This has been niggling at me for years, and now that the guy is back in Lebanon I’m inspired to ask my readers who know Arabic: is General Aoun‘s name, which I gather is عون in Arabic, pronounced the same as the identically spelled word ‘aun ‘help, aid; helper, aide, assistant’? This is one of those times when I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough.

The other night I watched a deeply moving documentary on PBS, “Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness,” about a heroic Japanese consul who saved thousands of Jewish lives during WWII:

As Japan’s consul to Lithuania, Sugihara risked career, disgrace, his life, and the lives of his family defying Tokyo by writing transit visas for refugees desperate to escape persecution. In August 1940, Sugihara spent upwards of sixteen hours a day issuing visas, until Soviet-occupied Lithuania forced the final shutdown of the country’s last remaining consulates. In the end, more than 2,000 Sugihara-stamped passports allowed hundreds of families to flee Europe through Russia to safe havens abroad. Today it is estimated that more than 40,000 people owe their very existence to Sugihara’s heroic acts of humanitarianism.

(You can find many more details, as well as video clips, at the website.)

His full name was Chiune Sugihara, but after the war, when the Japanese government fired him and he was forced to take any job he could get, he wound up working in Moscow under the name Sempo Sugiwara. I wondered about the relationship between the names, and now Bill Poser of Language Log explains what’s going on in a detailed post (hint: the pairs of given names and family names are identical, but in different ways). I’m glad he posted about it, both because it informed me and because it gave me a chance to post on this topic and urge everyone to read about a nearly forgotten man.

Anggarrgoon quotes the following news report by Abantika Ghosh:

NEW DELHI, MAY 2 Four months ago, his tribe’s near-miraculous escape from the devastating tsunami catapulted King Jirake to fame. His interviews describing the disaster, and how his tribe was adjusting in their new quarters in Port Blair, made headlines across the world.

But all that was in stark contrast to the 65-year-old’s quiet and painful death in a Chennai Hospital on April 17—the tribal chief died of brain haemorrhage and consequent paralysis.

And apart from the 49 remaining members of his tribe, including Jirake’s grandson Berebe, who was born days before he died, the only other people mourning his demise were a group of researchers from the School of Languages in Jawaharlal Nehru University.

For, Jirake was the last member of his tribe who knew all the 10 variants of the Great Andamanese language. With his death, the trilingual Great Andamanese-English-Hindi dictionary that Professor Anvita Abbi’s team from JNU is working on, has suffered a setback that it will probably never be able to fully recover from…

(The rest of the article is here.) I thought at first that the “10 variants” were those listed in the Ethnologue family tree for Great Andamanese, but all except A-Pucikwar are said to be extinct.

I had always vaguely wondered about the place name Bikini (after which the famous swimwear was named); now, thanks to an exhaustive investigation by piloklok (Bob Kennedy’s linguistics blog, which has been promoted to the blogroll for this service to etymology), I know that the Marshallese form is Pikinni and that this “is composed of pik ‘surface’ and ni ‘coconut’.” Now I have only two questions: 1) Is the stress, as my Webster’s Geographical Dictionary and the Wikipedia article say, on the first syllable? and 2) What does “piloklok” mean?

(Via Literal-Minded.)

Update. See now Jory Dayne’s extremely informative comment in this Wordorigins thread:

Pik and Ni are glossed as ‘plane surface’ and ‘coconut’ in The Marshallese-English Dictionary—and according to Abo, Bender, Cappele & DeBrum, Pik,Ni is the origin of the place name Pikinni. I guess the real mystery, however, is why the Marshallese opted to single that particular islet out for that specific feature, when nearly all the other islets in the whole of the group share almost identical features: namely, a flat surface where coconuts are growing.

There is another gloss for Pik, and that is to fly, as in the flight of birds, or flapping. Given the tendency to name places for an apparently arbitrary, isolated event, this seems like it could also be a possibility—perhaps in a storm or what have you; that’s pure speculation on on my part, however.

As for stress, I would offer that PIK(ih)NI was probably the original pronunciation—for a couple reasons.

1. I’m willing to bet that the second ‘i’ in Pikinni/bikini is actually just an excrescent vowel… For instance, the Marshallese word for ‘doctor’ is taktõ (dahkduh)—borrowed from English. It is pronounced, however, as DAHK(ih)Duh. A non-loan word, jerbal follows the same pattern. It is pronounced JEHR(ih)bahl.

So you’re probably looking at the name actually being Pikni, with the excrescent vowel inserted between the two parts to help it conform to custom. Other place names also follow this pattern…

2. The ‘N’ in Ni, is a heavier ‘n’—the doubling in the current spelling (Pikinni) is probably to reflect that (although they have recently switched to using a cedilla beneath the heavy consonants to indicate this). So while the stress would be placed on Pik, the weight of the ‘n’ would give that syllable a stress of its own.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that the current pronunciation of Pikinni seems like it has changed to match the one common to English speakers (biKIni). I offer that with the caveat that I have only been in contact with Marshallese who have relocated to the U.S. (although most very, very recently)—so it may just be that group, while native Marshallese are “keepin it real.”

According to a Guardian story by John Ezard:

The Man Booker prize organisation yesterday unveiled a £15,000 special translation award as part of its international fiction prize, whose first winner is due to be announced early next month.
The move has been inspired partly by the judges arriving at a final shortlist in which 10 of the 17 authors wrote in other languages. The winning author would have got £60,000, with nothing, until now, for the translator.
“The judges became increasingly aware of the huge role translators play,” said their chairman, John Carey.
Among those in line for the inaugural prize are the translators of Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Lem, Naguib Mahfouz, Tomas Eloy Martínez and Kenzaburo Oe. The winning author decides which translator gets the prize, with discretion to split it among several translators.

About time, say I. But which translator’s picture did they use to illustrate the story? Why, none of them, of course; they ran a photo of Gabriel García Márquez! In fact, they didn’t even name any of the translators. Calling Rodney Dangerfield…
(Via Naked Translations.)

Reading Fred Anderson’s superb Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766, with its penetrating insights into every side’s point of view and what really mattered in the end (the Battle of Quebec, in which Wolfe and Montcalm so famously fell, was less important to the fate of Canada than the Battle of Quiberon Bay two months later, which put the French navy out of commission and prevented the resupply and reinforcement of Canada), I noticed a particularly telling misspelling in the following quote from the journal of Captain Samuel Jenks, a Massachusetts blacksmith, in an entry written after the fall of Montreal on September 9, 1760: “I fear we shall be kept [at Crown Point] until ye last of November, for ye command is left to Haverland, & I know he delights to fatigue ye provincials.” (I should point out that ye is a purely graphic alternative for the, due to the similarity of handwritten y and Þ; he would have read it “…until the last of November…” and so on. I will also point out that he was quite correct, and the commander, so solicitous of his regular troops from Britain, kept the provincials “working on the fort and its barracks despite a terrifying outbreak of smallpox, severe weather, and the utter lack of an enemy threat”; Anderson adds that “there was no love to be lost between the provincials and regulars who together had added Canada to the British empire.”)

Now, the commander’s name was Haviland, and Jenks’s spelling Haverland tells me that his dialect was non-rhotic (did not pronounce postvocalic r). I had somehow got it into my head that the loss of the r sound began later, but as this site says:

In the seventeenth century, most of England was rhotic, but non-rhotic speech was common in the southeast, near London. By the eighteenth century this became a prestige variety. In America, areas colonized by higher-class immigrants from southeastern England, such as Tidewater Virginia and the Eastern New England area, maintained non-rhotic speech, which is why the stereotyped Boston accent is r-less–“I pahked my cah by Hahvahd yahd” being a prime example. The r-lessness resulted partly from these speakers being (or being descended from) speakers of r-less dialects in England, and partly from the contact that wealthier speakers from these regions maintained with London at a time when r-lessness was prestigious.

Other regions, such as the mid-Atlantic states, Western New England, and upland areas around Virginia, were chiefly colonized by Scots-Irish or Western English immigrants who spoke r-ful dialects, and did not maintain much contact with upper-class British speech. (New York City, traditionally r-less, is a slightly differerent story; the area was originally r-ful, but r-lessness grew in the mid-nineteenth century through immigration from New England.)

The site also has this nice bit: “a classic joke in the New York area has a student writing ‘A tragic hero is one who falls through the floor in his character.'”

The High Icelandic language centre (Miðstöð háfrónska tungumálsins) is… well, it’s pretty strange. In the words of their manifesto:

The High Icelandic Language movement has its origin in the Icelandic hyperpuristic circles of the nineties. Its members were inspired by the puristic extremities of the nineteenth-century Fjölnismen and the fanatic translation of Goethe’s Faust by Bjarni Jónsson frá Vogi. Towards the end of the millennium the movement was nothing more than a few individuals who were unsatisfied with the ‘in their opinion’ moderately puristic endeavours of the Icelandic word-commissions. These men went further where the Fjölnismen had stopped. Lists of purely Icelandic geographical names, Icelandicized proper names and names of chemicals were collected. All these efforts culminated in the foundation of the ‘Language Laundry’ (Nýyrðasmiðja Málþvottahús), which brought hyperpurism into the spotlight…
Languages free of foreignisms don’t exist. From a linguistic point of view, there is no such thing as a ”pure” language. All languages (even High Icelandic) have borrowings. But there is a difference between purity and originality. A word like ‘sinkbróðir’ for ‘cadmium’ contains a loan-word, but the compound as a whole is unique in the world. In a way, this kind of genuineness could be interpreted as a form of purity. Still the High Icelandics aim at reducing as much as possible the foreign words in Icelandic that were borrowed after the first written texts. The exclusion of many words won’t necessarily lead to language impoverishment. In order to avoid that, a large part of obsolete Old Norse vocabulary will be resurrected. The result will be a hyperpure variant of modern Icelandic…

But you needn’t be Icelandic to be High Icelandic:

[Read more…]

OK, first go read Gary Shteyngart’s The Mother Tongue Between Two Slices of Rye (from the Spring 2004 Threepenny Review). It’s very funny.

When I return to Russia, my birthplace, I cannot sleep for days. The Russian language swaddles me. The trilling r’s tickle the underside of my feet. Every old woman cooing to her grandson is my dead grandmother. Every glum and purposeful man picking up his wife from work in a dusty Volga sedan is my father. Every young man cursing the West with his friends over a late morning beer in the Summer Garden is me. I have fallen off the edges of the known universe, with its Palm Pilots, obnoxious vintage shops, and sleek French-Caribbean Brooklyn bistros, and have returned into a kind of elemental Shteyngart-land, a nightmare where every consonant resonates like a punch against the liver, every rare vowel makes my flanks quiver as if I’m in love…

That was great, right? The man can tell a story. I would have posted the piece for its own sake posted the piece a year ago, but I also want to go on for a bit about this:

Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony sits on the slope of a hill, beneath which lies a small but very prodigious brook, from which my father and I extract enormous catfish and an even larger fish whose English name I have never learned (in Russian it’s called a sig; the Oxford-Russian dictionary tells me, rather obliquely, that it is a “freshwater fish of the salmon family”).

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Mark Liberman of Language Log is posting a great series of entries on the function of the well-known Canadian tag “eh”: The meaning of eh (describing the findings of a 2004 paper [pdf] by Elaine Gold, “Canadian Eh?: A Survey of Contemporary Use”), Open access eh (the results of a search of Canadian Hansards), Um, em, uh, ah, aah, er, eh (other “filled pauses”), and most recently Canadian “eh” and Japanese “ne” (comparison with a similar Japanese particle). An interesting quote from the last:

Robin Lakoff’s 1975 account of English tag questions, based on her introspective judgments, was that such tags “are associated with a desire for confirmation or approval which signals a lack of self-confidence in the speaker.” But when Cameron et al. 1988 looked at the distribution of tag questions in nine hours of unscripted broadcast talk, they found that such tags were used only by the participants that they characterized as “powerful” — in other words, those “institutionally responsible for the conduct of the talk”. These were doctors as opposed to patients, teachers as opposed to students, talk show hosts as opposed to guests.

This is why it’s important to do research rather than depending on introspection and theorizing.
Update. There’s further interesting discussion at piloklok, Bob Kennedy’s new linguistics blog, which I discovered via HeiDeas.

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.

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