There’s something oddly compelling about the word simurgh; it sounds exotic and wondrous, and when you find out (at an early age, if you’re lucky) that it’s “an immortal bird that nests in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge” and “is known to take children into its nest to nurse them or foster them,” the name seems somehow fitting. Now, the OED says Persian sīmurgh is from “Pahlavi sīn (Av. saēna, Skr. çyena) eagle + murgh bird,” but the first syllable sounds like the Persian word sī ‘thirty,’ a coincidence that led to one of the masterpieces of world literature, Fariduddin Attar’s Mantiq at-tayr or Conference of the Birds, available in many translations. I have the Penguin edition translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, who summarize the story in their Introduction as follows:

The birds of the world gather together to seek a king. They are told by the hoopoe that they have a king—the Simorgh—but that he lives far away and the journey to him is hazardous. The birds are at first enthusiastic to begin their search, but when they realize how difficult the journey will be they start to make excuses… [In the end the thirty who persevere] are finally admitted and find that the Simorgh they have sought is none other than themselves. The moment depends on a pun—only thirty (si) birds (morgh) are left at the end of the Way, and the si morgh meet the Simorgh, the goal of their quest.

Attar’s work has been an inspiration for artists both classic and modern, not to mention a great jazz record by Dave Holland, and the simurgh inspired a great MonkeyFilter post by the quidnunc kid, which I urge you to visit for many more links, including some gorgeous illustrations and a long and involving Mandean tale about the bird’s visit to the noble king Hirmiz Shah.

I just discovered the Collation of language names page on the OED site; created to help users deal with the plethora of varying abbreviations used in the days before they decided to simply give all language names in full, it’s a staggering demonstration of the number of languages to which reference must be made in fully describing English. (I was amused on the A page to see that the second item was “Aboriginal”; I assume that referred to any of the native langugages of Australia, and that it’s long since been retired in favor of actual language names. Oh dear, and a few lines below that is “African”—I hope that was retired a long time ago.)

Beth at Cassandra Pages has posted an entry that does an excellent job of recounting the kinds of interactions that can defeat us when we’re trying to operate in a second language, and the way it makes us feel:

“It doesn’t matter how long I live here or how hard I try,” I said to myself, miserably, “I’ll never master this language completely, and I will never, ever fit in….”

As I thought about it more, I decided that it wasn’t so much an inability to make myself understood – for I’m pretty good at that, using language or not – as it was not being able to understand others, and how humiliated I feel when they instantly switch to English, or turn their backs – whether the gesture is real or only felt. The switching, I’ve found, is often Canadian politeness, and most people will continue in French if you tell them you’re trying to learn and improve. I recognized that discomfiture was also coming from a bruised ego. I am not only a word person, and someone who wants to communicate and know other people, but I’m an over-achiever, and I can’t stand feeling stupid or unaccomplished, especially in this sphere.

I know exactly how she feels, and there’s a certain relief mixed in with my chagrin that I’m no longer living in a city where I always had the opportunity to actually practice my languages. It’s so much easier just to read them.

Addendum. Compare La Coquette’s adventures in French, courtesy of Tatyana in the comments below.

Here’s why the OED is so great. Four times a year, they issue a list of new and updated entries; the latest, from March, is called “ovest to Papua New Guinean.” Naturally, I looked up “ovest,” thinking that it might be a borrowing of the Italian word for ‘west’ (Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, for instance, is Verso ovest in Italian), but no: it’s a dialectal word for ‘acorns and oak mast.’ It’s the modern form (with an excrescent, or epenthetic, -s- from somewhere or other, perhaps harvest) of the Old English ofet ‘fruit’ (spelled obet in early glosses), which is related to German Obst. The Old English poem known as Genesis B has a line “Adam, frea min, þis ofet is swa swete” [Adam, my lord/master/husband, this fruit is so sweet], and the 14th-century Ayenbite of Inwit has this rendition of a famous line of the Ave Maria: “Y-blissed þou ine wymmen, and y-blissed þet ouet of þine wombe.” After the 14th century it goes underground for half a millennium, reappearing as a dialect word from Hampshire:

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I’ve just discovered that the Edward G.Seidensticker translation of Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) is online. I don’t know what the deal is, since the book is still in print and less than thirty years old, but if you have a hankering to read a thousand-page classic online, here’s your chance, if you can finish it before it gets yanked. (And if you want the whole text on a single web page—well, you can have that too. The internet is large and generous.) And I found a nice page of Genji links originally compiled for a class.

So then it occurred to me that the original Japanese text must be online, and of course it is, doubtless in many places, and this is old hat to you Japanese experts out there, but it knocked me out to find this site, which not only has the original text and a modernized version but a romanized (romaji) one as well, and will display all three at once (in parallel frames) if you wish to compare them. And it turns out to be part of the Japanese Text Initiative. a collaboration of the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center and the University of Pittsburgh East Asian Library to “make texts of classical Japanese literature available on the World Wide Web”; just take a look at all the texts they have from the premodern and modern periods. Amazing. I really should learn the language. But I can make use of the texts anyway, after a fashion, thanks to POPjisyo.

Anyway, I got started on all this because of a wonderful site that has photographs of all the places mentioned in the novel, a link I got from the equally wonderful Plep.

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My wife discovered Edmund Hogan’s 1910 Onomasticon Goedelicum: locorum et tribuum Hiberniae et Scotiae: an index, with identifications, to the Gaelic names of places and tribes online and of course shared it with me; I poked around and discovered it was posted by the Locus project, which aims “to produce a new Historical Dictionary of Irish placenames and tribal names to replace Fr Edmund Hogan’s Onomasticon Goedelicum.” (They “would like to appeal to anyone who has new or additional information on any placename, whether cited by Hogan or not, to make this information available.”) And from their list of links I got to the Scottish Place-Name Society, which “exists for the support of all aspects of toponymic studies in Scotland, and in particular the work of the Scottish Place-Name Database at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Edinburgh.” Two worthy projects, and this lover of place names wishes them well.

I was listening to the Writer’s Almanac this morning and it closed with a Donald Hall poem I very much liked, so I thought I’d share it with you:

The Old Pilot

He discovers himself on an old airfield.
He thinks he was there before,
but rain has washed out the lettering of a sign.
A single biplane, all struts and wires,
stands in the long grass and wildflowers.
He pulls himself into the narrow cockpit
although his muscles are stiff
and sits like an egg in a nest of canvas.
He sees that the machine gun has rusted.
The glass over the instruments
has broken, and the red arrows are gone
from his gas gauge and his altimeter.
When he looks up, his propeller is turning,
although no one was there to snap it.
He lets out the throttle. The engine catches
and the propeller spins into the wind.
He bumps over holes in the grass,
and he remembers to pull back on the stick.
He rises from the land in a high bounce
which gets higher, and suddenly he is flying again.
He feels the old fear, and rising over the fields
the old gratitude. In the distance, circling
in a beam of late sun like birds migrating,
there are the wings of a thousand biplanes.

Grant Barrett, project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, writes to say they’re looking for letters of support from users of the existing two volumes of the dictionary: “Editing is currently underway for the final two volumes (in the P-Z range) with Volume III tentatively scheduled for release in 2006. Just a few lines about how you use the dictionary would be enough. You can send them to him directly at grant.barrett@oup.com.”

Come on, people, I know you love this magnificent work as much as I do (if you’re not acquainted with it, seek it out at your local library and discover its riches); slang has often been documented haphazardly, but never with the kind of rigor and thoroughness on display in the two handsome volumes already produced. Let the folks at Oxford know you appreciate their picking it up from the half-finished oblivion to which Random House had consigned it!

The Japan 2001 Waka Website is “a site devoted to the many types of classical Japanese poetry.”

During the course of the Japan 2001 Festival we built up a collection of 2001 poems here, covering approximately the first thousand years of poetry in Japan. The poems appear in the original Japanese, transcribed into the Roman alphabet (Romanised) and translated into English. They are accompanied by commentary and background material to fill in the blanks on the world the Old Japanese poets lived in, their beliefs and society.

I love this sort of thing, and look forward to seeing much more of it as the internet expands.
Here’s the first poem, from the Kojiki, “‘The Records of Ancient Matters’, a volume composed at some point in the late seventh century which recounts Japan’s mythological beginnings and the history of the Imperial line” (I’m omitting the characters):

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I just learned a new word, and I rather wish I hadn’t. Reading an interview with Mahmood Mamdani, an Indo-Ugandan scholar who’s currently Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University and has written what sounds like a very interesting book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, I hit the following rough patch:

I do acknowledge the importance of the nativist critique that calls for a fuller grasp of historicity, but one also needs to understand its weakness, because its sense of historicity is compromised by its search for authenticity. The point is not to just to sidestep the nativist critique but to sublate it, in the manner in which Engels understood sublating Hegel in his critique of Ludwig Feuerbach; to take into consideration that which is relevant, effective and forceful in the critique but at the same time to break away from its preoccupation with origins and authenticity.

That’s classic High Academic dialect, but I was able to hack my way through most of it; the verb “sublate,” however, defeated me. It turns out that, although it has been used by logicians to mean simply ‘deny,’ it has a more specific meaning: ‘to negate or eliminate (as an element in a dialectic process) but preserve as a partial element in a synthesis,’ in the admirably clear words of Merriam-Webster. I say “admirably clear” because the OED throws up its hands and says simply “see quots. 1865.” You want to see quots. 1865? Here they are:

1865 J. H. STIRLING Secret of Hegel I. 354 Nothing passes over into Being, but Being equally sublates itself, is a passing over into Nothing, Ceasing-to-be. They sublate not themselves mutually, not the one the other externally; but each sublates itself in itself, and is in its own self the contrary of itself. Ibid. 357 A thing is sublated, resolved, only so far as it has gone into unity with its opposite.

Got that? Me neither. The Secret of Hegel could remain a secret forever with explanations like that. But why “sublate”? Here the OED is more forthcoming: “rendering G. aufheben, used by Hegel as having the opposite meanings of ‘destroy’ and ‘preserve.’” And yes, aufheben is a many-splendored word; the basic meaning is ‘pick up’ (heb es auf ‘pick it up!’), but it also means ‘keep, put aside,’ ‘abolish, do away with,’ ‘raise, lift’ (eg, a blockade), and ‘offset, make up for.’ So if you’re translating dear old Hegel, how do you render it in English, given that English does not have a word with that particular combination of senses?

Well, there are several approaches. You could keep the down-to-earth, colloquial nature of the word and render it “pick up,” letting the reader get used to the specialized usage and forcing future writers to say “to pick it up, in the Hegelian sense.” Or you could keep the sense of the word in context, giving up on the basic-vocabulary aspect; you could, for instance, render it “supersede,” which I think conveys the meaning well enough. But James Hutchison Stirling (for I assume it was he who set English Hegelianism on this contorted course: “his style, though often striking, is so marked by the influence of Carlyle, and he so resolutely declines to conform to ordinary standards of systematic exposition, that his work is almost as difficult as the original which it is intended to illuminate”) chooses to reach into the grab-bag of Latinity he doubtless picked up at Glasgow University and pulls out sublate (from sublatum, the past participle of tollo ‘pick up’), a verb that will convey absolutely nothing to the average reader and thus is catnip to a certain type of scholarly mind. It’s the same mentality that chose to render Freud’s Besetzung by “cathexis,” Fehlleistung by “parapraxis,” and Ich by “ego.” I wish translators would make the reader’s comprehension their main goal rather than seize the opportunity to show off their classical education.