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):

[Read more…]

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.

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”:

[Read more…]

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:

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

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!

[Read more…]

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.’