My dictionaries of first resort, the OED, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, and American Heritage, all give a four-syllable pronunciation for the name of this New England Indian tribe; M-W renders it “wäm-p&-‘nO-(“)ag, AH is the same (rendered in their own system), and the OED differs only in having a schwa in the final syllable. But the original pronunciation was clearly three syllables; the first citation in the OED (Roger Williams, 1676) calls them “Wampanoogs,” and the ending must be the same as in the original Narraganset name for the Pequots, Pequttôog, and the word for Europeans, Wautaconâug ‘coatmen,’ which I presume are two spellings of the same vowel or diphthong. It was still three syllables in the early nineteenth century; John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1830 poem “Metacom” rhymes “Beneath the closing veil of night,/ And leafy bough and curling fog,/ …Rested the fiery Wampanoag” and “The scorched earth—the blackened log—/ …Be the sole relics which remain/ Of the once mighty Wampanoag!” In 1847, John Brougham’s parody of the wildly popular play Metamora: Or, the Last of the Wampanoags was titled “Metamora, or the Last of the Pollywogs,” which strongly implies a pronunciation WAMP-anogs. And I just found a recording (mp3) of Chief Wild Horse, the last speaker of the Wampanoag dialect, reading the Lord’s Prayer (followed by a detailed linguistic explication) in 1961, and both he and the guy who introduces him say WAMP-anog, three syllables. So why do the dictionaries list only the spelling pronunciation wampa-NO-ag?

Addendum. Martin, in the comments, links to some extremely interesting sites: an article about Jessie “Little Doe” Fermino, a Mashpee Indian who last year earned a master’s in linguistics and is trying to revive the Wampanoag language (there’s more about the revival effort here, where the table on the upper right is, oddly, the syllabary for Inuktitut, a language not mentioned in the piece), and the website for the Wôpanâak Language Revitalization Project (and I note that the address line at the bottom refers to the “Wampanog Tribe”).

I should also mention that I got the mp3 recording from this webpage.

A MetaFilter post introduced me to the writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who at the time of Partition left a successful screenwriting career in Bombay for a miserable existence in Lahore, where he wrote brilliant stories and drank himself to death in early 1955. (There’s an affecting account of his life here.) He’s been compared to Lawrence and Gorky for the unblinking honesty of his writing, which frequently got him in trouble with the government; his most famous story is Toba Tek Singh, which is available in both Urdu and English here (there’s even a set of notes on the language [from C. M. Naim, Readings in Urdu Prose and Poetry, no longer available online in 2025]). You won’t soon forget the lunatic’s nonsense mantra (اوپڑ دی گڑ گڑ دی اینکس دی بے دھیانا دی منگ دی دال آف دی لالٹین, uupa;R dii gu;R gu;R dii enaks dii be dhyaanaa dii mu;Ng dii daal aaf dii laal;Ten).

If you’re interested in book design and book covers, you’ll probably want to, er, bookmark Foreword, “a community in the service of books and book design, with authors in the US and UK.” Check out the collection of The Bell Jar covers and the book cover waiting to happen.

I had just started the article “Those Ancient Incan Knots? Tax Accounting, Researchers Suggest” by Nicholas Wade in today’s NY Times when I had occasion to grind my teeth: “They believe they may have decoded the first word – a place name – to be found in a quipu (pronounced KWEE-poo)…” What the hell? Is the Times too proud to actually consult a dictionary? Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, for instance, which says “Pronunciation: ‘kE-(“)pü.” Or the American Heritage, which says the same thing in its own transcription. You’d think anyone with the slightest acquaintance with Spanish would be able to grasp that qui = /ki/; if you wanted further confirmation, you could look up the etymology—M-W gives the Quechua word as khipu and AHD as kipu, but either way there ain’t no /kw/. But the Times in its corporate wisdom (I’m not going to blame Wade, since it may well have been an idiot editor who added the “information”) says “I ignorantly pronounce it this way, and since I am the Times I am by definition correct in all things, so I will inflict my ignorance upon the public at large.” Well done, O Newspaper of Record!

The North American Journal of Welsh Studies “is comprised [sic, tsk] of material originally presented at a conference or event sponsored by the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History.” The web pages for each issue are HTML (the latest is Winter-Summer 2005), but the individual articles are pdf files. There’s some interesting stuff there, like Grahame Davies, “Beginnings: New Media and the Welsh Language” (pdf); if you read Welsh and are interested in new media, of course, you should bookmark morfa. (Via wood s lot.)

Update (Aug. 2022). The original links have rotted, so I’ve provided archived ones. The situation with the journal is annoying. The North American Journal of Welsh Studies page is here, but the link there to the “North American Journal of Welsh Studies website” is dead and there is no way to access the journal the page is supposedly for. The website The Latest News of NAJWS Now starts with this confusing material:

Hello… Welcome to this website. I’m really sorry if what you are looking for right now is not there. This website does not provide journals like before.

This website has changed ownership into private property.

This is A Brief History of The North American Journal of Welsh Studies.

Later it says:

Some of the old files belonging to the North American Journal of Welsh Studies can be found below.

download this pdf file

download this pdf file

download this pdf file

download this pdf file

Thank you for coming here.

Uh, you’re welcome, I guess. But you’d think somebody could have done better at keeping this material available.

The poetry publisher duration press has put online the first of its new critical e-book series, towards a foreign likeness bent: translation (pdf). It contains fifteen essays, from Ammiel Alcalay’s “Politics & Translation” to Chet Wiener’s “The Legacy and Future of ‘Horizontal’ and ‘Vertical’ Translation in Contemporary Poetry,” of which (I regret to say) too many are marred (for me) by an excess of politics, theory, and/or self-indulgence. But at least two are worth downloading the book to read, Jonathan Skinner’s “A Note On Trobar” (followed by a selection of his own translations, “Petit Chansonnier: Provençal Lyrics”) and Rick Snyder’s “The Politics of Time: New American Versions of Paul Celan.” The first begins:

While it is a commonplace that the troubadours “invented” (or found) the art of love (whose key words we all know well—vernal, auzel [bird], dona, pretz [worth], amors, cor, remirar [glance], dezir, joi, sofrirs, mezura, servir, merce, lauzengier [slanderer], senhal [nickname]), the formal, lyric specificity of that invention has been lost to us. What was unique about the troubadour canso was its secular artifice, its engagement with social and linguistic particulars in an ideal vernacular, a koine relatively free of (Latin) ecclesiastical and juridical control while also not particularly tied to local dialects. The troubadours elaborated a frankly sexual (and, I might add, social) sensibility in a “field of rhyme” with little compare in the history of Western literature—in fact, Occitan rhyme’s likely connections with Arabic and Hebrew poetry, in forms including the Mozarabic zagal and muwashshah, remain relatively unexplored to this day. (Indigenous influences such as refrain songs associated with the round dance have been considered more important.)

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Cerdis zerom deronty toulpinye,
Purois harlins linor orifieux,
Tictic falo mien estolieux,
Eulfiditons lafar relonglotye.
Gerefeluz tourdom redassinye;
Ervidion tecar doludrieux,
Gesdoliou nerset bacincieux,
Arlas destol osart lurafirie.
Tast derurly tast qu’ent derontrian,
Tast deportulast fal min adian,
Tast tast causus renula dulpissoitre,
Ladimirail reledra survioux,
C’est mon secret ma Mignonne aux yeux doux,
Qu’autre que toy ne sauroit reconnoistre.
—Marc Papillon, seigneur de Lasphrise (1597)

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Tae Kim‘s A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar “was created as a resource for those who want to learn Japanese grammar in a rational, intuitive way that makes sense in Japanese. The explanations are focused on how to make sense of the grammar not from English but from a Japanese point of view.” The Introduction says:

The problem with conventional textbooks is that they often have the following goals.
1. They want readers to be able to use functional and polite Japanese as quickly as possible.
2. They don’t want to scare readers away with terrifying Japanese script and Chinese characters.
3. They want to teach you how to say English phrases in Japanese…
This guide is an attempt to systematically build up the grammatical structures that make up the Japanese language in a way that makes sense in Japanese. It may not be a practical tool for quickly learning immediately useful Japanese phrases (for example, common phrases for travel). However, it will logically create grammatical building blocks that will result in a solid grammatical foundation. For those of you who have learned Japanese from textbooks, you may see some big differences in how the material is ordered and presented. This is because this guide does not seek to forcibly create artificial ties between English and Japanese by presenting the material in a way that makes sense in English. Instead, examples with translations will show how ideas are expressed in Japanese resulting in simpler explanations that are easier to understand.

That makes a lot of sense to me, and if I ever decide to really learn Japanese, I think I’ll give it a try. (Via Plep.)

Still on my colonial history kick, I’m reading Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, about the worst conflict in early American history, King Philip’s War of 1675-76 (although, as she says, “Its very name, each word in its title—’King,’ ‘Philip’s,’ ‘War’—has been passionately disputed”). I checked it out of the Athenaeum because I couldn’t resist the title of Chapter 1, “Beware of Any Linguist,” and I’m glad I did—I’ve found all kinds of goodies just in the introduction, “What’s in a Name?” The first one I want to share is this discussion of the name of the eponymous Wampanoag leader:

It is possible that Philip called himself “Philip” when addressing the English and “Metacom” when talking with Indians. But it seems more likely that he simply abandoned the name Metacom after 1660. After all, Philip was raised in a culture in which people commonly adopted new names, leaving old names behind. Edward Winslow had observed in 1624, “All their names are significant and variable, for when they come to the state of men and women, they alter them according to their deeds or dispositions.” For just this reason, it is possible that Philip renamed himself during the war, to mark a new stage in his life, but surely he would not have returned to Metacom, the name of his youth. That no record of Philip’s new name survives should come as no surprise. Those who knew Philip by the name he went by at the time of his death, in August 1676, would not have uttered it: a strict naming taboo prohibited it. As Roger Williams had reported, “the naming of their dead Sachims, is one ground of their warres”; in 1665 Philip himself had traveled to Nantucket to kill an Indian who had spoken the name of his deceased father, Massasoit. If Philip took another name during the war, it has not survived. (Although one small, uncorroborated bit of evidence suggests that he may have been renamed “Wewesawamit.”) And, since he seems to have initially taken “Philip” in earnest, calling him “Metacom” today is no truer to his memory, especially because “Metacom” became a became a popular substitute for “Philip” only in the early nineteenth century, when white playwrights, poets, and novelists sought to make the war sound more authentically, and romantically, Indian.

I love this kind of detailed discussion. And something that completely delighted me was discovering the reason he was given the name Philip when he and his brother asked the Plymouth Court for new names after their father died:

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Reading Jonathan Franzen’s annoyingly self-absorbed “My Bird Problem” [archived] in the latest New Yorker, one reason I kept going was the profusion of wonderful bird names: gadwall, veery, redstart, dunlin… Then I hit “parauque” (at the bottom of the middle column on page 66, if you’re following along at home) and thought I’d better look it up so I’d know whether to mentally pronounce it as if it were French or Spanish. Well, it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, so of course I googled it, and was suprised to find only a few hundred hits—bird names shouldn’t be that rare. Following my usual practice with unfamiliar plants and animals, I googled the Linnean name, in this case Nyctidromus albicollis, and what do you know, every hit gave the English name as “pauraque.” So I googled that, and sure enough, there were over 15,000 hits, and when I looked it up in my massive Webster’s Third New International, there it was (pronounced \pau‘räkā\ in their transcription, like “pow RAH kay”). The New Yorker had allowed a misspelled word into their once famously perfect pages. Once again, the modern world had let me down.

I was a bit consoled, or at least distracted, when I followed the trail left by Webster’s laconic definition (pauraque n [MexSp] : CUIEJO) and looked up cuiejo. I was rewarded with this:

cuiejo \kü‘yāhō\ n [modif. of AmerSp cuyeo] : a tropical American nighthawk (Nyctidromus albicollis) the dried and ground bones of which are highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion — called also pauraque

“Highly esteemed in parts of its range as a love potion”—why, it’s lexicographical poetry! And the endearingly awkward phrasing “the dried and ground bones of which,” contorted to avoid the perfectly good “whose dried and ground bones,” was the icing on the cake.

Later in the same paragraph Franzen mentions “my first northern beardless tyrannulet”; I liked “tyrannulet” very much but was unable to find it in any dictionaries: not Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, not the big Webster’s, not the OED. And yet it’s an English word in good standing; not only does it get 20,000 Google hits (besides the northern beardless, this page lists dozens of others: Rufous-lored, Cinnamon-faced, Minas Gerais, Oustalet’s, Mottle-cheeked, Rough-legged, Greenish, Tawny-rumped…) [June 2020: the Wayback Machine has no record of that page, but this Wikipedia Category page has quite a few], it’s the subject of an Encyclopædia Britannica article. So why isn’t it in the dictionary, not even the OED? I’m mystified and annoyed; at least the pronunciation is clear, but what if it weren’t? I’d be lost in the sea of words without a compass!