. The sentence “One thing is not another” may, according to context, mean almost anything; yet to an Ahuan, the precise meaning in any particular context will always be crystal clear…

The Ahuans look with mild amusement on our efforts to speak Ahua. An outsider invariably falls into certain faults which instantly mark him out, to an Ahuan, as having only a childish grasp of the language. He will attach fixed meanings to the words, and he will memorise stereotyped expressions. Ahuans take pride in the fact that their language is always changing. An Ahuan will never use the same word twice with the same meaning. There is a constant striving for unfashionability—indeed, no fashion of speaking can ever assert itself, for when an Ahuan notices that some word, or phrase, or any other feature of speech is beginning to be used with any consistency, he deliberately flouts that incipient rigidification. For this reason, no bilingual dictionary can ever be made of the language. Curiously, there are Ahuan dictionaries. They are considered to be among the greatest works of Ahuan literature. They partake of the elliptical and allusive style of the everyday language, and are more like poetic meditations on the words of Ahua than definitions. Needless to say, they are completely useless for the foreign learner of Ahua.

I enjoy very much the idea of such a dictionary, although an attempt to produce one in English would probably exhaust its interest after a quick perusal. (Via Plep.)

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Maciej of Idle Words is translating Ilf and Petrov’s Золотой теленок [Zolotoi telyonok, The Golden Calf] and has had the brilliant idea of creating a LiveJournal, baconmeteor, where he can ask questions about difficult points and get answers from the entire online universe of Russian speakers. For instance, in this post he asks about “this overheard bit of Soviet speak: На ваше РКК примкамера есть, примкамера! What is РКК, and what is a примкамера?” It turns out РКК is рабоче-крестьянский контроль (‘workers’ and peasants’ [financial] inspectorate’) and примкамера is примирительная камера, in Maciej’s words “like what the Brits call an industrial tribunal.” It would have taken a lot of digging through reference works and histories and a certain amount of luck to get that information (internet sources were of no help). If more translators did this rather than fudging or omitting difficult passages, there would be better translations.
Oh, and one of the comment threads introduced me to sokr.ru, a splendid site for Russian abbreviations and acronyms that got instantly bookmarked. (Thanks for the tip, Tatyana!)

Anyone interested in the Classical Japanese verbal system should hie themselves to this post at IbaDaiRon Blog and the subsequent lengthy analysis at No-sword (1, 2). I can grasp only the basics myself, but here’s a summary of current thinking (at least on Matt’s part):

A CJ verb consists of stem + ending. There are three main types of verbs:
* C-type verbs are consonant-stem (sC) (e.g. omoh.u).
* V-type verbs are vowel stem (sV) (e.g. mi.ru, ke.ru).
* D-type verbs have a consonant stem (sC) and a vowel stem (sV) (e.g. sug.u/sugi, at.u/ate) The vowel stem is used whenever “available” (usually for MZ, RY and MR) and the consonant stem otherwise, but for some reason the RT and IZ consonant stems always take the post-vowel allomorphs.

Those of you who know what’s going on will definitely enjoy the discussion and perhaps want to contribute. Doozo!

I have received an e-mail from a firm of solicitors alleging “extremely serious defamatory allegations and innuendoes posted on your web site” by a commenter; they add: “The impact of these scurrilous allegations on our clients has been compounded by your endorsement of the allegations in the final paragraph of the posting” (i.e., in my next comment, which basically said “Thanks for the information”). They go on:

We demand that you immediately remove these outrageous defamatory allegations from your web site forthwith and agree to publish a full retraction and apology in terms to be first agreed with us. We also require your proposals for compensating our clients for the serious damage caused to their reputation.
We await hearing from you within the next seven days, failing which we have instructions to institute legal proceedings against you without further notice.

Needless to say, I hate to remove a blog post just because somebody with access to lawyers was offended by it, but I also have no desire to be forced to defend myself against a lawsuit: even if it’s thrown out in the end, I can’t afford the costs. So: anyone know what a safe and appropriate response would be? (Obviously, I am not asking for technical legal advice, but I’m hoping some of you will have experience with this sort of thing and have some useful suggestions. “Tell them to go to hell,” while appreciated as an expression of solidarity, is alas not useful advice without a convincing reason why that would not wind up costing me money.) If you want further details, e-mail me at languagehat at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Those of you who like both mystery novels and word puzzles should check out a post at Suzanne E. McCarthy’s Abecedaria:

This novel is set in Thule Bay in northern Greenland. This could only be Qaanaaq, a settlement whose name is a palindrome. Several clues point to the use of the palindrome in deciphering the two ‘keywords’ of the story, the words written on the scroll placed in the golem’s mouth…

The first keyword is the ‘word of creation’ which brings the golem to life; and the second keyword, a reverse of the first, will destroy him…

I particularly enjoyed this tidbit:

Next, I switched to researching the legend of the golem in history. I found out that one of the original ‘words of creation’ was ‘emeth‘ (truth) written on the golem’s forehead. With the erasure of the ‘e’ altering ’emeth’ to read ‘meth’ (death), the golem was destroyed.

Language is powerful stuff!

The Unbound Bible allows you to view any section of the Bible in four languages at the same time (in parallel columns). Right now I’m looking at the gospel of John in English, Russian, Georgian, and Greek (of which you get seven choices for the New Testament and four for the old). I meant to post this months ago when Joe Tomei sent me the link (thanks, Joe!), but it somehow slipped through the cracks. Better late than never!

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So MetaFilter member acoutu mentioned in an AskMeFi thread that her family name, Coutu, was traditionally pronounced “Koo-chee.” Her explanation for this was that

…my great-great-grandfather worked on the railroads with a bunch of Italians. Being an Italian in North America at that time was not exactly a great thing, but it was a heck of a lot better than being a French Canadian. So, when Coutu was pronounced lightly as “Cootchyu”, some of the railroad guys thought it was “[C]ucci”. And my great-great-grandfather just went along with that. This makes sense to me because of the discrimination against French Canadians.
As late as the 40s or 50s, my grandfather was mistaken for being Italian—something he gladly accepted. One day, a guy asked him something about Italians and my grandfather said he was actually French Canadian. The guy said, “Me too!” And my grandfather said, “Since when is McCready a French Canadian name?” And the other guy said, “It’s Mercredi. You think I’m going to say something if they think I’m Scottish?!”

I absolutely love that story and had to share it at once.

Last week’s New Yorker (which arrived a week late, so I’m still working my way through it) has an essay [archived] by Wyatt Mason on the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who sounds like a writer I’d enjoy reading; this certainly appeals to me:

Over the years, Marías has translated a vast range of American and English writing, including poetry by John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Frank O’Hara, and Wallace Stevens; and fiction by Anthony Burgess, Raymond Carver, Thomas Hardy, J. D. Salinger, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Updike…

This work has had an impact on Marías as a writer. On the most basic level, Marías has made all his narrators in some sense translators; whether they happen to teach translation theory or work as interpreters, ghostwriters, or opera singers, each is giving voice to other people’s stories.

But what brings me to post about it is a reminiscence about his mother:

[My mother] published an anthology titled “España como preocupación” (“Spain as a Preoccupation”), with the subtitle “Literary Anthology.” Her name was Dolores Franco—her surname, which is rather common, being the same as the dictator’s. Dolores… in Spanish means literally pain, or pains. The censorship argued that “Spain as a Preoccupation,” plus Dolores Franco, meaning “pains Franco,” wouldn’t be accepted.

It seems inevitable that the more power you acquire over others, the more you fear retribution (since power over others is always, in a basic sense, undeserved), and fear makes people do foolish things. This particular bit of folly is essentially comic, but the fear and folly of power, it hardly needs saying, often have more serious consequences. The novelist’s father “was denounced by a former friend, who accused him, falsely, of writing for Pravda and of consorting with Communist leaders”; he was jailed and lost his job, which in the context of his time and place, made him a lucky man. The stories are very different, but share this quality: it is difficult for those who haven’t experienced life under a dictatorship to fully credit them. How can men run a country who have so little sense?

Addendum. No sooner did I finish the Mason essay and turn the page than I found a brief review of Richard J. Evans’s The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939, which has the following pertinent sentence: “Evans shows that Nazism was all the more effective for its irrationality and arbitrariness: there was no logic in which to take refuge.” I suppose folly has its rewards.

That’s how I’d transliterate the Yiddish title, אין מױל אַרײַן, of a delightful blog I just ran across, using the Lithuanian pronunciation I’m familiar with, but the URL uses the spelling inmolaraan, which leads me to suspect the blogger, the chocolate lady, uses the Polish dialect. At any rate, the name means ‘into the mouth,’ and the blog features עסן און װערטער [esn un verter] ‘eating and words’: what could be better? Don’t be alarmed if you follow the link and see a sea of Yiddish; just scroll down and you’ll find English entries as well, of which this is a fine sample:

A sakh zmires un veynik lokshn (Lots of hymns and just a little pasta) is a Yiddish expression meaning great effort expended for a disappointing result—a long run for a short slide. Zmires are the para-liturgical hymns sung at festive meals, and lokshn (noodles) are especially associated with the Sabbath in Ashkenazic tradition.

For much more on lokshn in the Yiddish language and Jewish life see the hilarious dialogue “Lokshn” [pdf file] by the eternally amazing Noyekh Prilutski. Yet more on lokshn, including a Romanized version of Prilutski’s “Lokshn” can be found in The Mendele Review Special Lokshn Issue, parts one and two. Have a look at A. Almi’s poem about Prilutski while you’re there

I’ve taken some of the sidebar titles from John Evelyn’s Acetaria: a discourse of sallets. I really like that he has a chapter called “Of composts, and stercoration, repastination, dressing and stirring of the earth and mould of a garden” (all punctuation is in the original), so I’ve used this for my compost entry, even though I have no immediate plans to write any further about compost. For the Yiddish title of this category I used the saying “emes vakst fun der erd aroys” “The truth grows out of the earth.”

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In a comment to an earlier post, Keira Ballantyne mentioned work she’d done on Yapese, including interlinear translations, and I liked the site so much I thought I’d give it its own post.

This corpus is split into two parts. The first, the Honolulu Corpus of Written Yapese, was collected at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in the spring of 2001. The source materials for the corpus come from various upper elementary school readers first published in the late seventies by the Yap State Education Department… The second part of the corpus, the Colonia Corpus of Spoken Yapese, was collected in Yap in late 2002. It consists of three interviews… Keira Gebbie Ballantyne edited the translations and prepared the interlinearized version of the texts.

Keira says: “I’m currently looking for an application which I can use to generate concordances from the xml files on the web. If you know of something that will do that, I’d love to hear from you.” So drop her a line, and once again: isn’t the internet great?