Patrick Hassel Zein has a pageful of links on the Chinese language, many of which look useful and/or interesting, but the one I want to highlight here is The most common Chinese characters in order of frequency. Boy, I wish I’d had this available when I was trying to learn Chinese; he explains:

The list was created using statistic list of Chinese characters and a number of thick dictionaries. All characters are presented in falling statistical order. Pronunciations are specified according to Pinyin and for some characters a number of different possible pronunciations are given. Examples of common words are given for most characters, however with no guarantee that all the most common words are listed or that the given examples are particularly common words. Some of the listed pronunciations for some characters are less used than other pronunciations for the same character, and in those cases translations and examples may lack. Some additional comments are given.

The first character is 的, of which he says:

[Read more…]

The excellent Russian-Israeli blogger Avva has a great story about a taxi ride with a driver he’d used several times before: “Judging by his face and Hebrew, a typical sabra (native Israeli), an Ashkenazi, about 45… He tells me he lived in America a long time; sometimes he switches to quite good English.” They had just exited from a tunnel and were behind a car that refused to move; the driver was turning into the next lane to pass when a bus shot out of the tunnel and sped past in that very lane. “The driver leans on the brake with all his strength and hollers” a stream of Russian obscenity, “without any accent whatsoever.” (I won’t bother reproducing the mat because anyone who could read it might as well read Avva’s whole entry—it’s short and funny.) As one commenter said, “It’s always like that—we speak in one language, switch to another, and curse in Russian.” I have to say that Russian is the best language for cursing I know, bar none.

In the process of researching my post on the multilingual ad (and let’s not slack off, people—there are words yet to be identified—kawi, bukola, yemashala…) I ran across the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary (aka the Kamusi Project, kamusi being Swahili for ‘dictionary’).

The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is a collaborative work by people all over the world. Together we are working to establish new dictionaries of the Swahili language – Kiswahili – both within Swahili and between Swahili and English. We are preparing print-based dictionaries and multi-media Swahili learning applications, all accessible to you through this home page. We invite you to become a contributing editor – help refine our lexicon by using our unique Edit Engine. Swahili is the most widely spoken African language, with more than 50 million speakers in East Africa and Central Africa, particularly in Tanzania (including Zanzibar) and Kenya. We suggest that first-time visitors to the Kamusi Project take a few minutes to read through our page of Frequently Asked Questions.

I once got my Swahili to the point that I could read a simple newspaper story; this resource tempts me to renew my acquaintance.

Update (Sept. 2020). I’ve replaced the dead links with archived ones, but the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is now online here (assuming it’s the same project).

Frequent correspondent Laurent sent me a most interesting advertisement, in which the letters of the word “Chevron” are made up of the words for ‘energy’ in a bunch of languages. I can identify most of them by using dictionaries and/or Google, but there are some I can’t. Here’s the image (click for large version):

And here’s what I’ve got so far, starting with the words making up the letter C; if anyone can fill in any blanks, I will be much obliged:

ŋsī – ?
ஆற்றல் [aatral] – Tamil
energy – English
ngolo – Kikongo? (according to this site, “NGOLO means energy, force, power. Moyo means life/spirit in the Kikongo language.”)
শক্তি [shokti] – Bengali
nukiorneq – Greenlandic
amaanda – a South African language
orka – Icelandic (I believe this is related to English work)
エネルギー [enérugii] – Japanese (obviously borrowed from German, because if it were from English it would be enaaji)
ພະລັງ? [pa:la:ng] – Lao
brændstof – Danish [actually means ‘fuel’ — tsk]
kawi – Swahili?
enerhiya – Hiligaynon (a language of the Philippines; a commenter adds that it could also be Tagalog or any other Philippine language)
енергия [energiya] – Bulgarian
enerģija – Latvian
pūngao – Maori
energji – Albanian
energie – Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Romanian
emandla – Swazi (Swati, siSwati)
fuinneamh – Irish (pronounced something like FWINN-ya, if you were wondering)
enerji – Turkish (j is as in French, like the s of leisure, and the word is borrowed from French, unless of course it’s from Sumerian)
bukola – ?
ऊर्जा [ūrjā] – Hindi
энергетика [energetika] – Russian
matla – Sotho (from googling I find it used in Southern Sotho and Tswana)
ენერგია [energia] – Georgian
توانائی [tavāna’i] – Persian (Many thanks to Tim May for providing the Unicode for me to copy; he adds: “Online dictionaries return “توانايي”, though, which gets a lot more hits, and so does “توانائي” and “توانايى”. The first one looks like it’s what it says in the advert, though.”)
قوت [quvat] – Pushtu? (also could represent Dari quvvat)
ឋាមពល [tha:ma’pɔl] – Khmer/Cambodian
Energie – German
能源 [néngyuán] – Chinese
күч [küch] – Kyrgyz (common Turkic word; cf Turkish güç)
energía – Spanish
شکتی [shakti] – Urdu
makasi – Lingala?
umfutho – ? (Obviously a language related to Zulu, but doesn’t mean ‘energy’ in Zulu as far as I can tell)
බලය [balaya] – Sinhala
эрчим хүч [erchim khüch] – Mongolian
에너지 [eneoji] – Korean
energia – Portuguese, Catalan, Polish, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Basque
maatla – a South African language (Pedi?)
énergie – French
nishati – Swahili?
hinya – Kikuyu??
енергія [energiya] – Ukrainian
พลังงาน [phalaŋŋaan] – Thai
ingufu – Kinyarwanda
אנרגיה [energyah] – Hebrew
simba – ? (Unfortunately, the very well known Swahili word simba ‘lion’ pretty much makes Google useless here)
amandla – Zulu (It’s under -andla if you ever have to look it up in a Zulu dictionary)
energija – Lithuanian, Slovene, Croatian (or, if you’re old-fashioned, Serbo-Croatian)
ενέργεια [enéryia] – Greek
енергетски извор – Macedonian
inirjia – Aymara?
pachamamaq – Quechua
yana qori unun – ?? (I don’t even know if this is one, two, or three entries, but none of the words occurs separately)
energi – Norwegian, Swedish (also Danish, which is represented by brændstof)
pissens – Kreyol (Haitian Creole, from French puissance)
buka – ?
tenaga kerja – Indonesian
năng lượng – Vietnamese (a loan from Chinese 能量[nengliang])
daya – Malay
hery – Malagasy (Curiously, final i is always written y in Malagasy)
Ենէրգիա [energia] – Armenian
طاقه [Taaqa] – Arabic
enegiýa – Turkmen (?)
mbaretekue – Guarani
mphamvu – Chichewa
yemashala – ?
enerġija – Maltese
agbara – Yoruba

Update (May 2023). Alas, the image is no longer accessible, and the Internet Archive didn’t capture a snapshot of this post until a decade later, by which time it was already gone. Sic transit.

In my last entry the word theodolite cropped up in the OED’s definition of circumferentor; I got curious about its etymology and looked it up, only to find:

Origin unknown… The name, alike in the Latinized form theodelitus and the vernacular theodelite (subseq. –dolite), originated in England, and is not known in French and German until the 19th c. Its first user, and probable inventor, L. or T. Digges, has left no account of its composition, as to which various futile conjectures, incompatible with its early history and use, have been offered; such is the notion that it arose in some way out of alhidada or its corruption athelida occurring in Bourne’s Treasure for Travailers 1578, which an examination of the works of Digges and Bourne, where both words occur in their proper senses, shows to be absurd. Theodelite has the look of a formation from Greek; can it have been (like many modern names of inventions) an unscholarly formation from θεαομαι [theaomai] ‘I view’ or θεω [theo] ‘behold’ and δηλος [dēl-os] ‘visible, clear, manifest’, with a meaningless termination?

Dammit, if people are going to invent words, the least they can do is let us know where they got the materials!

[Read more…]

Continuing on with Mason & Dixon, I have followed the Durham lad Jeremiah Dixon into the local “Ale-Grotto of terrible Reputation” the Cudgel and Throck, where he is reluctantly drinking with his old teacher William Emerson and the Jesuit Fr. Christopher Maire, who is trying to recruit him to work for the Society, perhaps in China. Here is a snippet of their conversation:

“Ye’d find nothing like this in China, Jeremiah, Lad,” cries Emerson.

“Mr. Dixon,” declares the Jesuit, “at present, owing to the pernicious Cult of Feng Shui, you would find it a Surveyor’s Bad Dream,— nowhere may a Geometer encounter an honest 360-Degree Circle,— rather, incomprehensibly and perversely, in willful denial of God’s Disposition of Time and Space, preferring 365 and a Quarter.”

“That being the number of Days in a year, what Human Surveyor, down here upon the Earth, would reject thah’,— each Day a single, perfect Chinese Degree,— were 360 not vastly more convenient, of course, to figure with? Surely God, being Omniscient, has little trouble with either…? all the Log Tables right there in His Nob, doesn’t he,—” Dixon, having been out tramping over the Fields and Fells for the past few weeks, with Table and Circumferentor, still enjoying a certain orthogonal Momentum, “and 365 and a quarter seems the sort of Division Jesuits might embrace,— the discomfort of all that extra calculation…? sort of mental Cilice, perhaps…?”

“Oh dear,” Emerson’s voice echoing within his Ale-can.

One of the pleasures of the book for me is looking up unknown words, and there are two of them in this passage. A circumferentor is, according to the OED: “Surveying. An instrument consisting of a flat brass bar with sights at the ends and a circular brass box in the middle, containing a magnetic needle, which plays over a graduated circle; the whole being supported on a staff or tripod. (Now commonly superseded by the THEODOLITE.)” And cilice (pronounced SILL-iss, from Latin cilicium ‘Cilician’) is “Hair-cloth; a rough garment made of hair-cloth, generally worn as a penitential robe.” Or so says the OED—but the Mason & Dixon glossary says “Jesuit chastity belt, a wire girdle with sharp metallic points to irritate the skin,” backing it up with a quotation from an anti-Opus Dei website, of whose trustworthiness I cannot judge, so I’ll stick with the OED for now.

Incidentally, you may be thinking (as I did) that the reference to Feng Shui is one of Pynchon’s beloved anachronisms, like having Dixon talk about Ley-Lines (the ley, “the supposed line of a prehistoric track in a straight line usually from hilltop to hilltop with identifying points such as ponds, mounds, etc., marking its route,” being a bit of lunacy invented in the 1920s), but no, it turns out the OED’s first citation is from as far back as 1797: “The greater part of the Chinese are of the opinion that all the happiness and misfortunes of life depend upon the fong-choui” (Encycl. Brit. IV. 679/1), so it’s not inconceivable a well-traveled Jesuit could have bandied the word about a generation earlier.

And this just for Eliza: a few paragraphs later Dixon refers to himself as an “old Geordie aslog thro’ the clarts”—clarts being, as I expect she knows, a northern dialect term for “sticky or claggy dirt, mud, filth.”

From SIL‘s LinguaLinks Library, the Glossary of linguistic terms: “This is a living glossary, and suggestions are welcome for additions or corrections.” Useful. (Via Incoming Signals.)

We’re all familiar with the expression “the crack of dawn“; I, for one, was not acquainted with the recent variant “the butt-crack of dawn,” and I can’t say I’m the better for having been introduced to it. But esthetics have no place in science, and if you wish to pursue an investigation of this phenomenon, you will direct yourself to Geoff Pullum’s initial announcement and Mark Liberman’s follow-up in Language Log.
Yes, I know esthetics do have a place in science—in fact, I believe some famous scientist said that the correct theory is always the most esthetically pleasing—but I needed a little inaccurate rhetoric for my sentence. These things happen.

Having touted George Oppen in my previous entry, I realized I’d never posted any of his poetry and decided to remedy the omission. Here’s the last poem in his great book Of Being Numerous (I presume the fifth line refers to Swan’s Island, Maine; the poem was originally published in Poetry, December 1967):

BALLAD

Astrolabes and lexicons
Once in the great houses—

A poor lobsterman

Met by chance
On Swan’s Island

Where he was born
We saw the old farmhouse

Propped and leaning on its hilltop
On that island
Where the ferry runs

A poor lobsterman

His teeth were bad

He drove us over that island
In an old car

A well-spoken man

Hardly real
As he knew in those rough fields

Lobster pots and their gear
Smelling of salt

The rocks outlived the classicists,
The rocks and the lobstermen’s huts

And the sights of the island
The ledges in the rough sea seen from the road

And the harbor
And the post office

Difficult to know what one means
—to be serious and to know what one means—

An island
Has a public quality

His wife in the front seat

In a soft dress
Such as poor women wear

She took it that we came—
I don’t know how to say, she said—

Not for anything we did, she said,
Mildly, ‘from God’. She said

What I like more than anything
Is to visit other islands…

The Academy of American Poets has selected “31 groundbreaking books of poetry“; I was looking down the list and nodding (yup, the usual suspects, all good stuff but no surprises here) when I hit Of Being Numerous by George Oppen (1968). Any list that includes the unjustly neglected Oppen is worth posting about, so here ’tis. (Via Ramage.)