The Business & High-Tech Dictionary Project is a promising new online lexicon:

This project got its start with the realization that there are no web sites that focus on the etymology and usage of business and high-tech jargon terms. There are many business jargon glossary sites, but none that apply rigorous lexicographic standards to the subject.
The world of business, and particularly high-tech business, is fertile ground for neologisms and catch phrases. General and slang dictionaries do not cover many of these terms, either because they are used in too limited a context or because they appear faster than print dictionaries can react. The internet is the ideal medium for capturing these terms and describing how they are used. Not only can a web site respond to new terms and phrases much faster than a print source, but it can also rely on a web of contributors to expand the dictionary and provide citations of usage.

As they say, it’s “very much a work in progress,” and you can help it grow: go to the Contribute page, read the criteria, and fill out the form.
A sample that gives a sense of how useful (and entertaining) the project can be:

[Read more…]

A satisfyingly comprehensive page on the first Lithuanian book, Martynas Mažvydas‘s 1547 Catechism, or to be more precise Catechismusa prasty Szadei, Makslas skaitima raschta yr giesmes del kriksczianistes bei del berneliu iaunu nauiey sugulditas… At this page you can read the Foreword (in verse) and even hear the first two lines read aloud, and here is a lengthy discussion of the book (by Leonardas Vytautas Gerulaitis, from Lituanus). All this comes via the ever-industrious Mithridates, who has also put up some excellent links on Kyrgyz in two posts (1, 2).

The Tokyo National Museum has a gorgeous online calligraphy collection; I’m not sure what distinguishes the Books & Documents from, say, the Ancient Superb Writings in Japan, but it doesn’t really matter—it’s all good. Enjoy. (Via Plep.)

Bridget Samuels has a blog, ilani ilani, with the enticing description “Putting the ‘sin’ back in syntax and the ‘ho’ back in phonology.” Recent posts are on protosyntax and snowglobes (or whatever you call them). And in her first post she says this about the blog’s name: “The title comes from the Hittite expression for step by step, which perhaps explains the cuneiform background and the little pointy-headed figurine dude in the corner.”

I discovered her via Christopher Culver’s new Безѹмниѥ [Bezumnie], and anyone who remembers his former blog Nephelokokkygia will be as delighted as I am that he’s returned to blogging. In his Welcome post he says:

A year ago I managed a weblog called Nephelokokkygia, charting my interest in comparative Indo-European linguistics. I later took it down, feeling that I would be speaking too authoritatively for an undergraduate student, and frequently finding I had little to write about. Immediately afterward, however, my studies began to give me much more to think about, and I decided to see training in comparative Indo-European linguistics as a stepping-stone to comparative Uralic linguistics. Encouraged by some acquaintances, I have decided to set up a new blog. Безѹмниѥ (Old Church Slavonic for ‘Ignorance’ but the root of the Russian word for ‘Insanity’) will serve as a record of my progress as I have gotten way over my head in a field bent on maddening and impoverishing me.

Finally, Heidi Harley’s HeiDeas (ie, “Heidi’s”) describes itself as “Linguistics, science, books, movies, cartoons, whathaveyou,” but so far the focus is on linguistics, with recent posts on the phrase grand theft auto and Longer-than-your-average-compound compounds, the latter ending with a truly magnificent picture of a “run you over horse.”

Welcome, all!

So I finally got a copy of the new 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, and in flipping through it I happened on the unfamiliar word chukar. It represents a rather handsome partridge, Alectoris chukar, but what caught my attention were the pronunciation and etymology:
chukar \’chə-kər also chə-‘kär\ [Hindi cakor & Urdu chakor]

My immediate reactions were:

1) The preferred pronunciation sounds exactly like chukker ‘one of the periods of play in a polo match’ and doesn’t go with the etymology. What’s going on?

2) “Hindi cakor & Urdu chakor“? Those are the same word; you’re just using two different language names and transcription systems! What’s going on?

I went back to the 9th and 10th editions of the dictionary and found an interesting sequence:

9th:
chukar partridge \chə-‘kär\ [Hindi cakor]

10th:
chukar \’chə-kər also chə-‘kär\ [Hindi cakor]

So here’s what I think. In between the 9th (1987) and 10th (1993) editions, the M-W lexicographers discovered that the people who had imported the bird into the western US called it simply “chukar,” not “chukar partridge,” and furthermore pronounced it in a completely anglicized form, not knowing or caring that that made it a homophone of some polo term. So far so good. But then somebody decided that it wasn’t fair to say it was from Hindi, since it was borrowed at a time (two hundred years ago) when there was no clear separation between what we now call “Hindi” and “Urdu,” both of them being cultural variants of the local lingua franca then called “Hindustani.” This makes perfect sense. But then, instead of calling the etymon “Hindi-Urdu cakor” or “Hindustani cakor,” they invented a completely spurious distinction between what look to the untutored eye like two different preforms, apparently because their transcription system for Hindi uses c for the unaspirated \ch\ (presumably using ch for the aspirated consonant), whereas the one for Urdu uses ch for the same phoneme (and presumably chh for the aspirated one). I’m sorry, but this just won’t do. If you get a result like that, it’s time to revisit your theories of transcription, etymology, or entry writing.

Incidentally, the AHD gives only the etymological pronunciation (chuh-KAHR), which I’m guessing is out of date for American use (or why would M-W have changed it?), but a simpler and better etymology: Hindi cakor, from Sanskrit cakorah.

I’ll finish with the charming definition found in Platt’s Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English:

cakor S[anskrit] چکور चकोर ćakor, s.m. The Bartavelle or Greek partridge, Perdix rufa, or Tetrao rufus (fabled to subsist upon moon-beams, and to eat fire at the full moon).

I’ve discovered an excellent new word, apophenia, described here:

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger)…

According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.”…

In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., ghosts and hauntings, EVP, numerology, the Bible code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld “hits”, most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena.

I presume the word (which has not yet made it into the OED) is based on Greek apophaino ‘show forth, display’ and thus represents a hypothetical *apophainia (the actual Greek derived nouns are apophansis and apophasis), so that the proper UK spelling would be “apophaenia” (though googling that form turns up only a page from a Russian medical dictionary giving it as the etymon of Russian apofeniya; a nice question is whether that can be considered a correct etymology).

Anyone curious about why this word should appeal so to me may consult my entries on Coincidence and More coincidence. Probability theory is extremely unintuitive for us poor Homo sapiens, doomed to see meaning in every damn thing.

Warning: Do not click on this link if you are subject to motion sickness; it’s an unsettling experience anyway. Simon Whitechapel has created a font in which each letter is constantly moving:

Rotor is an experimental script created to realize the concept of letters that literally move on the “page”. It consists of seventeen minimal pairs of graphemes in which the members of each pair are identical except for the way they move: unvoiced consonants and the first member of the pairs m n, w y, l r, h j, q x, a o, “. :”, “, ;”, “ ‘ ’ ”, and “! ?” turn clockwise, voiced consonants and the second member of the pairs turn anti-clockwise (c rocks first clockwise, then anti-clockwise). Of the remaining graphemes, e turns a vertical figure-of-eight and u a horizontal one, and i alone, consisting of two “zoophors” turning clockwise, is unambiguous when at rest.

While I admire the ingenuity, I cannot bring myself to regard this as a Good Thing. (Via No-sword.)

Update (June 2021). I’ve replaced the dead link with an archived one; you can also see the script at Omniglot.

Joan Neuberger’s home page [2024: no archive available] (which I searched out because I was so impressed by her book Hooliganism) has a very useful series of links, mostly relating to Russia; one of them is to Sher’s Russian Web, which contains (among many other things) Benjamin Sher’s piece “Nature vs. Art: A Note on Translating Shklovsky.” This goes into considerable detail about two translations of a single paragraph from Viktor Shklovsky’s famous essay „Искусство как прием“ [‘Art as technique/device’]:

“And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs…”

There are two current translations of this key passage from Shklovsky’s masterpiece, one in Lemon and Reis’s Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (p.4), which includes the opening chapter from [Theory of Prose] and the other in my complete translation of Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose (p.6).

The reader may wonder which version is “closer” to the original text, Lemon and Reis’s or mine. Well, the answer is: neither one. After looking at the passage carefully and retracing my mental steps, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that neither Lemon and Reis nor I are in actual fact close to the text.

Why?

Because this excerpt, at least, cannot be translated head-on. It can only be approached through the back door of “interpretation.” It is a veritable quagmire of elusive, shifting terminology.

There is only one way to translate a passage like this one and that is by interpreting it in terms of the translator’s implicit schema or set of preconceptions.

He goes on to give the two translations (as well as a “literal” version); I’ll add the original Russian here:

И вот для того, чтобы вернуть ощущение жизни, почувствовать вещи, для того, чтобы делать камень каменным, существует то, что называется искусством. Целью искусства является дать ощущение вещи, как видение, а не как узнавание; приемом искусства является прием „остранения“ вещей и прием затрудненной формы, увеличивающий трудность и долготу восприятия, так как воспринимательный процесс в искусстве самоцелен и должен быть продлен; искусство есть способ пережить деланье веща, а сделанное в искусстве не важно.

I’m dubious about some of his ideas, particularly that delan’e is “a possible misprint or variant for delanie” (I’m curious to know what Russian readers make of his insistence that “I cannot imagine that Shklovsky, in the context of enstrangement (ostranenie, itself a verbal noun, that is, the act of enstranging) would ever speak of ‘experiencing a made thing’ [delan’e, a substantive]”—the implication that delanie is any less a substantive is of course absurd), but I love this sort of picking of linguistic nits.

As it happens, Katerina Clark, in her Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, translates the crucial phrases (and provides some context) in the course of introducing Shklovsky; I’ll highlight in bold the parts that correspond to Sher’s translation:

Russian Formalism in some senses began with a lecture by Shklovsky entitled “The Place of Futurism in the History of Language,” delivered when he was still a young student, on December 23, 1913, at the Stray Dog Cabaret, a center of theatrical experimentation. A later essay by Shklovsky that makes similar points, “Art as Technique” (Iskusstvo kak priyëm, 1915-1916), the de facto manifesto of early Formalism, contains a quintessential account of the first premise of perceptual millenarianism. Here Shklovsky quotes a passage from Tolstoy’s diary of 1897 in which the writer remarks how it is often the case that with a routine task such as dusting the room one cannot recall whether one has dusted the divan or not. If one has dusted it but forgotten about it, it is as if the act had not occurred, so little has it impinged on one’s consciousness. Indeed, Tolstoy concludes, “If for many people an entire complex life passes by unconsciously, it is as if this life had not been.” Shklovsky goes on to say that “art exists in order to recover the sense of life, in order to feel objects, to make the stone stoney“… Shklovsky, like the Futurist artists and so many other avant-gardists of his time, gives the ability to “see” an object or word absolute priority. He draws a distinction between “seeing” (videnie) and “recognizing” (uznavanie), the latter being what happens when a word or object has been routinized: “Once objects have been perceived several times one begins to perceive them by recognition: an object stands before us, we know about it, but we do not see it.” He labels such a predicament “automatization” (avtomatizatsiya), and he provides a solution for it, a technique he calls “making strange” or “defamiliarization” (ostranenie). This technique involves taking things out of their context as a means of seeing them and “using an impeded [zatrudnënnaya] form that increases the degree of difficulty and the length of perception, for the process of perception in art is self-valuable and must be prolonged; art is a means for experiencing the making [delan’ye] of an object, and what is made [sdelannoye] in art is not important.“

As Sher says, “A volume could be written about translating this passage alone.”

(Incidentally, this appears to be Sher’s translation of the full essay.)

A silent conquering army,
The island dead,
Column on column, each with a stone banner
Raised over his head.
A green wave full of fish
Drifted far
In wavering westering ebb-drawn shoals beyond
Sinker or star.
A labyrinth of celled
And waxen pain.
Yet I come to the honeycomb often, to sip the finished
Fragrance of men.
    —George Mackay Brown

I don’t know how many of my readers have worked in bookstores, but I’ve served time in a number of them, and I can join Ed Brisson, the creator of this comic strip, in asserting: “It’s all true, folks!”