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.

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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.

I was reading Roger Angell’s recent New Yorker reminiscence [archived] about his stepfather, E.B. White (known to his intimates as “Andy”), when I came to the following paragraph:

The other sentence-closer in the passage is “death,” and Andy must have ceased in time to be astonished at how often the theme and thought recurred in his writing. It runs all through his sweetly comical piece “Death of a Pig,” in which he tries ineffectually to deal with the crisis of a young pig of his who has stopped eating. Castor oil doesn’t help, nor does his own sense of “personal deterioration,” or the ministrations of Fred [his dachshund], who accompanies him on trips down the woodpath through the orchard to the pigyard, and also makes “many professional calls on his own.” The pig dies, nothing can be done about it, and it is the profusion of detail—his feeling the ears of the ailing pig “as you might put your hand on the forehead of a child,” and the “beautiful hole, five feet long, three feet wide, three feet deep” that is dug for the pig among alders and young hackmatacks, at the foot of an apple tree—that makes its death unsentimental and hard to bear.

The word hackmatacks stopped me cold; from context it apparently referred to some kind of plant, but neither I nor my wife (a New Englander) was familiar with it. When I got home I checked my dictionaries and discovered that both Webster’s and the OED said it was another word for the tamarack (Larix laricina). Case closed, one might think (except for the odd similarity of the two words)—but I checked the AHD just for completeness and found that that excellent dictionary identified it rather with the balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), a tree of an entirely different genus. A competitive googling produced 755 hits for “hackmatack, larix” and only 342 for “hackmatack, populus,” but that’s not exactly a scientific way of deciding the matter. It seems odd to me that dictionaries cannot agree on the referent of this uncommon but well-established word; can anyone shed light on this?

A NY Times story by Nicholas Wood describes efforts to “restore” the “Bosnian language” to the Serbian region of Novi Pazar (1911 Britannica article), known in Serbo-Croatian (to use the accurate name of the language everyone in the region speaks) as the Sandžak and traditionally in English as the Sanjak (which is how you pronounce the Serbo-Croatian word). Wood does a suprisingly good job of separating nationalistic claims from reality and puncturing the idea of a separate language:

Since their country fractured, their culture and language has, too. Croatia, Bosnia, and even Montenegro have all sought to reassert traditional differences and distance themselves from Serbo-Croatian, a language some felt was too heavily dominated by Serbian.

What were considered dialects until recently are now regarded as their own language. In fact, three “new” languages – possibly four, if one counts Montenegrin – have appeared, distinguished as much by national pride (and perhaps pronunciation) than any deep distinction in grammar.

Vocabulary differs here and there. The Serbs and Montenegrins also use the Cyrillic alphabet, while Bosnians and Croatians use the Latin alphabet. But many people read both.

Still, before the war, Yugoslavs most everywhere in the country could understand each other. The same holds true through the region today. There is in fact probably less difference in spoken language and accent between and a Sarajevan and a Belgrader than between a Londoner and Glaswegian.

I have highlighted the crucial phrase (though of course “as much” should be “more”). Wood goes on to explain the political background:

Introduction of the classes is seen as a victory for the mountainous region’s Muslim minority, which argues that the local language was eroded by the education system and bureaucracy in Belgrade, which were dominated by Orthodox Serbs who speak a different dialect with its own accent.

“Language defines the identity of a people,” said Zekerija Dugopoljac, the director of education for the Bosnian National Council, the official body that represents Muslim Slavs in Serbia and Montenegro. “Having the Bosnian language brings recognition to a people who have lived in Serbia and Montenegro for centuries.”

The lessons, which have the approval of the Serbian Education Ministry, are intended to comply with European law allowing minorities to be taught their own language. But Serbian nationalists oppose the classes, which they see as a first step toward a separatist movement. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party has called for the education minister to step down.

Such moves are closely watched in this region, one of Serbia’s most ethnically diverse. The Sandzak managed to escape the ethnic conflicts of the 1990’s that took place just across its boundaries in Bosnia and Kosovo. Muslims here say they are keen not to alarm their Serb neighbors. Others appear confused about the need for the classes.

“I speak Serbian,” said Nedzat Zenunovic, a 23-year-old Muslim who works in an Internet cafe. “Bosnians speak Bosnian. We don’t live in Sarajevo, we live here.”

A straw poll in the cafe revealed that several people had difficulty in giving any name to the language they spoke.
“It’s Serbo-Montenegrin!” quipped a young student, smiling. Serbo-Montenegrin is not a recognized language.

Sounds like the locals who are neither politicians nor bureaucrats have a pretty sensible attitude towards the whole thing. To me, it’s as if the mayor of New York mandated classes to teach people “Dutch English” in an attempt to restore the traditional dialect of the city before it was corrupted.

I can’t post about Novi Pazar without quoting one of my favorite bits from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

This lymphatic monster had once blocked the distinguished pharynx of Lord Blatherard Osmo, who at the time occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office, an obscure penance for the previous century of British policy on the Eastern Question, for on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe:

Nobody knows-where, it is-on-the-map,
Who’d ever think-it, could start-such-a-flap?
Each Montenegran, and Serbian too,
Waitin’ for some-thing, right outa the blue—oh honey
Pack up my Glad-stone, ‘n’ brush off my suit,
And then light me up my bigfat, cigar—
If ya want my address, it’s
That O-ri-ent Express,
To the san-jak of No-vi Pa-zar!…

It is taking up so much of his time he’s begun to neglect Novi Pazar, and F.O. is worried. In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm’s plastic surgeons … their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other.

Novi Pazar, anyhow, was still a croix mystique on the palm of Europe, and F.O. finally decided to go to the Firm for help. The Firm knew just the man…

But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm. Months passed, World War II started, years passed, nothing was heard from Novi Pazar. Pirate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its grandeur—though not from World War II, of course. But by then, the Firm was allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up, but not enough for it to poison him.

If only Lord Osmo could have lived to see the quiet reappearance of his obscure area of responsibility into the limelight of the News from Europe!

(Thanks to Bonnie for the link.)

Bruce Byfield has a brilliant analysis of the origins of, and problems with, prescriptivism called “Tech Writers, Grammar, and the Prescriptive Attitude.” I urge anyone interested in the topic to read it; I’ll just quote a bit that I particularly want to emphasize:

Writing well, as George Orwell observes in “Politics and the English Language,” “has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax.” If it did, then two centuries of prescriptive grammar in the classroom should have resulted in higher standards of writing. Yet there is no evidence that the language is used more skillfully in 2001 than in 1750. The truth is that, prescriptive grammar and effective use of English have almost no connection. A passage can meet the highest prescriptive standards and still convey little if its thoughts are not clearly expressed or organized. Conversely, a passage can have several grammatical mistakes per line and still be comprehensible and informative. Prescriptive grammars are interesting as a first attempt to approach the subject of language, but today they are as useless to writers as they are to linguists. So long as writers have a basic competence in English, prescriptive grammar is largely a distraction that keeps them from focusing on the needs of their work.

There’s nothing wrong with following the “rules” if you enjoy playing that game (or if it’s required by the publication you’re writing for), but it has nothing to do with the quality of your writing, which is (or should be) paramount. I also recommend Jean Hollis Weber’s fine piece on the proper focus of editing, “Escape From the Grammar Trap.”

Thanks to aldiboronti of Wordorigins.org for the link to Echo Tan’s blog X Reverie, where I first saw these articles posted, and to suchi in the comments below for the proper attribution.

In the course of a serial savaging of Strunk and White, first Mark Liberman and then Geoff Pullum analyze the prescriptivist pair’s strange insistence that “however” must not come at the beginning of a sentence; Mark then extends the analysis to other adverbs and suggests that there may have been “a large-scale change in adverb-placement fashions at the end of the 19th century.” Most interesting. And the investigation involves an extremely useful link: the Hyper-Concordance of the Victorian Literary Studies Archive, covering a wide range of authors.

My wife brought me the Provider Directory (online search form here) sent us by Health New England, open to the index by languages, which she knew would interest me. (You can consult the “Languages Spoken” pull-down menu on the search form linked above.) I was impressed by the fact that there were doctors listed under such unexpected languages as Armenian, Cebuano, Kannada, and Yoruba, and pleased to see there were two listed as being able to use Sign Language (presumably ASL). Then I started noticing some strange entries. “Ukraine” for Ukrainian was a minor glitch, but what were “Pakistani” and “Indian” supposed to mean? (Ethnologue lists 69 languages for Pakistan, 387 for India.) There were separate entries for “Persian” and “Farsi,” and not just for cross-referencing convenience, either: there were five doctors listed under the latter and only one (a different one) under the former. But the worst was “Hebrew (Yiddish).” What the…? Not only are those completely different languages, it’s unlikely that many doctors are competent in both—certainly here in New England. I suspect most of those listed speak Hebrew, with a few having picked up Yiddish either as mamaloshen at home or as an elective in college; in any case, lumping them together seems completely insane. (Also, I can’t help but wonder how many patients still arrive at the doctor’s expecting to describe their symptoms in Yiddish.)

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It is not given to many men to introduce a new word into the language. He claimed he got it from an editor, but he claimed a lot of things. All I know is that nobody ever wrote like that before, and lots of people have since tried and made fools of themselves, and now it’s all over.

Farewell and mahalo, Hunter.

(A good collection of Hunter Thompson links at Incoming Signals.)