Anyone with any interest in Finnegans Wake will welcome the appearance of the website Fweet (which claims to stand for Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury and to be pronounced “thweet,” but you can ignore both those pieces of possible misinformation). The Prologue explains how the compiler, Raphael Slepon, began by putting annotations to the book on his computer for easier access and how he “came up with the idea of setting up a website, allowing others to browse and search the collection.” But you can ignore that too; all you really need is the search engine and the tutorial and you’re good to go. Don’t ignore the tutorial, though; the tour guide gets quite testy and you may end up with blood-stained fingers and a torn vest. Right, then, off you go. This way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in!
(A deep bow in pf’s direction for the link.)

The new Iraqi constitution, as presented in the NY Times, says that “The Arabic language and Kurdish language are the two official languages of Iraq.” As Bill Poser’s Language Log post, where I learned about the language clause, says, “This is great news for Kurdish and the Kurds, whose language has never before had official status.” My immediate reaction was to wonder whether this will mean the establishment of a standard language, presumably based on Sorani, and whether this might eventually create some coherence in what is now a confusing cluster of dialects. Anyway, it’s a promising development, although, as Bill says, “it remains to be seen whether the Constitution will actually be implemented.”

Cataloguing my books has gotten me dipping into volumes I’d forgotten all about, and yesterday it was Paul Goodman’s Speaking and Language (1971), which I bought and eagerly read in 1974 (it’s full of annotations) but hadn’t looked at in years. Goodman was (as Edward Said said in his perceptive NY Times review) “amateurish and utopian,” and here he takes a thoughtful amateur’s look at language and the attempts of linguists to corral and analyze it. He makes a lot of mistakes and says some silly things (the margins are full of my penciled question marks, “Huh?”s, and corrections—it’s Verner’s Law, not “Werner’s”), but he also had some very interesting and perhaps useful things to say, and I’ll quote a couple here. From Chapter III (p. 41 in my Vintage paperback):

Most often words do not fail a speaker; rather, he wrenches the words a bit and communicates. This does not mean that the constant supra-individual code is unimportant; on the contrary, it is all the more indispensable. Unless the speakers know the code well, they do not hear the modifications. Bloomfield speaks of “the fundamental assumption of linguistics, namely: In certain communities [speech-communities] some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning.” But it is how the speaker varies the code—by his style, the rhythm and tone of his feeling, his simple or convoluted syntax, his habitual vocabulary—that is his meaning, his meaning in the situation, which is all the meaning there is. This should be a platitude, except that it tends to be denied or brushed aside by linguists.

And the end of Chapter VII, “Constructed Languages”:

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In the course of reading John Crowley’s novel The Translator (how could I resist a book with a title like that?), I came to a sudden halt on page 31 at the sentence “She wondered (though the wonder never quite rose over the limn of hurt consciousness) how she would ever be able to do anything daring or good ever again.” The limn of hurt consciousness? I had never seen the word used as a noun, but it’s not a common word anyway, and John Crowley is clearly a learned man (he wrote a novel called Dæmonomania, with an æ ligature, for heaven’s sake), so I was perfectly prepared to look it up and discover some rare and beautiful usage I could commit to memory. But the OED knows only the verb, originally ‘illuminate (letters, manuscripts, books)’ or ‘adorn or embellish with gold or bright colour,’ then ‘paint (a picture or portrait); portray, depict (a subject),’ which is its modern sense (insofar as it can be said to have one). I was desperately trying to imagine what a nonce nominal use might import (hurt consciousness as a gilt illumination?), when years of typo-hunting kicked in and it suddenly came to me: Crowley meant limen, ‘the limit below which a given stimulus ceases to be perceptible; the minimum amount of stimulus or nerve-excitation required to produce a sensation. Also called threshold.’ The sense fit perfectly: the wonder never quite rose over the threshold of hurt consciousness. Somewhere along the way an e dropped out, and the intended word was so obscure itself that everyone who looked at this bit of text thereafter must have shrugged and thought “Man, that Crowley knows a lot of words.” Which he does, but in this case his vocabulary has proved fatal to his wounded word’s chances of recovery.

I was alerted to an interesting divergence in culinary terminology by the discussion in this Pepys Diary thread; as Todd Bernhardt says:

In my American experience, to broil means to heat something from above as it sits on a slotted pan, so the juices can drip away. Grilling, in my experience, heats from below, and the juices drip down (usually onto the heat source).

But in the UK and Australia, heating from above is called “grilling” and broil means (according to GrahamT, who appears to be British) “to cook meat in a closed container over heat, similar to the American pot-roast.” So think twice about how you order your meat when you cross the Atlantic.

A story by Lester Haines in The Register describes recent attempts to crack down on widespread usage of internet slang in China:

Xia Xiurong, chair of the Education, Science, Culture and Health Committee of the Shanghai People’s Congress, told the Shanghai Morning Post: “On the Web, Internet slang is convenient and satisfying, but the mainstream media have a responsibility to guide proper and standard language usage.”
The problem is apparently that wild youth has taken to using terms such as “PK” (literally “player killer” = “one-to-one [gaming] competition”), the abbrevation “MM” for “girl” and the delicious “konglong” (literally “dinosaur”) for unattractive woman.
Phrases are taking a pasting too, with “bu yao” (don’t want) reduced to the shocking “biao” in net parlance.

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“Which-hunting” refers to editing which and that based on the superstition that the former should be used with a nonrestrictive clause and set off by commas; editors enslaved to this doctrine scrutinize manuscripts for relative clauses and zealously change whiches to thats or encase them in commas, with the satisfaction of someone lining up the pencils on their desk until they’re all perfectly parallel. This often produces esthetically displeasing results, but rarely does it have the potential of wreaking such havoc as in a sentence (Decision 4 of the International F.A. Board to Law 12 – Fouls and Misconduct) from soccer/football’s Laws of the Game:

A tackle, which endangers the safety of an opponent, must be sanctioned as serious foul play.

Since other versions (e.g., French: “Un tacle qui met en danger l’intégrité physique d’un adversaire doit être sanctionné comme faute grossière”) make it clear that the clause was meant to be restrictive, proper which-hunting would have turned the sentence into “A tackle that endangers…” But it’s so easy to get caught up in the game of changing whiches to thats that you lose sight of the point of it all and run the risk of this sort of thing. If I were a referee, I would zealously whistle every single tackle, explaining that Decision 4 of the IFAB banned tackles altogether and handing them a card with the phone number of whoever approved this abomination. Of course the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) probably doesn’t recognize the English version of the rules as definitive, but it would be fun until I got a cease-and-desist call from Zurich or was stomped to death by outraged players, whichever came first. (Via Mark Liberman’s Language Log post.)

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Andrew Wiesner has assembled a collection of links to “Images of Orality and Literacy in Greek Iconography of the Fifth, Fourth and Third Centuries BCE.” Some amazing stuff there, like the Boy seated writing. (Via wood s lot [10.10.2005].)

Incidentally, wood s lot also reminds me that today is the birthday of the great Thelonious Monk, and WKCR is playing his music all day. Click the “live broadcast” link at the bottom, choose your stream, and enjoy.

Today is Hangul Day (한글날): on this day in 1446, King Sejong the Great promulgated the Korean alphabet, hangul. Read all about it in Bill Poser’s Language Log post; I hadn’t realized the purpose of the alphabet was explicitly to bring literacy to the mass of Koreans: “I have been distressed by [the fact that most people can’t express their feelings in writing] and have designed twenty-eight new letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease and make convenient for their daily use.” But “15th century Korea was a highly stratified society rigidly controlled by a small elite in which those who were not elite and not male had few rights.”

Indeed, there was strong opposition to the introduction of Hangul on the part of King Sejong’s court, so strong that they presented a memorial in opposition and debated with him verbally. The reasons they gave were in part that it was wrong to deviate from the Chinese way of doing things, and in part that such a simple writing system would lead to the loss of aristocratic privilege. Their motives may have been wrong, but they understood the effects of mass literacy all too well. After King Sejong’s death, Hangul was very nearly suppressed. It took much longer to come into wide use than he had intended due to the opposition of the aristocracy.

Sounds like something worth celebrating to me.

Jesse Sheidlower has a piece in the current Bookforum on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language that is well worth reading. A snippet:

The abundance and quality of the material are often overshadowed by the smattering of humorous definitions in Johnson, of which the most widely known is surely his entry for lexicographer, which begins “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” (This, its common form, is a selective quotation; the entry goes on more helpfully, “that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.”) A pension was “an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.” And oats is “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” All it takes is one or two such entries, especially when combined with the many witty comments Boswell quotes Johnson as having said, to give the impression that the whole work is a frippery. It is not. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is one of the great intellectual achievements of any age. Praised from the moment of its publication, it remains an astonishing work, not least because it is the product of a single, extraordinarily perceptive mind. Johnson had the help of a half-dozen assistants—most of whom, by the way, were Scots—but their role was chiefly to help him manage the quotations, not to write definitions.
Even sympathetic discussions tend to focus on the unusual—the humorous entries, the weird words (bicipitous; jobbernowl; trolmydames). These are crowd pleasing, and easy to discuss, though ultimately not very important. The trend continues: Most modern dictionaries are publicized with their hottest new words, it being impossible to interest the press in the quality of one’s etymology.

(Via Gnostical Turpitude.)

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