The library blog It’s All Good (or rather its 15th-century avatar Bibliotheca Ephemeris) has scored a real coup: an interview with an abbot who has returned in high dudgeon from Mainz, where he visited Johannes Gutenberg:

BE: Abbot Michael, can you please tell us what you discovered?
AM: This upstart Gutenberg claims he has created a device to allow ink to be directly applied to paper, without the intervention of a scribe! He has adopted a wine press, of all things, and places tiny pieces of wood on the face of the press, slathers ink all over the wood, and then presses the letters to the paper. He claims he can turn out dozens of pages a day this way.
BE: But you do not seem to be impressed.
AM: It is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. This is not a dignified scriptorium, where monks illuminate manuscripts with leaf and ink. No, this is brute force work, simply dedicated to speedily turning out books. Can you tell me what civilized person would want this?

I was particularly moved by this plaintive outcry:

[Read more…]

A new blog, The Language Guy, describes itself as “Commentary on how language is used and abused in advertising, politics, the law, and other areas of public life. You can think of it as a linguistic self defense course in which you and I prepare ourselves to do battle with the forces of linguistic evil.” The author, Mike Geis, says of himself:

After receiving a B. A. in philosphy from Rice University, I moved on to M.I.T. where modern theoretical linguistics was brought into being by Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and others. After receiving my Ph.D., I worked at the University of Illinois for five years and then left to teach and do research at The Ohio State University until I retired in 1995. Perhaps because of my early interest in philosophy, I switched my focus from theoretical linguistics to more humanistic pursuits, applying what I had learned as a theortical linguist to such areas as advertising, politics, journalism, the law, and conversation. I wrote “The Language of Television Advertising,” “The Language of Politics,” and “Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction.” I also wrote and consulted on linguistic issues arising in such legal domains as trademark law, deceptive advertising, and jury instructions in death penalty cases.

An interesting background, and it promises to be an interesting blog; it started off with an entry on what linguistics is and why people study it, and has continued with analyses of forms of speech like “I don’t mean to X” (which is invariably followed by doing precisely X). Welcome to Blogovia, Mike!
(Via the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

Any Arabic speakers out there willing to do me a favor? I would very much like a translation of the lyrics of the song “Ma fi hada” (I’ve put the Arabic in the extended entry, copied from here). A transliteration would be nice, too, but I realize that’s extra work, and I can work it out between the Arabic writing and an audio file if I have to. Anyway, any assistance will be deeply appreciated.

ما في حدا لا تندهي ما في حدا
عتم و طريق و طير طاير عالهدا
بابن مسكر و العشب غطى الدراج
شو قولكن صاروا صدى؟
مع مين بدك ترجعي بعتم الطريق
لا شاعلة نارن و لا عندك رفيق
يا ريت ضوينا القنديل العتيق بالقنطرة
يمكن حدا كان اهتدى و ما في حدا
يا قلب اخرتا معك تعبتني
شو بك دخلك صرت هيك و شو بني
ياريتني سجرة على مطل الدنيي
و جيرانها غير السما و غير المدى ما في حدا

The Department of French Studies of Louisiana State University has a web page called Un glossaire cadien-anglais/A Cajun French-English Glossary:

A number of resources exist for those looking for Cajun French vocabulary, but all of them pose problems for LSU students in Cajun French because they are either too regional in scope, too inconsistent in spelling, or too theoretical in approach for beginning students. Therefore, in response to our students’ expressed need for a basic vocabulary resource, we are in the process of building a glossary…

As they emphasize, it’s a work in progress, but it’s already very useful, especially since they’ve added audio files to many entries. The unofficial nature of the language is clear from an entry like this:

cacher-faite (n.m.) [KAH SHEH FET] hide and go seek game. [A preferred spelling has not been established. Variant spellings include: cachez-fête, caché-faite, cache-et-fête, etc.]

(Via Mithridates, where you will find other Cajun resources, like the Kreyol Lwiziyen site, which has a short English-Creole glossary.)

The British Museum’s COMPASS collection of “around 5000 objects from the huge range of periods and cultures represented in the Museum” includes a nice feature called “Arabic Script: Mightier than the Sword”:

A defining feature of Islamic civilization has been its widespread use of writing. Writing has a profound significance because Arabic was both the language of God’s revelation to the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century AD and the script in which the Qur’an, the holy book of Muslims, was written down.
The Arabic language spread geographically with Islam. It was generally learned alongside local languages but the Arabic script often displaced local scripts. It has been used to write many languages, including Persian in Iran and Urdu in India. It is now the most commonly written script after the Roman alphabet.
From very early on Arabic script also began to be used for its decorative potential. Islamic art has, as a result, rightly been described as a ‘speaking art’. The objects in this tour have Arabic script inscribed upon them or are connected to the art of writing. Together they show the continuing importance of Arabic in the cultures of what we can broadly call the Islamic lands.

It includes sections on script styles, calligraphy, objects with writing (I particularly like the Earthenware bowl with Kufic inscription), and others; Islam in China and the Malay Peninsula includes an amazing example of Arabic calligraphy done in Chinese style, with a brush. Thanks to plep for the link.

I don’t know what to make of Juliette Blevins’ ideas about language as an evolving system, not being an evolutionary anthropologist, but anything that “undermines a central tenet of modern Chomskyan linguistics: that Universal Grammar, an innate human cognitive capacity, plays a dominant role in shaping grammars” automatically awakens my interest, and I look forward to learning more about them. (Link via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

I always thought this phrase was a Macaulay original, but Mark Liberman at Language Log traced it all the way back to 1783, in Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres:

I spoke formerly of a Climax in sound; a Climax in sense, when well carried on, is a figure which never fails to amplify strongly. The common example of this, is that noted passage in Cicero which every schoolboy knows: “Facinus est vincire civem Romanum; scelus verberare, prope parricidium, necare; quid dicam in crucem tollere.”

(The essential point about what “every schoolboy knows,” of course, is that it must be something known only to graybeard academics.) Mark found this by means of Literature Online, “the world’s largest cross-searchable database of literature and criticism”; I hope I can get access to it through either the NYPL or C/W MARS.

This site has the “four essential travel phrases” in “307 languages plus 33 additional dialects.”

The phrases we thought every traveller should know are:

Where is my room?
Where is the beach?
Where is the bar?
Don’t touch me there!

I expected this to be as careless of accuracy as other such “funny phrase in many tongues” projects, but I was mistaken; the worst I’ve found to complain of so far is that in the Yiddish the word for beach should (I think) be breg yam rather than just yam (which means ‘sea’); the Russian has accent marks over the words (never used except in children’s primers), but that’s a pretty minor fault. [2024: The new version of the Russian page has ditched the accent marks.] There are zillions of languages and dialects, many little-known and each scrupulously provided with its own script (Yiddish is given three, modern and traditional printed and cursive/handwritten), and it’s a lot of fun. (Needless to say, you have to allow them some leeway when translating “Where is the bar?” into ancient languages!)

Via Mithridates.

As lagniappe, here’s a UTF-8 sampler that will allow you to see how versatile your browser is. Mine isn’t displaying runes, Bengali, Mongolian script, or Tibetan, but handles everything else (including Georgian, Armenian, and Tamil) admirably.

While trying to look up something else in my big Russian-English dictionary, I happened on the entry Вирсавия [Virsaviya] f bib Bathsheba. Well, that’s odd, thought I: Virsaviya doesn’t sound much like Bathsheba (who was King David’s wife and Solomon’s mother, in case you’re not up on your Bible references). I looked it up in my indispensible Dictionnaire Russe-Français (by N.P. Makaroff, Saint-Pétersbourg, 1908) and found it rendered as Bersabée, which is an older French version of Beersheba, which is an ancient site southwest of Jerusalem (the name means ‘well of seven [lambs]’) where Abraham spent a good deal of time. So which is it, the woman or the well? Turns out it’s both, and Russian didn’t invent the confusion but inherited it from Greek, where both are rendered in the Septuagint as Βηρσαβεε (/bhrsabee/ in the usual transcription where /h/ = eta, and pronounced by the Byzantines, and thus by the Russians, as /virsave/, giving Russian Virsaviya). The confusion was evidently borrowed by Latin as well, allowing Sir John Mandeville to produce the following supremely confused passage:

And when men pass this desert, in coming toward Jerusalem, they come to Bersabe [Beersheba], that was wont to be a full fair town and a delectable of Christian men; and yet there be some of their churches. In that town dwelled Abraham the patriarch, a long time. That town of Bersabe founded Bersabe [Bathsheba], the wife of Sir Uriah the Knight, on the which King David gat Solomen the Wise, that was king after David upon the twelve kindreds of Jerusalem and reigned forty year.

So what I want to know is how the two Hebrew words, which are after all distinct even if fairly similar, one referring to a person and the other to a place, got rendered the same in Greek. And I would also like to know, though less urgently, where the stress is in the Russian word; Makaroff has virsAviya and the modern dictionary virsavIya.

[Read more…]

Palaeography: reading old handwriting, 1500 – 1800: A practical online tutorial

Palaeography is the study of old handwriting. This web tutorial will help you learn to read the handwriting found in documents written in English between 1500 and 1800.
At first glance, many documents written at this time look illegible to the modern reader. By reading the practical tips and working through the documents in the Tutorial in order of difficulty, you will find that it becomes much easier to read old handwriting. You can find more documents on which to practice your skills in the further practice section.

Start here.