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:

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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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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?)

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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.:

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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.