I’m having a hard time believing this is real, but April 1st was a long time ago:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure—a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

This is stunning—it will rewrite the history of classical and post-classical literature and provide work for generations of scholars. My own excitement was roused especially by word of “a large and particularly significant paragraph of text from the Elegies, by Archilochos, a Greek poet of the 7th century BC.” Archilochus (or Arkhilokhos, if you want to be Hellenic about it) has always been one of my favorite poets, and I still remember the thrill of the discovery thirty years ago of another substantial fragment; as soon as I got hold of a text (it took longer in those pre-internet days) I stayed up most of the night working on a translation. I can’t wait to see this one, not to mention all the other newly found masterpieces, once known by heart to every person of culture but long since forgotten. And I’m also looking forward to the “lesser work—the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.” (Via Mithridates.)

A few months ago I had a post on “Uncleftish Beholding,” a Poul Anderson piece written entirely in words of Germanic origin. You can see the crazed nineteenth-century origin of this idea at Inscape & Outlandishness, a LiveJournal post that opens with a fusillade from William Barnes’s An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878):

Some of the small word-endings end themselves with a dead breath-penning… [These] seem to betoken, mostly, an ending or shortening or lessening, in time or shape… of their body-words… Flap, flip, a quick flying; heap, hop, hip, small highenings or humps; pop out, to poke out quickly; clap the hands, to close them quickly; stub, a small stump; wallop, to wallow or well (roll) lightly… We may think that we have two very fine words in envelope and develop, whereas they seem to be nothing better than the Teutonic inwallop and unwallop….

It continues with a description of Barnes (“Barnes’s passion was the rootedness of English, its power to create ungrafted words, of its own thorny and inalienable stock. A quickset tongue, hedge-English: tough and insular, flowering and thorny…”), Joseph Wright (author of the English Dialect Dictionary), and others, including my man Charles Montagu Doughty, whose one-of-a-kind masterpiece, Travels in Arabia Deserta, deserves more readers than it has. The post ends with a list of Barnes’s suggested word-equivalents in purified English:

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Trevor of Kalebeul has created a language blog aggregator he calls Langwich sandwich, explained as “syndicated language-related blogs for my lunchtime perusal.” He adds:

Feeds update every hour. Comments and automatic registration work, should anyone so desire. I’ll make it pretty and a bit more functional some other time, like never.

(Via Naked Translations.)

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.