One of my favorite radio events each day is The Writers Almanac, with its beautiful theme music, its rundown of writers’ birthdays, and Garrison Keillor’s mellifluous reading of a poem (and my thanks to WAMC for running it twice every morning, doubling my chances of catching it). Today’s poem was “Writing,” by Howard Nemerov, which begins:

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice…

I was enjoying it, even if I didn’t feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, when a reference caught my ear:

…The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger’s to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the ‘Slender Gold.’

Who was this emperor Hui Tsung? Being the type who can’t simply accept such things as part of the poetic tapestry, I went to my reference books and discovered an unhappy tale. Hui Tsung, or Huizong as he is known in this pinyincentric world, should never have been an emperor. I’ll let the Columbia Encyclopedia tell the tale:

Politically he was a rather ineffectual ruler, but he was said to have devoted all his spare time to painting and to the reorganization of the Imperial Academy of Painting. Through his encouragement, art collecting came into vogue during his reign. The emperor himself was an accomplished artist, specializing in delicately colored bird-and-flower paintings. There are also many such paintings by others that have his seals and signatures—affixed by the emperor to signify his approval of the work of artists who laboriously copied his own paintings. Most of these works show intimate, detailed studies of nature, executed in a refined, sensitive, and meticulous manner. He abdicated in 1125 when his attempts to buy off the advancing Jurchens failed. In 1126 the Northern Sung capital at Kaifeng was overrun by the Jurchens, and he was captured together with the new emperor and taken to Manchuria, where he died in captivity.

I opened Pound’s Cantos, as I often do when I’m investigating Chinese history, to see what that mad magpie might have had to say about the matter in the Chinese cantos; in this case there was only the disappointing half-line “HOEÏ went taozer.” But this was shortly followed by the pleasing passage

…The tartar lord
      wanted an alphabet
by name Akouta, ordered a written tongue for Kin tartars

—which brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the topic of writing.

(For “Akouta” see the Wikipedia entry on the Jin (Chin) Dynasty, whose first ruler, Jin Taizu, had the given name of Aguda.)

Ow be knackin’ vore?

John Germon was born and raised in the Devon stannary town of Ashburton. He attended both the Primary and “The Big School” and has a keen interest in local dialect…
John is chairman of the Ashburton Devon Dialect Club and has compiled this A-Z. If you want to know how to pronounce the words in a true Devon accent, just click on the link and John will read them out to you.

Via Plep.

As a followup to this post:

þys is efne to secgenne
Ic æt
þa pluman
þe wæron
þære iscieste
and þe
þu eallmæst cuþice
hordodest
for morgenmete
Forgief me
hie wæron smæcclice
swa swete
and swa cealde

This gem is from Hwæt!: a little Old English anthology of American modernist poetry, translated and edited by Peter Glassgold (which I will obviously have to find a copy of); it was quoted by a commenter in a wonderful thread at Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light. Don’t read the comments until you’ve at least tried to identify the Old English texts in the post!

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While reading The Beacon at Alexandria by Gillian Bradshaw (I’m a sucker for historical novels) it occurred to me that the book’s heroine Charis was the same age as Augustine of Hippo, both being around sixteen in 371, when the novel opens (Charis in Ephesus and Augustine in Carthage), so I pulled out the copy of the Confessions that I’d had for years and never read (the Penguin edition translated by the unfortunately named R.S. Pine-Coffin, about whom there is no information either in the book or online). Naturally, I wanted to compare it with the Latin original, and a moment’s googling produced the mother lode: the 1992 edition, with commentary, by James J. O’Donnell (who has a new biography of Augustine coming out next month).

Each book of the text has a link to introductory commentary on that book, and each section of the text has a link to detailed comments on the section. Links within the commentary connect not only to the section of text directly being annotated, but also to other parts of the text and commentary. Footnotes in the commentary appear at the end of each book; the footnote numbers are links from the commentary text to the footnote and from the footnote text back to the commentary. Where possible, links have been provided to the texts of classical works and Biblical passages cited in the commentary. Links at the end of each book of the text and commentary allow navigation to the next book or the previous one of text, commentary, or both together.

Just in the commentary on the bit of Book I I’ve read so far, O’Donnell has cited T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Durrell (Justine: ‘Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?’), and Wittgenstein, so the scholarship is not of the dry-as-dust variety. It’s amazing to me that such a recent edition is freely available, and I thought I’d pass it along.

I have to say, I’m disappointed to find that Augustine disliked the Greek language: “quid autem erat causae cur graecas litteras oderam, quibus puerulus imbuebar?” (Pusey: “But why did I so much hate the Greek, which I studied as a boy?”)

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:

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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.)