Thanks to Céline of Naked Translations, I’ve learned a new French expression: découvrir le pot aux roses, which she says means ‘to find out what’s going on’ and my Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French by René James Hérail and Edwin A. Lovatt defines as ‘to stumble on a bit of scandal.’ It’s apparently often misunderstood as “poteau rose,” so Chris Waigl of serendipity is using poteaux roses as a French equivalent of “eggcorns” (first sighted here) for the purposes of her eggcorn database. (If any of my Russian readers know of a Russian word or phrase that’s sometimes replaced by a semantically clearer, though historically incorrect, version, like “eggcorn” for acorn or “poteau rose” for pot aux roses, please mention it in the comments.)

The interesting thing about découvrir le pot aux roses is that it’s not at all clear how the expression came about. For one thing, roses are not grown in pots, and there is no such thing as a pot aux roses in other contexts (hence the eggcorn potential). One theory is that the reference was originally to rose in the sense of ‘rouge,’ which makes perfect sense of the expression, since it would mean “discovering the secret of what you thought had been a woman’s natural beauty”; alas, as Francparler.com points out, the expression has always had roses, plural, so that won’t wash. There’s further discussion at the entry in the dictionary at the excellent Langue française site (“Dépannage en français, difficultés, (bon) usage, syntaxe, orthographe, vocabulaire, étymologie, débats et dossiers thématiques”—I love their epigraph « C’est quand les accents graves tournent à l’aigu que les sourcils sont en accent circonflexe. »).

The Hérail-Lovatt book, by the way, says “Few expressions containing the word pot have literal meanings. Most, like se manier le pot: to ‘put one’s skates on’, to hurry up and en avoir plein le pot: to be fed-up, are figurative derivations.” The listed meanings are ‘arse, bum, behind’; ‘luck, good fortune’; ‘drink, alcoholic beverage’; and ‘pot, kitty, pool of money staked at cards’; these are followed by phrases like faire son pot ‘to make one’s pile, amass a tidy sum of money,’ pot de colle ‘limpet-bore, tenacious button-holer,’ and tourner autour du pot ‘to beat about the bush, to tackle a problem or a situation in a dilly-dally manner’; the last of these is découvrir le pot aux roses, followed by the useful note “Because of a possible hiatus, the ‘t’ in pot is pronounced as a liaison in colloquial contexts.” An exemplary book (note that most definitions include both a colloquial equivalent and a literal explanation), which any reader of French literature (not to mention l’internet!) should have at hand.

Mark Liberman at Language Log has a post about an interesting problem of interpretation. He quotes Bill Clement on the cancellation of the NHL season: “It is such a day of squander and a day of waste that anybody involved in both sides should be ashamed of who they are right now.” After establishing that squander is a valid, if infrequent, noun, he points out the strange (to him and to me, anyway) use of “anybody involved in both sides”:

When he says “anybody involved in both sides”, Clement clearly means that all the participants, regardless of which side they’re on, should be ashamed of their fatal unwillingness to compromise. He’s not slamming fence-sitters or double agents — he’s not even suggesting that any members of these categories exist. The negotiation between the NHL owners and the players’ union has been a polarizing dispute, and if there is any individual who’s consequentially involved with both sides at once, he’s keeping a low profile.
However, when I read this, I first interpreted “anybody involved on [sic; Clement said “in”] both sides” as referring to people with split allegiance.
So the question is, did Clement make a mistake in saying this? Or did I make a mistake in understanding it? Or do we speak slightly different dialects of English?

I have the same reaction as Mark, but clearly some people use the construction unselfconsciously—see his post for examples found by googling. So, how do you all feel about this? Does the quoted usage seem wrong, borderline, or perfectly OK?

Sarah Maguire, the London poet who founded the Poetry Translation Centre, has an article on translation in the Poetry Review; she focuses on one of my own touchstones of the translator’s art, Pound’s Cathay:

Why is Cathay so compelling? Firstly, it exists, in its own right, as a collection of great poems in English. Published in 1915, the poems are, as Kenner points out, “among the most durable responses to World War I. They say, as so much of Pound’s work says, that all this has happened before and continually happens.” But what of the poems as translations? How “faithful” to their sources are they? How “Chinese”? It’s generally admitted that Cathay is full of “mistakes”. It’s hardly to be expected otherwise, given the misreadings made by the Japanese professors instructing Fenollosa, whose notes Pound often found difficult to decipher. However, what may be taken as Pound’s “mistranslations” are, as Kenner argues, “deflections undertaken with open eyes . . . . The main deviations from orthodoxy represent deliberate decisions of a man who was inventing a new kind of English poem and picking up hints where he could find them”. Pound’s loyalties, it seems, were to English poetry, not to accurately representing Chinese poetry.

Debates about translation have been raging since the Romans, and, crudely, they all come down to the same decision: whether to “domesticate” the translation or to “foreignise” it. In other words, as a translator you have to take a decision – a decision which is as much ethical as it is aesthetic – as to whether your translation should be as close as possible to a poem in English, or whether it should clearly announce its different, foreign qualities. As Friedrich Schleiermacher summarised it in 1813 (in the most influential essay written on translation in the nineteenth century), “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader”. Pound, one might then conclude, given his stated priorities, was concerned with domestication, with “moving the writer toward the reader”. Yet a close examination of the poems in Cathay indicates that, yes, these are quite wonderful poems in English, but also that they announce their foreign status very clearly indeed…

In 1928, T.S. Eliot claimed that “Chinese poetry, as we know it to-day, is something invented by Ezra Pound”. How is it possible that an American poet who knew no Chinese can be said to have invented “Chinese” poetry? George Steiner has argued that “Pound can imitate and persuade with utmost economy not because he or his reader know so much but because both concur in knowing so little”. In other words, Pound’s “China” is an Orientalist fake, an exotic invention lapped up by readers seduced by a lazy Chinoiserie. However, a number of Chinese scholars have agreed that “Pound’s versions seem to come nearer to the real qualities of Chinese poetry”; and that this is because “he recognized the importance of the culturally distant and unfamiliar”. In fact, it turns out that Pound didn’t “know so little” after all. Although it’s true that, in 1915, he had just begun actively to engage with Chinese literature, this marked the start of a profound, life-long, commitment that had fascinating antecedents in his childhood in Philadelphia. Both Pound’s parents had contacts with Christian missionaries in China; they owned Chinese objects and works of art; and, of all American cities, it was Philadelphia which at that time was “at the center of America’s response to the Orient.” By the time Fenollosa’s notebooks fell into his hands, Pound was steeped in Chinese art and profoundly curious about the radically different world it represented. What Ming Xie and other Chinese commentators point out is that, even by the time of Cathay, Pound grasped “the paradigmatic frame of an entire culture”.

In short, what makes Cathay the most important translation into English in the past one hundred years is that Pound successfully “domesticates” and simultaneously “foreignises” these poems. In Schleiermacher’s terms, he both takes the writer to the reader and he takes the reader to the writer. Added to this, the qualities of directness, simplicity and vividness in Cathay, and the unobtrusive, delicate music of the lines, have had an extraordinarily profound impact on the ways in which it is possible to write poems in English. It was Pound’s recognition of “the importance of the culturally distant and unfamiliar” that made this revolution in English poetry possible.

That’s only part of a thoughtful discussion of what makes translations worthwhile; I recommend the whole thing, as well as what Maguire rightly calls “one of the most beautiful poems in English written last century.”

(Via wood s lot.)

A story by James Brooke (originally in the New York Times, but linked here from the International Herald Tribune website) discusses the increasing prominence of English in Mongolia, until recently under the sway of Russia and its language:

“We are looking at Singapore as a model,” Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia’s prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed at graduate school at Harvard University. “We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world.”
Camel herders may not yet refer to each other as “dude,” but Mongolia, thousands of kilometers from the nearest English-speaking nation, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world language…

[Read more…]

For as long as Adnan Khashoggi has been in the news (over three decades now), his last name has niggled at me: what kind of name is it, and how is it pronounced? Now, reading a book by Said K. Aburish (interview) called The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (a book full of mistakes and bad English that doesn’t appear to have been edited at all, but there’s so little non-sycophantic material out there about Saudi Arabia that his gossip and unverifiable assertions are at least a useful counterweight), I find the following in Chapter 9, “Servants of the Crown”: “It would seem that the only thing people in the West do not know about Adnan Khashoggi is how to pronounce his name properly. A hard ‘g’ is followed by a soft ‘g’: Khashog-ji.” (The next paragraph begins: “Khashoggi is a Turkoman, another non-Saudi son of one of Ibn Saud’s doctors…”) So I’m glad to know how it’s pronounced, and I’m somewhat enlightened about its formation (-ji, or -ci in the current orthography, is the Turkish suffix for ‘person who…,’ as seen in the name Saatchi, originally ‘watchmaker’ from Arabic-Turkish saat ‘hour, time; watch, clock’; I note that there are people who spell their name Khashogji), but I’m still mystified about the base element. I’ve checked my Persian dictionaries for anything resembling khashog (the g rules out Arabic and the kh eliminates Turkish) but have come up empty. Any suggestions?

Addendum. Having been informed that the base element is a Turco-Persian word for ‘spoon’ (kaşık in Turkish, qashoq in Persian, both from Old Turkish qashuq), I looked up kaşık in my Langenscheidt pocket dictionary and discovered that the following entry was:

kaşıkçıkuşu pelican.

Now, kuş is ‘bird,’ so ‘pelican’ in Turkish is “spoonerbird.” Or, if you prefer, “Khashoggi bird.” Just thought I’d pass that along.

The Varieties of English site (maintained by the Anthropology Department of the University of Arizona) is an ongoing project to describe various English dialects; some links take you to a “we’re working on this” page, but the Canadian English section is well filled out and quite interesting:

Canadian English, for all its speakers, is an under-described variety of English. In popular dialectological literature it is often given little acknowledgement as a distinct and homogeneous variety, save for a paragraph or two dedicated to oddities of Canadian spelling and the fading use of British-sounding lexical items like chesterfield, serviette, and zed.

There is a small body of scholarly research that suggests that if there is such a thing as a Canadian English, all its unique characteristics are being lost… To the contrary, this site’s discussion of Canadian phonology identifies at least four other characteristics not included in Woods’ study, all of which remain robust in Canadian speech. The other sections offer further insight into the character of Canadian English.

(Via mj klein of Metrolingua, a blog on “language discussion and expression.”)

Addendum. A nice supplement: Wikipedia’s List of dialects of the English language. (Via Plep.)

The genesis of this entry goes back almost six years, to April 29, 1999 (I can tell you the date because I kept the sales slip to use as a bookmark, as is my wont), when at one of my periodic visits to the sale cart on the third (foreign-language) floor of the Donnell I found a book by Boris Khazanov called Нагльфар в океане времен (Nagl’far v okeane vremen, ‘Naglfar in the ocean of time’). I’d never heard of Khazanov (it turns out his real name is Gennadii Moiseevich Faibusovich, he was born in 1928, did some time in the Gulag, studied medicine, and emigrated to Germany in 1982, where he’s written a bunch of stories and novels), but the book was part of the Альфа-фантастика [Alpha-Fantasy] series and had an attractive Chagall-ripoff cover… and there was that mysterious word “Naglfar.” I flipped through the book but couldn’t find out what it meant or if it was someone’s name (in fact, I couldn’t find any reference to it at all), but it clearly wasn’t Russian and it had a certain consonantal grandeur whose pull I couldn’t deny, sort of like the Georgian words (t’k’bili, gmadlobt) I always enjoy startling people with. I figured the book was easily worth the 25 cents they were asking and added it to my stack.

Fast-forward to this weekend. I was reading Nicholson Baker to assuage the misery of my wife (who’s picked up, alas, the cold I had just put down); halfway through “Clip Art” (an essay about nail clippers and clipped nails that originally appeared in the Nov. 7, 1994 New Yorker) I reached the following paragraph:

[Read more…]

Here’s a nice little joke (from Martin Kramer, quoting Charles Issawi) that depends on asymmetrical linguistic patterning (semantics not matching up with morphology) for its impact:

A Western orientalist goes to Egypt, and strikes up a conversation in Arabic with his taxi driver. The poor driver, after straining to understand his passenger, plaintively asks him how he came to know Arabic. Ana mustashriq! the orientalist answers proudly. In reply to which, the taxi driver mutters: Wa’ana mustaghrib…

If, like me, you need the joke explained (though I did figure out that mustashriq was ‘orientalist’), hie yourself over to Language Log, where Mark Liberman does the honors.

I suspect many of my readers will have no more problem than I do relating to yesterday’s NY Times story by Carole Braden about Kathie Coblentz, a cataloguer at the New York Public Library, and how she deals with her own large collection of books. (I couldn’t get a blogsafe link, so this one will expire next week.)

Her 16 bookcases – about 214 running feet – reveal no deference to John Dewey and his decimal system and varying degrees of respect for the alphabetical-by-author rule. Indeed, it seems she has grouped her books less by subject than by country of origin. Dust-free and with carefully cracked spines (a sign that books have been read, or at least leafed through), the books in Ms. Coblentz’s library are navigable to no one but her.
“Your system doesn’t have to be logical, it just has to work for you,” said Ms. Coblentz…

Nice to hear, since in my latest attempt at cramming too many books into too few shelves one bookcase has books on Greece and the Greek language followed by books on Central Asia and Iran followed by travel books. I think many of us can also relate to this anecdote (sparked by her recommendation on how to weed out a collection): “Nicholas Basbanes… confessed that he regularly gives books to charity sales, then drops by to rummage and buys back his own donations.” And of direct LH relevance is this: “Grouped by country of origin – Ms. Coblentz speaks or reads 10 languages – the collection includes 12 shelves of classic German literature and 14 of Swedish mysteries.”

[Read more…]

A new (or revived?) site called Mithridates features posts on a multilingual 404 page (Wuhloss, man, de page yuh lookin for ent here!! — Bajan; Siidan du söökkää e int hää meera. — South Helsinki Swedish; Awan ditan. — Ilokano), rabbit language, the first book printed for a Finnish audience, and a Thai page on the original Mithridates, among other language-related posts. (For instance, I can’t read this website, or even verify that it is in fact about Udmurt poetry, but this post says so, and that’s good enough for me. Udmurt poetry! Who can resist?) So welcome, or welcome back, O spiritual descendent of Pontic rulers and/or A.E. Housman, and keep bringing those tasty links.