The Yiddish Dictionary Online is just what it says; you can open it in English or Yiddish alphabetical order or use the search box. This will save me having to go over to the bookshelf and pull down my Weinreich, and most people don’t have a Weinreich to pull down, so this is a great thing to know about. (Via Plep.)

Addendum (2010). Another online dictionary is here.

The Academia Mexicana de la Lengua maintains on its website the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos, containing Spanish definitions of words peculiar to Mexico, and the Diccionario geográfico universal, whose entries often give “local pronunciation” and the Spanish adjective derived from the place name (e.g., Acaya ‘Achaea’ has the adjective aqueo ‘Achaean,’ which is logical but might not immediately occur to the inquiring mind; that for Acapulco is acapulqueño). The geographical dictionary gives Latin forms when available (Adour, latín Aturus) but no other etymologies; for Mexican place names, however, the etymology is often available via the adjective’s listing in the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos:

acapulqueño, acapulqueña. (De Acapulco, Acapolco, municipio del estado de Guerrero, del náhuatl Acapulco, literalmente = ‘lugar de grandes cañas’, de acatl ‘caña, carrizo’ + pol, aumentativo, + –co ‘en, lugar de’; la ciudad fue fundada en el siglo XVI.) 1. adj. Perteneciente o relativo a Acapulco. || 2. m. y f. Nativo o habitante de Acapulco.

There’s also a Refranero collecting popular sayings. A valuable site.

Today’s NY Times has an article [archived] by Larry Rohter on a 17th-century language still spoken in a remote corner of Brazil, língua geral or Nheengatú (Ethnologue: Nhengatu).

When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil five centuries ago, they encountered a fundamental problem: the indigenous peoples they conquered spoke more than 700 languages. Rising to the challenge, the Jesuit priests accompanying them concocted a mixture of Indian, Portuguese and African words they called “língua geral,” or the “general language,” and imposed it on their colonial subjects.

Elsewhere in Brazil, língua geral as a living, spoken tongue died off long ago. But in this remote and neglected corner of the Amazon where Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela meet, the language has not only managed to survive, it has made a remarkable comeback in recent years.

“Linguists talk of moribund languages that are going to die, but this is one that is being revitalized by new blood,” said José Ribamar Bessa Freire, author of “River of Babel: A Linguistic History of the Amazon” and a native of the region. “Though it was originally brought to the Amazon to make the colonial process viable, tribes that have lost their own mother tongue are now taking refuge in língua geral and making it an element of their identity,” he said.

Two years ago, in fact, Nheengatú, as the 30,000 or so speakers of língua geral call their language, reached a milestone. By vote of the local council, São Gabriel da Cachoeira became the only municipality in Brazil to recognize a language other than Portuguese as official, conferring that status on língua geral and two local Indian tongues.

As a result, Nheengatú, which is pronounced neen-gah-TOO and means “good talk,” is now a language that is permitted to be taught in local schools, spoken in courts and used in government documents. People who can speak língua geral have seen their value on the job market rise and are now being hired as interpreters, teachers and public health aides.

The article goes on to give more of the history of the language and report on opposition by elements of the military. (I can find no trace of “River of Babel: A Linguistic History of the Amazon,” but maybe that’s a translation of a Portuguese title. And of course “neen-gah-TOO” is a ridiculous attempt at indicating the pronunciation of the first syllable, but you know what? I give up. They can tell people to pronounce it SPIN-ach for all I care.)

I do love a good language rant, as long as it’s the sensible kind and not the usual prescriptivist lament, and fev of the copy-editing blog headsuptheblog (active since April) has a dandy one, called “Is that a mote in your eye, or are you just glad to see me?”:

OK, we wouldn’t all be gathered ’round this little electric campfire if we didn’t think whingeing about language was fun, right? A downside, as some of you might have noticed already, is that those who would complain about language should do it really, really carefully, lest they be held up as examples for the rest of us.
Hence today’s food for thought, a column from one of the two leading local daily papers. The problem with it is not necessarily that it’s prescriptivist. We all have a little prescriptivist in us (some of us have a lot). Rather, it’s the array of side dishes – grammatical glitches, inability to distinguish fundamentals, dialect chauvinism, BoCoMo ethnocentrism, hyperformal usage and annoying J-school-isms – served up along with the implausible, and essentially untenable, thesis.

Details are gone into, and a conclusion is drawn:

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Reading Brodsky always sends me to my dictionary, but usually it’s my Russian dictionary. Making my way through Пятая годовщина (“The Fifth Anniversary”), I ran into the usual slew of difficult Russian vocabulary (и к звездам до сих пор там запускают жучек ‘and to this day they’re still flinging zhuchkas to the stars’—zhuchka looks like a diminutive of zhuk ‘beetle,’ but it turns out it’s an affectionate name for a pet dog) and learned that лишая, the genitive of the word for ‘lichen,’ is accented lisháya these days instead of lishayá as my dictionaries have it, but the worst trouble I ran into was with the line я чувствую нутром, как парка нитку треплет ‘I feel in my gut the Fate something-ing the thread.’

Trepát’ is one of those verbs I’ve never managed to assimilate because it bundles ideas that don’t go together in English: it can mean ‘dishevel (by tugging at),’ ‘blow about,’ ‘pat,’ ‘fray,’ ‘pull (someone’s hair, ears, &c),’ and ‘whip,’ among other things; trepát’ yazykóm ‘to trepát’ with the tongue’ is ‘to babble, chatter,’ and the reflexive trepát’sya (‘to trepát’ oneself’) is ‘flutter,’ ‘go around,’ or ‘talk nonsense.’ But here, in the context of the Fates and thread, it clearly takes on its primordial meaning, ‘to scutch.’ Yes, that’s the first definition in my trusty Oxford: “to scutch, swingle (flax, hemp, etc.).” Well, it was off to the OED with me, where I found it means ‘to dress (fibrous material, flax, hemp, cotton, silk, wool) by beating.’ (There is another verb scutch meaning ‘to strike with a stick or whip, to slash, switch,’ but although it is “not impossible” that this is “a transferred use of [the verb meaning ‘to dress by beating’],… more probably the present verb is an independent onomatopœic formation: cf. scotch vb.”) Unfortunately, due to my deficient understanding of the process of turning fibers into thread, I still don’t have a clear picture; this page helps: “The flax is passed through it, slamming the break as you go, until the brittle outside layer starts to fall away, leaving the fiber intact. Then you ‘scutch’ it, which requires scraping the last of it away with a dull knife.” At least I’m pretty sure it’s Clotho (Клото [Kloto]—why did Greek theta give Russian t here rather than f?) who’s doing the scutching.

So how do you translate it? Brodsky, in his own translation, cheats, which he can get away with, being the author: “I sense the thread within strained by the Parcae’s shuttle.” (I note, sadly, that he mistakes “Parcae” for a singular; the Latin singular is Parca, but that’s not used in English, where we have to say “one of the Parcae.”) Nabokov, of course, would have taken delight in using “scutch”; I suppose I’d go with “I feel in my gut the Fate tugging the thread” for phonetic and associational reasons, but I would regret losing the specificity of the technical term. This is the problem with the English language’s plethora of specialized vocabulary—it can make a grand impression, but it doesn’t serve well when translating a foreign term that is a perfectly ordinary word outside of the particular technical sense used in the given context. (And speaking of context, can any of my Russophone readers tell me what “треплешь парк” means in the fifteenth stanza of Памяти Геннадия Шмакова?)

This is just one tiny example of how difficult, verging on impossible, it is to translate Brodsky (and I have to say I’m not fond of his self-translations in general—he tries too hard to be flamboyant, and is too disrespectful of his originals). Pushkin is untranslatable because of his (surface) simplicity: if you translate literally, it sounds like nothing, and if you gussy it up, it sounds gussied-up. With Brodsky there is the opposite problem—he uses register, reference, polysemy, and every other resource he can work into his text until it presents an interwoven thicket that can be plucked at or hacked at but not, in the normal sense, translated. Which brings me to the final line of the poem:

Скрипи, скрипи, перо! переводи бумагу. [Squeak, squeak, pen! perevodí paper.]

Normally, perevodít’ means either ‘take/carry across’ or ‘translate,’ but here Brodsky is using the colloquial sense ‘use up, waste’ (Не переводить бумагу ‘Don’t waste paper!’). But if you translate “waste paper,” you lose everything that’s memorable about the line. Brodsky renders it “Scratch on, my pen: let’s mark the white the way it marks us”; does that make sense? Is it poetry? You be the judge.

The Kaurna Warra site reproduces a 19th-century dictionary of the now extinct language of the Kaurna people of southeastern Australia (the second link says the name is “pronounced garna”):

In Adelaide, 1840, a remarkable event occurred. Reverends Teichelmann and Schürmann published their work Outlines of a Grammar, Vocabulary, and Phraseology of the Aboriginal Language of South Australia. The amazing feature relates to its creation. Two German priests recorded essentially the language of the Kaurna people for the English speaking colonists to read. Indeed, these two remarkable men began teaching the Kaurna children in their own vernacular until forbidden to do so by the government.
Their book was originally self published. Advertisements in the local newspaper detailed the availability of this work. But interest was slight and copies sold slowly. If the Kaurna people were now subjects of the king, it was important that they deal in the king’s English…

I’m not sure why the creators of the site felt the need to sneer at attempts to revive the language (“The good folk of Adelaide will not accept the learning of an ancient language as a substitute for English because of sentimental reasons”)—or why the site renders my Back button inoperative, which is extremely annoying—but it’s an interesting enough site I’m posting it anyway. There’s a nice links page too. (Via Plep.)

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Speculative Grammarian is “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics,” if they do say so themselves.

We are nearing the end of our transition from the real world to online, and we have nearly completed digitizing the tattered remains of our once glorious Archive, re-publishing each issue on the internet.
Having re-emerged from the shadow of our most recent exile, we are, of course, also looking for submissions for forthcoming issues of SpecGram. Standards have never been lower, so get published while you can!

They have just put online Better Words and Morphemes:The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia, Volume I, Number 3 (May 1991), with (among many other items of equally dubious value) an entirely new scientific folk etymology of wombat. You thought it was of Australian Aboriginal origin? Well, you’re right, but they’ll do their damndest to convince you it’s “a purely English descriptive compound.” Go, enjoy, but don’t say I didn’t warn you you might get your brains addled.

Frequent commenter Tatyana just sent me the word ouguiya, which is in the dictionary and legal for Scrabble use. I had never heard of it but was thrilled to know it existed; when I googled it, I discovered the equally marvelous word ariary, of a similar nature. What do these exotic lexical items mean? The answers lie within.

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The African Language Resources page has links to Dictionaries, Glossaries and Lexicons and a list of the Mande languages. (Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org.)

Artemy Lebedev has an interesting history of the typewriter keyboard, concentrating on the Russian version.

The Russian letterkey layout originated from America in the late 19th century. The author has failed so far to find any credible evidence of the first company to produce typewriters with this layout, let alone its authorship. The only thing definitely known is that all firms that produced typewriters with the Russian key layout employed the same one— ЙIУКЕН (or ЙЦУКЕН after the reform of the Russian language) that was dubbed “Standard”.

It’s fascinating to see the reproductions of early keyboards, and to learn that in the prerevolutionary version “the numerals row lacks one, zero and three that would be replaced with I, О and З respectively.” And here’s a fun fact:

The first typewriter (the Yanalif model) was produced in the USSR in Kazan only in 1929. At first it was manufactured with Latin (!) letterkeys. It means that for at least 30 years after being put on the market all typewriters with the Russian font had been made abroad.

Via blogchik. (“Yanalif” means ‘new alphabet’ in Tatar—you can read about the sad history of Tatar writing systems here.)