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.’

The Japanese Page has all sorts of resources for learning Japanese; I was particularly taken with the Gogen – Word Origins page:

折り紙つき origami tsuki
Meaning: something very nice; certified to be good
Example: このレストランのピザは、折り紙つきのおいしさです。
kono resutoran no piza wa, origami tsuki no oishisa desu.
this-restaurant-‘s-pizza-as for-guarantee-‘s-tastiness-is.
I guarantee you’ll love the pizza in this restaurant.
Origin: It actually has nothing to do with origami. This ‘origami‘ actually refers to an official document certifying the authenticity of a sword (刀の鑑定書 katana no kanteisho). The tsuki means the sword comes with this guaranteed certificate. This paper was folded and thus called ‘ori’ (to fold) ‘kami’ (paper). It is now used to refer to objects in general.

(Via plep.)

Again via Stilicho, the IPA Phonetic Symbol Typer. As Dan says: Nɒt hæf bæd!

There’s no point my going on about what a great writer Bellow was; if this is news to you, go read him. But the hullabaloo about his death has led me to a couple of odd mysteries. For one thing, nobody knows when he was born. For somebody born in a Montreal suburb in the twentieth century, this strikes me as unusual. The NY Times obituary says “his birthdate is listed as either June or July 10, 1915, though his lawyer, Mr. Pozen, said yesterday that Mr. Bellow customarily celebrated in June. (Immigrant Jews at that time tended to be careless about the Christian calendar, and the records are inconclusive.)” So he was either a day or a month older than my father.

The other mystery, of more pressing interest to me, is about names. The Times obit calls his father Abram and says nothing about the original family name, which I had always assumed was Belov (stressed on the second syllable). But James Atlas’s biography calls the father Abraham Belo (adding that “the family called him” Abram) and says “Belo—the name derives from byelo, ‘white’ in Russian—became, through a Halifax customs official’s haphazard transliteration, Bellow.” Atlas is clearly no Russian scholar (the word for white is belyi, or byelyi if you want to represent the prerevolutionary yat’ by ye), but you’d think he’d get the family name right, particularly when -ov is such a common ending that the bare -o stands out like a sore thumb. Does anybody know anything more about this? (Incidentally, the novelist was born Solomon, “known as Shloime or Shloimke and later as Saul,” in Atlas’s words, and his uncles later “added an -s to their surname, modeling themselves after Charlie Bellows, a well-known Chicago criminal lawyer who had once been the Bellows’ neighbor. They pronounced it Bellus.”)

Something else I wonder about is whether Bellow knew Russian; it’s not clear from Atlas’s account:

His parents spoke to each other in Russian and Yiddish; he and his three siblings spoke English and Yiddish at home; on the streets of Montreal they spoke French, and in public school they spoke English. “I didn’t even know they were different languages,” Bellow wrote.

Atlas several times refers to his reverence for Russian literature and emphasis on his own Russian roots; in the ’50s he aquired a “habit of addressing his friends with patronymics (‘Dear Yevgeny Pavlovitch’)”—but none of this proves anything except affinity.

I can’t resist adding that Bellow was celebrated in Chicago socialist circles in the ’30s for a Yiddish version of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; Atlas quotes the lines
In tsimer vu di vayber zenen
Redt men fun Karl Marx und Lenin
[In the room where the women go
they talk of Marx and Lenin]
and
Ikh ver alt, ikh ver alt,
Un mayn pupik vert mir kalt.
[I grow old, I grow old,
and my belly button grows cold.]
Also, when he was told Thomas Edison was an anti-Semite, he replied “That’s why Jews light candles.” Alevasholem.

Addendum. There’s a fine appreciation by Ian McEwan in the April 7 NY Times; a taste:

Bellow lovers often evoke a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of “The Dean’s December,” who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of canine understanding, and a plea: “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog, and Saul Bellow, our master, heard us and obliged.

Update (Jan. 2016). I was hoping Zachary Leader’s new The Life of Saul Bellow would clear up the matter of the family name, but alas, he says pretty much the same thing as Atlas, except that he adds a new bit of confusion: “To explain this moment one must know something of Abraham’s history. He was born in Russia in 1881, the first son of Berel and Shulamith Belo (from the Russian byelo or bely meaning ‘white’).” The difference between the -ye- of byelo and the -e- of bely is just two different transliterations of the same vowel, and the byelo form is just as incoherent as it is in Atlas. And Belo still doesn’t look like a surname to me. Will no one get to the bottom of this mystery?

A hilarious/depressing post by the excellent Dan Hartung (about censorship of the comic strip Get Fuzzy) in his blog Stilicho (“a barbarian in the civilized world”—you know Stilicho, right?) led me to an investigation of the least respectable of the various meanings of the word beaver, which of course led me to the OED, where I discovered that the first citation of this meaning was:

1927 Immortalia 166 She took off her clothes From her head to her toes, And a voice at the keyhole yelled, ‘Beaver!’

(The next, from 1939, is from—wait for it—Finnegans Wake.) I did a little more investigation and discovered that Immortalia: An Anthology of American Ballads, Sailors’ Songs, Cowboy Songs, College Songs, Parodies, Limericks, and other humorous verses and doggerel is online, each edition lovingly photographed and the entire contents reproduced by John Mehlberg (who would like to hear from you if you happen to have a copy of one of the printings he knows of but has not seen). My hat is off to him, and you can see the actual limerick cited by the OED (number LIV, on page 166) here. (Um, not safe for work, in case you hadn’t figured that out.)

Update (2011). Alas, Dan has taken his blog down and Immortalia.com has been taken over by a link farmer, so there’s really not much point to this post any more. Ah well, I updated the dead “you know Stilicho” link to a Wikipedia entry, so at least one of the links works.

Update (2020). Apparently in 2011 I didn’t know about the Wayback Machine; I have now used it to restore several of the links, though neither the cartoon strip nor the Immortalia webpage (“Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.”) is available. However, an OCR of Immortalia, with downloadable PDF, is here.

I haven’t lambasted William Safire for a while now, and after his recent “Kifaya!” [archived], helpfully describing the meaning (‘enough!’), usage (political protest), pronunciation, and even derivation (quoting Hans Wehr’s Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic) of the titular exclamation, I was feeling downright charitable towards him. But no longer. His latest column [archived], called “Putin/Poutine,” is a nasty piece of work, spreading what he must know are lies in the service of an animus against the French that I thought was passé by now even among the most fervent conservatives.

His column makes two simple points:
1) The French spelling Poutine for the president of Russia “is pronounced poo-TEEN,” which is not how the Russians say it (“POO-tyeen”).
2) The reason for this is that they’re trying to avoid the spelling Putin, which “would be pronounced as putain in French — that is, sounding close to pew-TANH [– which] means ‘prostitute; whore.'”

Point 1 is true; point 2, the entire raison d’être for his column, is ridiculous. He must know perfectly well that Poutine is the only possible way to write the name in French, that there’s a standard way to render Russian names in French (Lénine, Staline, Khrouchtchev) and they’re simply following it. He must also know that the French can’t possibly pronounce it à la russe (unless, of course, they study Russian) because they don’t have a stress accent; stress aside, they do a better job than Americans do, with our alveolar t and reduced unstressed i. I hold no brief for Putin, a nasty piece of work himself, and anybody who wants to make fun of him has my blessing (perhaps by comparing him to québecois poutine, which Safire mentions only parenthetically, to “head off a torrent of e-mail from Quebec”). But his column is supposed to be about language, not politics, and even by his own standards I’d say he’s disgraced himself.

Update (Sept. 2025). In providing archived links for this post, I discovered that the last one, the “poutine” page, ends “For more information about poutine, try the Alta Vista or InfoSeek search tools.” Nostalgia!

A Japan Times article by Roger Pulvers has fun with the notion, dear to people in Japan, that Japanese is “the most difficult language in the world”:

No sooner had I closed my umbrella and entered the cab than the driver peered at me in the rearview mirror and said, in Japanese: “You’re not a Japanese are you.”
“No, I’m not,” I replied.
“Oh. Japanese is the most difficult language to speak in the world, you know. Isn’t it?”
Well, for the 15-minute ride home I strove to persuade my driver that this, in fact, did not seem to be the case. I pointed out the fiendish difficulties of the languages that I had studied in my life, Russian and, particularly, Polish being much more complicated in grammar and pronunciation, at least for a native speaker of English, than Japanese. I finished my discourse as we rounded the corner by my house.
“I mean, Polish, for instance, has elaborate case endings for adjectives, and even has a special one for the nominative plural of male animate nouns!”
Having listened attentively to my passionate, if pedantic, foray into the esoterica of comparative linguistics, the driver stopped the cab by my front gate, turned his head around to me and smiled broadly.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “Japanese is still the most difficult language in the world!”

So far, so amusing, but Pulvers goes on to say:

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Chapati Mystery (a blog by Sepoy, “a doctoral candidate in History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations department at the University of Chicago”) has a great post about the history of the word termagant ‘a quarrelsome, scolding woman; a shrew.’ The OED says “Name of an imaginary deity held in mediæval Christendom to be worshipped by Muslims,” which is interesting in and of itself, but the question is, where did the name come from? Sepoy investigates various proposed solutions, all more or less unsatisfactory (ta-rabbi-l-ka’bati ‘by the Lord of Ka’aba’??); we’ll probably never know the answer, but this sort of quest makes us very happy here at Chateau Languagehat.

Having gotten back to reading Dead Souls, I hit another mysterious word, гальбик [gal’bik], which is not in any of my dictionaries. From the context (Этот, братец, и в гальбик, и в банчишку, и во все что хочешь [That guy will play galbik, bank, whatever you want], a few pages into Chapter 4) it’s obviously a game of chance, but which? (I’m not the only one who wonders; Vasili Utkin, a soccer broadcaster with a passion for literature, says in an interview: “моя самая любимая книга – “Мертвые души”… Если бы я нашел описание игры в “гальбик”, думаю, что один из интересов студенческой поры для меня был бы удовлетворен.” [My favorite book is Dead Souls… If I could find a description of the game of “galbik,” I think my curiosity of student days would be satisfied.]) Both Andrew MacAndrew, whose translation I have at hand, and D.J. Hogarth, whose version is online [no longer, as of 2012], give up and render it “faro,” which provides only a vague equivalent (the Russian word for that is faraon). The only hint I found by googling (and Yandexing) was that the same Russian word was used to translate passe-dix in Chapter 32, “Un diner de procureur,” of Dumas’s Les Trois mousquetaires: “plumer quelque peu les jeunes clercs en leur apprenant la bassette, le passe-dix et le lansquenet dans leurs plus fines pratiques”—as this translation has it, “to pluck the clerks a little by teaching them bassette, passedix, and lansquenet.” According to the OED the corresponding English word is “passage”:

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I have reported on politically inspired place-name changing in India; now it’s the turn of South Africa and Ireland. It seems the former country’s capital, Pretoria, is being renamed Tshwane, adding to a list of similar changes that includes, for instance, Pietersburg changing to Polokwane a few years ago. While I understand the desire to eliminate names associated with the apartheid government, in this case it seems like there must be better ways to spend the billion-plus rand the change is expected to cost. Of linguistic interest is the fact that the -h- represents aspiration, so the new name is basically pronounced “Tswane,” although I’m sure most English-speakers will use the /sh/ sound because of the spelling. Also, it’s not at all clear what the meaning of the new name is. The Hindustan Times story says:

Pretoria was named after Andries Pretorius, who settled here with the so-called “Voortrekkers” (front trekkers) a vanguard of Boers who left the Cape colony with ox-wagons in the 1830s and the second group to live in the area.
The first were Nguni-speakers, known as the Ndebele who named the place Tshwane, which means “Little Ape”. The word Tshwane is said to symbolise the chief’s motto — “we are the same.”

So that’s two possible meanings right there (though I’m not clear on what “symbolizing the motto” means); the page “Meanings of place names in South Africa” quotes a government website as saying:

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