Natalia Dmytruk, a sign-language interpreter for Ukraine’s state-run television, has received the Fern Holland Award at the Vital Voices Global Partnership’s fifth annual ceremony honoring women from around the world who have made a difference. According to Nora Boustany’s Washington Post story:

During the tense days of Ukraine’s presidential elections last year, Dmytruk staged a silent but bold protest, informing deaf Ukrainians that official results from the Nov. 21 runoff were fraudulent…
Election monitors had reported widespread vote rigging immediately after the runoff between Yushchenko and the Russian-backed prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych. With Yanukovych leading by a slim margin, the opposition urged Ukrainians to gather in Independence Square in front of the parliament building to protest the results…
The opposition had no access to the state-run media, but Dmytruk was in a special position as a television interpreter to get their message out.

[Read more…]

The National Library Service has a very useful page called The ABC Book, A Pronunciation Guide; the symbols used are idiosyncratic (á = able, rate, é = evil, reel, ð = schwa), but the pronunciations I happen to know are spot-on, even the obscure ones:
Hippocrene (hip-ð-KRÉN-é) Publishers, foreign reference works
Rao’s (RÁ-óz) N.Y. restaurant
So I’m willing to trust them on ones I didn’t know, like:
Boni & Liveright (BÓ-ní and LIV-rít) Publishers (I said BOH-nee, not -nigh)
Brearley (BRÂR-lé) NYC East side private school
CMEA (SMÉ-ð) Council on Economic Assistance
Djer Kiss (DÉR KIS) Cosmetics mfr. (how’d they make Djer = deer?)

[Read more…]

The Discouraging Word is only updated once a month or so these days, but it’s worth visiting, because it provides some real lexicographical entertainment. The latest entry (Sommer prowde with Daffadillies dight, Posted Saturday, April 30, 2005—there are no permalinks) focuses on the word “dight,” which I knew as an archaic word for ‘adorn’; I probably once knew, but had forgotten, that it was from Latin dictāre ‘to dictate, order.’ What I did not know was how it had once flourished; the OED says “From the senses of literary dictation and composition in which it was originally used, this verb received in ME. an extraordinary sense-development, so as to be one of the most widely used words in the language.” As TDW says, there are 16 primary definitions, but I feel obliged to point out that that the last one shouldn’t be there (it’s “an erroneous use by Spenser,” F.Q. I. viii. 18 “With which his hideous club aloft he dights”—one of the odd Victorian features of the OED is its deferential inclusion of hapax mistakes by Great Writers, which have no more linguistic significance than similar errors made by the man on the Clapham omnibus); I also want to point out definition 4.b.:

[Read more…]

I’m basically going to repost here an entry from No-sword, because it’s an interesting question that I’m completely incompetent to answer, and I thought perhaps some of my more theoretically inclined readers might have some interesting comments:

Japanese is considered to have SOV word order and topic-comment sentence structure. So one uncontroversial way for a man to casually say, for example, “I don’t understand English” is

俺は英語が分からない
ore wa eigo ga wakaranai
I (topic) English (subject) be-understood-NOT
“As for me, English is not understood”
= “I don’t understand English”

But in spoken Japanese, it’s very common to hear something like this (note that the particles (wa and ga) have been dropped and wakaranai slurs into wakannai; these are uncontroversial changes):

英語分かんない、俺
eigo wakannai, ore
English be-understood-NOT, I

[Read more…]

Coming soon to a venue near you: Miguel de Cervantes will be promoting Don Quixote! (Thanks to Brecht for the tip.)

Addendum. It occurs to me that Harper-Collins will probably be taking this embarrassing page offline at some point, so I should reproduce it here for the benefit of posterity:

Miguel de Cervantes Events

Bookstore Appearances
No Events in this category.

Libraries, Museums, Fairs, Others

Wednesday, May 11, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman
MUNK CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES/Talk and roundtable discussion
Munk Centre, Campbell Conference Centre, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto

Tuesday, May 17, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
QUEEN SOFIA SPANISH INSTITUTE/Discussion and Signing
684 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021

Friday, June 03, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
INSTITUTO CERVANTES/Panel Discussion on Don Quixote
211-215 East 49 Street, New York, NY 10017

Thursday, June 23, 2005 07:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA/Montgomery Auditorium
1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103

[…]

In Print

Sunday, May 01, 2005
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
GLOBE & MAIL

Sunday, May 01, 2005
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
EDMONTON JOURNAL

Wagiman (or Wageman) is a nearly extinct language of northern Australia; the Wagiman online dictionary is a nicely done site that provides lexical and other information. The Introduction says:

Wagiman is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in Australia’s Northern Territory. At the moment there are about ten people who speak Wagiman, mostly old people. Wagiman belongs to what linguists call the non-Pama-Nyungan language family. Within that family, it appears to fall into the Gunwinyguan language group, but it is not closely related to any other Aboriginal languages.

There are several dialects of Wagiman, with the most prominent distinction being between matjjin no-roh-ma ‘light language’ and matjjin gu-nawutj-jan ‘heavy language’. Helen Liddy and Lenny Liddy speak light language, and Lulu Martin, Paddy Huddlestone and Clara McMahon speak heavy language. There is not all that much difference, and no Wagiman speakers have any trouble understanding one another.

Ten speakers and “several” dialects! Now, that’s what I call stubborn diversity. (Via Plep [28th April].)

Thanks to a comment by ben wolfson, I present you with the preview for a forthcoming linguistic thriller:

“CHOMSKY”
THE MOTION PICTURE

Announcer: The English Language is about to E*X*P*L*O*D*E!
No refuge is safe from linguistic peril!

Mom: Here, I brought up “Gravity’s Rainbow” for a goodnight story.
Kid: Aw, Mom! Why did you bring that book I don’t want to be read to out of up for?
Mom: Aiiiiieeee! My brane is melting!

Announcer: A secret government agency must find a new ally…

MIB: Mr. Chomsky? We need your help with a linguistic crisis.
I’m with intelligence….

Go on, read the whole thing, you know you want to. But don’t blame me, blame Stephen Will Tanner, who is solely responsible. I’d better provide the disclaimer in case you need it before you reach the end:

MOST OF THE JOKES IN THIS POST WERE BOTH OBSCURE AND TENUOUS.
THEREFORE, WE ARE PROVIDING PHONE “HUMOR TECH-SUPPORT”.

((ring))((ring))((ring))((ring))*click*

This is 1-800-KIB-OLUV. If you do not understand an acronym,
press 1 now. If you are having trouble with a running gag, press 2. If you need support on pre-1993 jokes, press 3. Harry Claude Cat’s posts are Not Funny, so if you are calling about them, please hang up now.

Woody Allen: And if I wanted a girl to explain Chomsky to me?
Woman: It’d cost you.

In an effort to find out something about the Isaurians and their language (a vain effort, and if anybody knows anything beyond “warlike” and “unknown” I’d appreciate hearing about it) I ran across Vassil Karloukovski’s Page, with its many Bulgarian-related links; what particularly attracted my attention was the section devoted to The Language of the Huns, Chapter IX of O. Maenchen-Helfen’s The World of the Huns (University of California Press, 1973). I’ll quote the meaty passage on Etymologies:

We must be prepared to meet among the names borne by Huns Germanic, Latin, and (as a result of the long and close contact with the Alans) also Iranian names. Attempts to force all Hunnic names into one linguistic group are a priori doomed to failure.

“Let no one,” warned Jordanes, “who is ignorant cavil at the fact that the tribes of men use many names, the Sarmatians from the Germans and the Goths frequently from the Huns.” Tutizar was a Goth and Ragnaris a Hun, but Tutizar is not a Gothic name and Ragnaris is Germanic. The Byzantine generals who in 493 fought against the Isaurians were Apsikal, a Goth, and Sigizan and Zolban, commanders of the Hun auxiliaries. Apsikal is not a Gothic but a Hunnic name; Sigizan might be Germanic. Mundius, a man of Attilanic descent, had a son by the name of Mauricius; his grandson Theudimundus bore a Germanic name. Patricius, Ardabur, and Herminiricus were not a Roman, an Alan, and a German as the names would indicate, but brothers, the sons of Aspar and his Gothic wife. There are many such cases in the fifth and sixth centuries. Sometimes a man is known under two names, belonging to two different tongues. Or he has a name compounded of elements of two languages. There are instances of what seem to be double names; actually one is the personal name, the other a title. Among the Hun names, some might well be designations of rank. It is, I believe, generally agreed that the titles of the steppe peoples do not reflect the nationality of their bearers. A kan, kagan, or bagatur may be a Mongol, a Turk, a Bulgar; he may be practically anything.

The names of the Danube Bulgars offer an illustration of the pitfalls into which scholars are likely to stumble when they approach the complex problems of the migration period with their eyes fixed on etymologies. In spite of the labor spent on the explanation of Bulgarian names since the thirties of the past century, there is hardly one whose etymology has been definitely established. The name Bulgar itself is an example. What does it mean? Are the Bulgars “the Mixed ones” or “the Rebels?” Pelliot was inclined to the latter interpretation but thought it possible that bulgar meant les trouveurs. The Turkish etymology was challenged by Detschev; he assumed that Bulgar was the name given to the descendants of the Attilanic Huns by the Gepids and Ostrogoths and took it for Germanic, meaning homo pugnax. Still another non-Turkish etymology has been suggested by Keramopoulos. He takes Bulgarii to be burgaroi, Roman mercenaries garrisoned in the burgi along the limes. Without accepting this etymology, I would like to point out that in the second half of the sixth century a group of Huns who had found refuge in the empire were known as fossatisii. Fossatum is the military camp.

In addition to the objective difficulties, subjective ones bedevil some scholars. Turkologists are likely to find Turks everywhere; Germanic scholars discover Germans in unlikely places. Convinced that all proto-Bulgarians spoke Turkish, Németh offered an attractive Turkish etymology of Asparuch; other Turkologists explained the name in a different, perhaps less convincing way. Now it has turned out that Asparuch is an Iranian name. Validi Togan, a scholar of profound erudition but sometimes biased by pan-Turkism, derived shogun, Sino-Japanese for chiang chün, “general,” from the Qarluq title sagun. Pro-Germanic bias led Schönfeld to maintain, in disregard of all chronology, that the Moors took over Vandalic names.

In view of the difficulties concerning the study of Hun names—the inexactness inherent in transcriptions, the morphological changes which many names must have undergone, the ever present possibility that the names were Gothicized, the wide margin of error in the manuscript tradition—in view of all these one cannot help marveling at the boldness with which the problem of the Hunnish language has been and still is being attacked.

I love that “sometimes biased by pan-Turkism”; yeah, I’d say that someone who derives shogun from the Qarluq title sagun may have a teeny little bias somewhere. I’m not sure how far one can trust his “profound erudition.”

(I expect this post to be of particular interest to John Emerson, who has cited Maenchen-Helfen in his post “The Steppe Barbarians in Eurasia.”)

In this week’s New Yorker there’s an article by Elizabeth Kolbert called “The Climate of Man—II.” (It’s not now online [archived], as are Part I [archived] and Part III [archived] of the three-part series.) It’s very interesting, but I had to get over my initial disappointment that it wasn’t about Akkad, since that’s what it begins by talking about. What concerns me here is a phrase in the third sentence of the piece: “Sargon—Sharru–kin, in the language of Akkadian—means ‘true king’; almost certainly, though, he was a usurper.” My initial reaction (aside from a reflexive grumble about falling editorial standards) was that the un-English phrase “the language of Akkadian” was a garden-variety confusion between “the Akkadian language” and “the language of Akkad”: she wrote one, half-changed it to the other, and no editor caught it (mutter, grumble). But it occurred to me that it might be taken as parallel to “the island of Manhattan,” and it also occurred to me that this might be an example of the increasing lag between the state of my own dialect and the ever-changing state of the language as she is spoke. So I’ll ask the Varied Reader: does the phrase “the language of Akkadian” sound acceptable?

Randy Cohen proposes an idea that appeals to me: “a literary map of Manhattan—not of its authors’ haunts but those of their characters.”

I began thinking about this map years ago while reading Don DeLillo’s ”Great Jones Street.” Bucky Wunderlick gazes out the window of his ”small crowded room” at the firehouse across the street. I realized: there’s only one firehouse on that street and few buildings that contain tiny apartments rather than commercial lofts. I know where Bucky Wunderlick lives. Or would live if he existed. He’s got to be at No. 35. Knowing this made walking around the neighborhood like walking through the novel. But I walked without a map. Shouldn’t there be a map of imaginary New Yorkers?
It would be a lush literary landscape—the house on Washington Square where Catherine Sloper waited and yearned, the coffee shops where the characters of Ralph Ellison and Isaac Bashevis Singer quarreled and kibbitzed, the offices where John Cheever’s people spent their days, the clubs where Jay McInerney’s creatures wasted their nights, the East 70’s and Upper West Side avenues where the Glass family bickered (Salinger gives several addresses), downtown where Ishmael wandered the docks.

He gives a number of examples of fictional locations, both exact and vague, and “can imagine maps of Brooklyn, Chicago, London and more.” (There is a certain amount of this in The Atlas of Literature by Malcolm Bradbury, but it covers too many areas and centuries to have much detail on any one place.) He says “Since nobody is widely enough read—I’m not widely enough read—to know the haunts and houses, the offices and bars and subway stops of so diverse a population, I appeal to Book Review readers to send in their favorites”; the address is bookmap@nytimes.com.
Update. The website is up.