Morfablog has a wonderful post (most unusually including an English explanation—Morfablog, being a Welsh blog, is normally in Welsh) about one of those embarrassing e-mail mishaps. It seems Hedd Gwynfor of the Welsh Language Society “sends an email to Wales@new.labour.org.uk asking some fairly general questions about Welsh Labour’s commitment to the Welsh language. Since Wales is, on paper at least, a bilingual country, Hedd writes the email in his native language. He doesn’t provide a translation.” The e-mail reads:

Beth yw polisi y Blaid Lafur ar yr iaith Gymraeg yn yr etholiadau Seneddol yma? Ydy’r Blaid Lafur yn cefnogi’r alwad dros Ddeddf Iaith Newydd?

Which Morfablog is kind enough to translate for those of us who aren’t Welsh and thus shouldn’t (unlike the Welsh Labour Party) be expected to understand it:

What is the Labour Party’s policy on the Welsh language in these Parlimentary elections? Does the Labour Party support the call for a new Welsh Language Act?

The woman who got the e-mail couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and composed the following touching message:

Hi Dave,

I have it on good authority (as I cant understand a word of it myself!!!) that this e-mail is asking what we think about using the Welsh Language in Wales or something like that.

Thanks.

Karen Bradbury – Administrator
Welsh Labour

Unfortunately, she sent it right back to Hedd Gwynfor, who promptly posted it to maes-e.com, a Welsh language bulletin board. Hilarity ensued… or I presume it did, not having the Welsh myself. But Morfablog thinks it’s pretty funny, and so do I. (Thanks to Songdog for alerting me to this.)

The Ancient Library tells the visitor:

You’ve reached the first stirrings of a major new classics resource. So far, we’re mostly testing the engine and working on architecture. Don’t be fooled; this is going to be a major site in the near future, including:

* Scanned secondary works, including classical dictionaries, histories, grammars and other classics books.
* A large collection of primary texts, both scanned and in HTML text. All primary sources will allow Wiki-style commentary.
* A “Wiki Classical Dictionary” users can edit, similar in some respects to Wikipedia.
* Community mechanisms, including forums for classicists and others interested in the ancient world to interact.

They already have the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith (1867), the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities by William Smith (1870), the Dictionary of Classical Antiquities by Oskar Seyffert (1894) (a guide to the ancient world, with 716 pages, 2,630 entries and over 450 illustrations), and the Classical Gazetteer by William Hazlitt (1851) (a dictionary of some 14,000 ancient Greek and Roman places), as well as a number of other works like the Manual of Greek Literature by Charles Anthon (1853) (a survey of Greek literature and authors all the way to the fall of Constantinople; excellent coverage of obscure authors), and they’re creating a Wiki Classical Dictionary (WCD) that “is to the Oxford Classical Dictionary what Wikipedia is to the Encyclopedia Britannica.” A promising beginning, and I look forward to its further development. (Via Sauvage Noble.)

Is this on the level? It looks like an April Fool’s joke—a site in simplifyed speling for “pêrsone ki on dê z’inkapasité intélêktuêl” (peepul hoo are not so brite)—but it’s part of the official site of the city of Montreal/la Ville de Montréal, so I guess it’s real. But I can’t help but think it’s ill advised; it reminds me of the “Rezedents Rights & Rispansabilities” brochure (pdf of actual document) published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development some years ago and quickly withdrawn because of the ruckus it caused (see the Straight Dope summary). I mean, really—check out the page for the “Bibliotêk”:

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Deep in south Poland is a town called Wilamowice. Like many towns in Poland, it has a German name as well, in this case Wilmesau. But this town has a third name, Wymysau, in a dialect of German spoken only there, Wymysojer. So obscure is this dialect (even Ethnologue ignores it) that Avva suspected that the Wikipedia article about it might be a clever fiction, along with Florian Biesik, who was said to have written poetry in it in the 19th century. But no, apparently it’s genuine; there are at least two scholarly articles and a book about it. So I guess we can accept this lullaby (from the Wikipedia article) as genuine as well:

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Edward Tregear’s Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary (1891), the work which made him a Fellow of the French Academy (according to this reference site, which misspells his name and thus is perhaps not entirely trustworthy), has been put online by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (which has put many other books online, including all 50 volumes of the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War). From Tregear’s preface:

Regarding the Maori speech of New Zealand as but a dialect of the great Polynesian language, the Author has attempted to organize and show in a concise manner the existing related forms common to New Zealand and the Polynesian Islands. Several attempts have been made to produce a Comparative Polynesian Dictionary, but so gigantic was the labour, so enormous the mass of material, that the compilers have shrunk back appalled in the initiatory stages of the work, and all that remains of their efforts has been a few imperfect and unreliable pages of vocabulary scattered here and there through books treating of the Malayan and Pacific Islands. The present work is, at all events, continuous and sustained; it does not pretend to be a dictionary of Polynesian, but to present to the reader those Polynesian words which are related to the Maori dialect; using the word Maori (i.e., Polynesian, “native,” “indigenous”) in the restricted sense familiar to Europeans, as applying to the Maori people of New Zealand…
No small proportion of the labour expended upon this work was exerted in providing examples of the use of words, both in Maori and Polynesian. Many thousands of lines from old poems, traditions, and ancient proverbs have been quoted. The examples might more easily have been given by the construction of sentences showing the use of the particular words, but, rejecting made-up examples as being in practice always open to adverse criticism, preference has been given to passages by well-known authors, where the words can be verified and the context consulted…
Although the dictionary relates to the classification of Polynesian dialects proper, Malay, Melanesian, and Micronesian vocabularies have also furnished comparatives.

Many thanks to Stephen Judd, who called my attention to this work in a comment on an earlier entry.

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I have previously declared my undying love for Pogo and his creator, Walt Kelly, and that thread unearthed a slew of readers who felt the same way, quoting Pogetry by the furlong: “The moon is a madness,” “Once you were two,” “Oh, roar a roar for Nora,” “The Keen and the Quing,” “I was stirrin’ up a stirrup cup,” and more! more! Now I discover a fellow acolyte in Neddie of By Neddie Jingo!, whose post Greetings from Fort Mudge not only reproduces Pogo cartoons, record covers, and campaign buttons and quotes a long stretch of dichotomous dialogue between Howland Owl and Churchy La Femme (Owl: “Mine is got the ingrediments of scintillating scientific achievement inherent in it.” Churchy: “Mine is too! It got the ungreedy minks of single-eightin’ sinus siftin’ an’ cheese mints inherited too!”), it not only provides the full text of the toponymophilic “Go Go Pogo” (“From Caravan Diego, Waco and Oswego…”), it links to an mp3 of Walt himself belting it out with (in Neddie’s mot juste) gusto. Tweedle de he go she go we go me go Pogo!

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Google has introduced yet another great feature:

What’s an “iwi“? What does “spiel” mean? Google Definitions is one example of how we work to make the world’s information more accessible: ask us what a word means, and we’ll try our best to get a good variety of definitions from all corners of the Web. So I’m happy to say that a handy feature just got handier; as of this week, Google Definitions is multilingual, and is indexing more sources than ever. Enjoy the peace of mind of knowing that the definition of voip is just one click away.

I got this via Margaret Marks at Transblawg; she says “What was interesting to me was the etymology of Bratwurst,” and I too was surprised to learn the first syllable is from Brät ‘meat without waste’ rather than braten ‘to fry/roast.’

The Japanese Page has all sorts of resources for learning Japanese; I was particularly taken with the Gogen – Word Origins page:

折り紙つき origami tsuki
Meaning: something very nice; certified to be good
Example: このレストランのピザは、折り紙つきのおいしさです。
kono resutoran no piza wa, origami tsuki no oishisa desu.
this-restaurant-‘s-pizza-as for-guarantee-‘s-tastiness-is.
I guarantee you’ll love the pizza in this restaurant.
Origin: It actually has nothing to do with origami. This ‘origami‘ actually refers to an official document certifying the authenticity of a sword (刀の鑑定書 katana no kanteisho). The tsuki means the sword comes with this guaranteed certificate. This paper was folded and thus called ‘ori’ (to fold) ‘kami’ (paper). It is now used to refer to objects in general.

(Via plep.)

Again via Stilicho, the IPA Phonetic Symbol Typer. As Dan says: Nɒt hæf bæd!

There’s no point my going on about what a great writer Bellow was; if this is news to you, go read him. But the hullabaloo about his death has led me to a couple of odd mysteries. For one thing, nobody knows when he was born. For somebody born in a Montreal suburb in the twentieth century, this strikes me as unusual. The NY Times obituary says “his birthdate is listed as either June or July 10, 1915, though his lawyer, Mr. Pozen, said yesterday that Mr. Bellow customarily celebrated in June. (Immigrant Jews at that time tended to be careless about the Christian calendar, and the records are inconclusive.)” So he was either a day or a month older than my father.

The other mystery, of more pressing interest to me, is about names. The Times obit calls his father Abram and says nothing about the original family name, which I had always assumed was Belov (stressed on the second syllable). But James Atlas’s biography calls the father Abraham Belo (adding that “the family called him” Abram) and says “Belo—the name derives from byelo, ‘white’ in Russian—became, through a Halifax customs official’s haphazard transliteration, Bellow.” Atlas is clearly no Russian scholar (the word for white is belyi, or byelyi if you want to represent the prerevolutionary yat’ by ye), but you’d think he’d get the family name right, particularly when -ov is such a common ending that the bare -o stands out like a sore thumb. Does anybody know anything more about this? (Incidentally, the novelist was born Solomon, “known as Shloime or Shloimke and later as Saul,” in Atlas’s words, and his uncles later “added an -s to their surname, modeling themselves after Charlie Bellows, a well-known Chicago criminal lawyer who had once been the Bellows’ neighbor. They pronounced it Bellus.”)

Something else I wonder about is whether Bellow knew Russian; it’s not clear from Atlas’s account:

His parents spoke to each other in Russian and Yiddish; he and his three siblings spoke English and Yiddish at home; on the streets of Montreal they spoke French, and in public school they spoke English. “I didn’t even know they were different languages,” Bellow wrote.

Atlas several times refers to his reverence for Russian literature and emphasis on his own Russian roots; in the ’50s he aquired a “habit of addressing his friends with patronymics (‘Dear Yevgeny Pavlovitch’)”—but none of this proves anything except affinity.

I can’t resist adding that Bellow was celebrated in Chicago socialist circles in the ’30s for a Yiddish version of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; Atlas quotes the lines
In tsimer vu di vayber zenen
Redt men fun Karl Marx und Lenin
[In the room where the women go
they talk of Marx and Lenin]
and
Ikh ver alt, ikh ver alt,
Un mayn pupik vert mir kalt.
[I grow old, I grow old,
and my belly button grows cold.]
Also, when he was told Thomas Edison was an anti-Semite, he replied “That’s why Jews light candles.” Alevasholem.

Addendum. There’s a fine appreciation by Ian McEwan in the April 7 NY Times; a taste:

Bellow lovers often evoke a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of “The Dean’s December,” who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of canine understanding, and a plea: “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog, and Saul Bellow, our master, heard us and obliged.

Update (Jan. 2016). I was hoping Zachary Leader’s new The Life of Saul Bellow would clear up the matter of the family name, but alas, he says pretty much the same thing as Atlas, except that he adds a new bit of confusion: “To explain this moment one must know something of Abraham’s history. He was born in Russia in 1881, the first son of Berel and Shulamith Belo (from the Russian byelo or bely meaning ‘white’).” The difference between the -ye- of byelo and the -e- of bely is just two different transliterations of the same vowel, and the byelo form is just as incoherent as it is in Atlas. And Belo still doesn’t look like a surname to me. Will no one get to the bottom of this mystery?