Exciting news from Greece:

Archeologists in Crete have found an important trove of archeological treasures containing some of the earliest known examples of Greek writing.
The culture ministry said the finds were excavated at a long-abandoned site on a hill overlooking the port of Chania in Western Crete, which has been identified with the Minoan city of Kydonia.
Among the discoveries was an amphora containing an intact text written in linear B, the language of the court at Mycenae where the legendary Agamemnon ruled.
Also found were two terracotta tablets containing texts in Linear A, an even older alphabet—used around 1,700 years before the common era—which has not yet been deciphered…

It pleases me that the discoveries were made at Khania, a city of which I have fond memories; you can read more about the archeological digs in this interview with Maria Andreadaki-Vlasiki. (Via ilani ilani.)

I ran across a scanned image of a Russian schoolbook page and started to read it when I was stopped cold by the second line:

2. Запишите 2-ой абзац текста, подчёркивая все орфограммы.
[2. Write out the second paragraph of the text, underlining all orfogrammy.]

What the hell is an orfogramma? It wasn’t in my Oxford dictionary, so I went to the big gun, the three-volume New Great Russian-English Dictionary, and there it was… defined as “orthogram.” This sort of thing really bothers me (I’ve posted about a similar situation here). There is no such word in English as “orthogram.” It’s not in the OED, it’s not in the big Webster’s, it’s not online—if you google it, you get a bunch of French pages (for some reason) and a stray Egyptological page claiming that an orthogram is “a sign in the script which is to indicate a dual or plural form.” That may or may not be a technical term in Egyptology, but it’s clearly not relevant here. So I went to my handy Russkii yazyk: entsyklopediya [Russian language: encyclopedia] and found a whole article about орфограммы, which I will summarize for you thus: an orfogramma is a point of uncertainty in the spelling of a word, a place where you can’t tell from the sound alone how to write it. Classic examples are final consonants (since all final consonants are devoiced: pyad’ ‘span’ and pyat’ ‘five’ sound the same) and unstressed vowels (golova ‘head’ could equally well be written galava to represent the standard pronunciation); writing words with small or capital letters would also fall under this rubric. So the line I quoted means ‘underline all letters whose spelling requires the application of orthographic rules.’ I sympathize with bilingual lexicographers; it’s not easy to deal with a situation like this. But it’s a dereliction of duty to say “орфограмма? orthogram!” and go on to the next word, not bothering your head about whether your “definition” is of any help to the users of the dictionary.

Update. Andrew Dunbar posted a request at Wiktionary, and already there’s an article with the following definitions:

1. A spelling that is in accordance with orthographic rules, usually etymological or historical rather than phonetic.
2. A consistently reproducible way to represent phonomorphological features of a given language in writing, such -ого for the Russian masculine genitive singular of adjectives, instead of the phonetic spelling -ава: нового (nóvəvə).

I hesitate to dispute a native speaker about the definition of a word I was unacquainted with until the other day, but “a spelling” to me implies the spelling of an entire word, whereas (if I understand correctly) an орфограмма is a particular point in a word where the spelling requires the application of special rules. I will be happy to be corrected.

Just a couple of words whose etymology I found interesting:

1) Elver ‘a young eel’ is a variant of eelfare ‘the passage of young eels up a river; a brood of young eels’; the first OED citation shows nicely the phonetic development:
1533 Act 25 Hen. VIII, c. vii, Any frye, spaume, or brode of yeles, called yele fares, or Ell vares.

2) Album is from Latin album ‘a white tablet or notice-board, esp. that on which was inscribed the edict of the praetor’ (the definition of the Oxford Latin Dictionary, more up-to-date than the OED’s ‘blank tablet’) which is itself the neuter singular form of the adjective albus ‘white’ (from Proto-Indo-European *albho- and thus perhaps related to both elf and oaf). I’m sure I had read this etymology before, but it had slipped right out of my mind; perhaps thinking of the Beatles’ White Album will help keep it there.

Ready Steady Book has a very fetching interview with Charlotte Mandell, a translator of French poetry and philosophy. Apparently it’s her first interview, and she burbles happily: “Translators never get asked anything, so when someone listens to us we tend to rabbit on. I could give you an entire Proustean list of things (favorite number: 4; favorite color: burgundy; favorite flower: yellow sea poppy; favorite movie: tie between Cocteau’s Orphée and Renoir’s Rules of the Game…) but I won’t.” (I will interject here that Rules of the Game is my favorite movie as well.) She has interesting things to say about Maurice Blanchot:

Reading Blanchot is a little like watching someone think. You have to have patience, since his essays move by nuance and suggestion, and come to focus slowly. English readers – Americans especially – are used to being fed information; in the case of an essay, they’re used to the conventional statement-exposition-conclusion format. The nice thing about Blanchot (and the thing a lot of people find exasperating about him) is that he doesn’t follow that formula, or any formula for that matter. Often no conclusion is reached. The subject is examined, and questioned, and looked at from different angles, but never really resolved. I like that a lot – it’s sort of like reading poetry.

She provides a list of Books That Changed My Life that ends:

When I was 17: Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. I fell madly in love with Julien Sorel. Also The Charterhouse of Parma and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Dead.
When I was 18: William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems. Also Rilke’s Duino Elegies and EM Forster’s Howards End.
When I was 20: Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I fell madly in love with Prince Andrei. Also Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. And also Robert Kelly’s Not This Island Music. I fell madly in love with Robert Kelly.

Reader, she married him!

(Via wood s lot [11.13.2005].)

I love bilingual texts that have both morpheme-by-morpheme interlinears and prose translations, and there are several of them at this Project Gutenberg reproduction of the Smithsonian Institution’s Illustration Of the Method of Recording Indian Languages by J.O. Dorsey, A.S. Gatschet, and S.R. Riggs (from the First annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80, published 1881): “How the Rabbit Caught the Sun in a Trap” in Omaha, “Details of a Conjuror’s Practice,” “The Relapse,” and “Sweat-Lodges” in the “Klamath Lake dialect” (not sure what language that is—Klamath-Modoc?), and “A Dog’s Revenge” in Dakota. (Via wood s lot.)

Just when I thought I knew all the minorities of Europe, along comes another one. An article by Tomasz Kamusella describes the situation of the Silesians:

The Silesians began agitating for recognition after World War I, when the status of Germany’s Upper Silesia became uncertain. A turning point in their story came in 1922, when Upper Silesia was divided between Germany and Poland, disregarding the yearning of many of the area’s 2.3 million inhabitants for an Upper Silesian nation-state with German and Polish as its official languages (the interwar Union of Upper Silesians, the main proponent of independence put its membership at half a million). Until then, the multilingual but homogenously Catholic Silesians had used German in school and for official business, and Polish in their dealings with the Church. At home, both prior to and after the division of their homeland between Poland and Germany, they continued to speak their local Slavic dialect interlaced with numerous Germanic loanwords and grammatical structures, which they termed “speaking in our own way” (po naschimu) or “the Silesian language.”
Neither Berlin nor Warsaw would stand for that. For Berlin, the Silesians became “in-between people” and, for Warsaw, a “nationally labile population.” Policies of enforced Germanization and Polonization took hold on either side of the borders of Upper Silesia. During World War II, the entire region was reincorporated in Germany, which nullified the achievements of Polonization. After 1945, the process was reversed, with all of Upper Silesia being granted to postwar Poland along with other formerly German territories. Millions of what Polish authorities called “indubitable Germans” were expelled, but those Silesians referred to as “autochthons” or “ethnic Poles insufficiently aware of their Polishness” were allowed to stay on, after being were sifted out from “indubitable Germans” by a process of “national verification” that was not, in truth, too rigorous: to qualify, it was enough to speak some of the Upper Silesian Slavic dialect, or just to have a Slavic-sounding surname…

I don’t know to what extent there is a genuinely distinct Silesian dialect—R.G.A. de Bray’s Guide to the Slavonic Languages (1951), the only reference book I have that mentions it, says only that such dialects “are chiefly characterized by the pronunciation of true nasals in all positions”—or whether there is a widespread sense of micronationalism among the Silesians, but I thought I’d pass along the information. (Thanks to John Emerson for the link.)

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin recently responded to what he describes as “a regular flow of comments and observations about language” from listeners; my response after reading it is to wish he’d stick to journalism and ethics and leave language alone. My esteemed copyediting colleague fev at Headsuptheblog has done a wonderful demolition job, of which my favorite bit is a response to this gem:

Mr. Everest also raised a question about when to use the plural possessive on the radio.
For example: should we say “John Roberts’ confirmation” or “John Roberts’s confirmation?” Mr. Everest is advocating the latter.
In print this is a constant issue. My esteemed colleague Ian Mayes is the readers’ editor (aka, the Ombudsman) at the Guardian in London. He has referred to this inappropriate use of the apostrophe as a dropping by that mythic creature, the *”Apostrofly.”

Sez fev:

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Jabal al-Lughat has a very interesting post called ” A comparative linguist of the 10th century”; it begins:

Yehudah ibn Quraysh was a rabbi of the late ninth/early tenth century from Tahert (modern Tiaret, in Algeria.) Shocked to hear that the Jews of Fez in Morocco were neglecting the study of the Targum (an Aramaic translation of the Bible), he wrote a letter to them intended to establish that they could not and should not get by on the Hebrew alone – because other languages, especially Aramaic and Arabic, are essential in elucidating the Hebrew. In the process, he casually noted most of the correct sound correspondences between Hebrew and Arabic, and ended up writing what amounts to an extensive comparative dictionary of the three languages, even throwing in 9 Berber comparisons and 5 Latin ones at the end. He definitely hedges his bets on the cause of this obvious similarity between the three languages, but seems to come surprisingly close to the correct explanation – common descent – at times… something to bear in mind next time you read about Sir William Jones having founded comparative linguistics in 1798.

The post goes on to provide a quote from Yehudah, in both translation and Arabic transcription (it was originally in the Hebrew alphabet).

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Amidaworld has a post called “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Classic Asian Literature” that moves from the discovery of Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases (provided for many books) to the insight that they can serve as a handy thumbnail sketch of the book itself:

But let’s use this to save some time and read some massive works in, say, 10 seconds or so. I love this one: The Tale of Genji‘s SIPs: saffron flower. Yep, that’s it. “Evocative,” no?

How about those massive Chinese novels? Journey to the West (vol. 2—1 was unavailable): hooped rod, two little fiends, auspicious luminosity, poled the luggage, travel rescript certified, vast magic powers, his muckrake, brazen ape, white jade steps, cloudy luminosity, subdue the fiend, his iron rod, great snow fall, ginseng fruits, bronze mallet, various fiends, iguana dragon, preparatory mass, steel crop, immaculate vase, our rescript, treasure staff, gloomy complexion, testimonial poem, reverted cinnabar. Could you give a better summary in 4 lines or so?…

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I just heard a radio news announcer say “In Beijing… uh, Beizhing…” My wife gets nervous when I swear at the radio, so I’ll say it here: there is no /zh/ sound in Mandarin Chinese! Why on earth do people insist on looking at a pinyin j, which is pronounced pretty much exactly like an English j, and reading it as if it were French? Stop it, all of you, just stop it!
This has been a public service announcement, brought to you by Hatters for Better Language Use.