Mark Liberman at Language Log has an interesting and depressing post about how lawyers pick up crazy ideas about language. He quotes John W. Brewer:

… a key part of law review culture is a hyperlegalistic concern with details of style and usage, and an almost pathological fear of exercising discretionary judgment among plausible alternatives. For any style/usage issue, the notion is that there must be a rule, and you can look the rule up in an authoritative source, and once you’ve done that you should follow the rule strictly, both in your own writing and especially in seizing opportunities to make petty corrections to the writing of others. The so-called “Blue Book” provides most of the obsessive-compulsive detail on matters of abbreviation and the like (should the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit be abbreviated “(2d Cir.)” or “(2nd Cir.)”? For God’s sake, don’t guess! Look it up!). But it doesn’t deal directly with many issues of prose style where people like this intuitively sense that There Must Be a Rule. For that, many law review types use as their authoritative source the Texas Law Review Manual of Usage and Style (MoUS), which I dimly recall from unhappy encounters with it circa 1990 as having a particularly obsessive and wrongheaded view of the that/which issue…

While as an editor I certainly object to the idea that looking up matters of style is “obsessive-compulsive,” it is unfortunate that so many style manuals take prescriptivism to absurd lengths, and apparently this is worst than most. But that’s not the half of it; Mark quotes Richard Posner’s “Against the Law Reviews,” where I learned the horrid truth about how law reviews work:

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OK, another question for you Africanists. I have a book Munyakare: African Civilization Before the Batuuree, by Richard W. Hull. I long ago figured out that batúuree is Hausa for ‘white man’ (the plural is tuuraawáa), but I have never been able to decipher “munyakare” (which is not in either the index or glossary, nor is it mentioned in the introduction or any other obvious spot). I thought Google would help, but it seems every hit for the word is a reference to this book. Assuming mu- to be a prefix, I googled “nyakare” and got a few hits, but the only one that looked promising was this page, which says “Nyakare: A chiefdom created for a daughter of Ruganzu II Ndoli” (who apparently ruled the baNyarwanda in the early 16th century). I guess a muNyakare would be a person from that chiefdom, but what that has to do with anything is beyond me. Again, I welcome assistance from those who know more than I.

In the course of cataloguing my library, I’m learning a lot about my books (many of which I bought after a cursory inspection and never investigated until now) and being forced to figure out linguistic details that I could gloss over when simply sticking the books on the appropriate shelf. This is the case with Umthwakazi, by P. S. Mahlangu (Longmans 1957), which according to this site is a historical account of Mzilikazi and the founding of the amaNdebele nation and was the first book published in Ndebele. The back cover says “NDEBELE (The Owner of the State),” the parenthetical phrase being apparently a translation of the book’s title; googling “umthwakazi” suggests that it consists of a prefix u- and the noun Mthwakazi, now used by Ndebele nationalists as the name of the Ndebele nation (considered as independent from Zimbabwe). The online Ndebele-English translator says “u-Mthwakazi: the nation of the Ndebele people,” and a news story from earlier this year quotes Godfrey Ncube as saying “Mthwakazi means ‘a nation’. That is what the Ndebele people were called.”

Now, Ndebele is a Nguni language that split off from Zulu quite recently; Dalby’s Dictionary of Languages says “Zulu and Ndebele are still to some extent mutually intelligible, though idioms differ and Ndebele has clearly borrowed numerous terms from the languages previously spoken in its territory” (where it arrived from what is now South Africa in the early 19th century). So I’ve tried to use my Zulu dictionaries to translate the subtitle and author line: “Izindaba ZamaNdebele Zemvelo. Zilotshwe ngu- P.S. Mahlangu.” So far I’ve learned that izindaba is the plural of -daba and means ‘reports, accounts,’ and zemvelo seems to be a form of -velo ‘nature.’ If anyone can provide further enlightenment, be my guest.

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Xavier Kreiss, a guest blogger at Naked Translations, has an interesting post on “The languages of Guernsey.” It starts off:

My mother is a Guernseywoman, and I’ve known and loved Guernsey all my life. The Channel Islands have always held a particular attraction for me – I’m a half-British Frenchman, which probably explains the affinity between myself and those “pieces of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England”, to quote the famous words of Victor Hugo, who spent many years in the archipelago as a political exile. He was fascinated by the local Norman-French dialect, or “djernesiais”, an ancient vernacular that dates back to the days of the Norman conquest.

And it continues with “a highly unofficial bit of potted history” and discussion of the patois (and its near-disappearance), the literature, the law, and the names: “Le Cheminant, Le Page, Le Patourel, Duquemin (pronounced dook-min), Mauger (prononced Major)…” Interesting stuff.

wood s lot turns five today. I don’t know how Mark Woods keeps up such a dependable stream of literary, cultural, artistic, and political links, avoiding the obvious and ferreting out the unusual and unforgettable, but if you don’t already have the site bookmarked, now’s as good a time as any. Today he has the haunting photography of Josef Sudek, poetry by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, various links on the Situationist International, E.J. Hobsbawm, Nassim Taleb, Stirling Newberry, Robert Kelly, Jacques Derrida, and more; tomorrow he’ll have completely different, equally valuable material. Congratulations, and many more!
(Pentacampeão!)

In the course of cataloguing my language books, I hit a snag with the English-Arabic Conversational Dictionary, said in my Ungar edition (1955, 1978 paperback reprint) to be by Richard Jaschke. Now, I like to include the date of original publication in my listings, and this was clearly published long before 1955—aside from the fact that the phrases include things like “Ho there! you! boatman! put me ashore” and “three petticoats,” the introduction begins “This little book, one of the best pocket guides to Arabic ever published, has been out of print for too long a time.” It boggles my mind that it was considered useful in 1955, let alone now (and it’s apparently still in print), but it’s a lot of fun to leaf through. Anyway, I’m normally good at finding out when first editions were published, but I’ve drawn a blank here, and it’s not helping that some sources refer to the author as “Richard Jasch,” which in fact gets twice as many Google hits as the Jaschke version. (The Library of Congress doesn’t recognize him under either name.) So can anyone let me know when Jasch(ke)’s original “little book” was published and what it was then called? Thanks in advance.

Anatoly, of the Russian LJ Avva, has a long and funny post about having years ago run across a book purporting to be a collection of critical essays about a newly translated play by a forgotten Spanish author; in reality everything in the book, including the professor who discovered and translated the play and edited the collection of essays, was an invention of the real author, whose name Anatoly eventually realized he had forgotten and could not retrieve. Naturally, I suspected he had invented the whole thing for the sake of the post, but he eventually did remember the true author, Herbert Samuel Lindenberger, and googling convinces me the man did exist and did write Saul’s Fall, the book in question. And in the course of the googling I ran across an interesting list of books with “Fictional Footnotes and Indexes,” which I thought I’d share with you all. It includes everything from Douglas Adams to Roland Barthes and Fyodor Dostoevsky (“Notes from Underground. Two: one at the beginning and one at the end.”). Heterogeneous fun.

Christopher Culver has a post with some nice resources for those who love Old Irish (and it’s one of those things, like Laphroaig, that you either love or hate): The Voyage of Bran and Aided Froích (‘The Death of Fróech’), both in Gaelic and English, a timeline showing the development from ogham to Modern Irish and Scots Gaelic using the word for ‘daughter’ as an example, and a photographically reproduced text of Kuno Meyer’s 1909 Irish Metrics.

While looking through my smaller Urdu-English dictionary (a mere 831 pages, as compared with Platts’ 1259), trying to get some hints as to its age and provenance (my edition says only SAPHROGRAPH CORP. Published 1969, but it’s clearly a reprint of an earlier dictionary, which I’m pretty sure is the Ferozsons, for which 1960 is the earliest date I’ve turned up), I happened on the following entry:

lāg (H) n.f. Enmity; rancour; spite; grudge; ill-feeling; cost; expenditure; a secret; spell; ratio; approach; competition; attention; affection; love; attachment; affinity; connection; relevancy; correlation.

I’ve bolded the definitions that struck me (although the whole congeries is somewhat reminiscent of Flann O’Brien’s mock-Dineen’s entry); among the phrases that follow, lāg rakhna means ‘to harbor ill-will, have a grudge against,’ and lāg lagnā means ‘to fall in love, be enamored of.’ Now, that’s what I call polysemy.

(You can see Platts’ even longer list of definitions here.)

Addendum. The title of this post is explained here by Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti.

A MetaFilter thread by OmieWise (whose Proust blog is well worth your time) introduced me to a nice site on Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino; it includes a grammar and some texts, mostly historical and cultural, although there’s also a fragment of a poem (written in Hebrew characters as well as transliteration). Visit the MeFi thread for other good links and information, mostly provided by the learned zaelic.