No, that’s not a typo, it means ‘become rich’ in Hittite, and caelestis at Sauvage Noble has a delightful post on why it’s his favorite Hittite word; read the whole thing if you enjoy Indo-European puns.

Anyone who has ever worked in a bookstore will nod ruefully while reading George Orwell’s little reminiscence “Bookshop Memories.” The names of the popular authors have changed since 1936 (as have some aspects of the situation; Orwell thought that “The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman”), but much is immutable. And the sad conclusion is still applicable:

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

(Via wood s lot.)

Back in May of last year, Mark Liberman of Language Log had a post which began by asserting that Abu Ghraib means ‘father of the raven’ (literally speaking, although the abu form in Arabic is so common and multivalent I’d be tempted to go with ‘Place of Ravens’ instead). Then on Monday he posted a correction, saying that Tim Buckwalter had told him it was rather the diminutive of ghariib ‘strange,’ while the dimunitive of ghuraab ‘crow, raven’ ought to be ghurayyib.

Now he has a further discussion of the matter, with more information on the formation of Arabic diminutives than you can shake a small stick at… and yet there’s still no resolution. Frankly, I find it hard to believe Iraqis don’t know whether Abu Ghraib is named after ravens, the west, or strangeness, assuming of course there is some sort of morphological differentiation in the diminutives. Does anybody know any Iraqis they can ask? The uncertainty is killing me, and perhaps Mark as well.

A Washington Post article [archived] by David A. Fahrenthold discusses the slow decline of the Chesapeake Bay way of speaking:

Years ago, before the watermen had to become bus drivers and the crab shanties were replaced by new red-brick houses, everybody on St. George Island knew about the arster, the kitchen and the sun dog.

The arster, of course, was a bivalve—called an “oyster” by some people—often found here at the remote south end of St. Mary’s County. “The kitchen” was a spot in the Chesapeake Bay where arsters were caught. And a “sun dog” was a haze that portended bad weather, a sign it was time to leave the kitchen and head home.

These words were part of the island’s local dialect, one of many distinctive ways of speaking that grew up over the centuries in isolated areas across the bay.

But now, like many of the other dialects, St. George-ese is fading. Many of the watermen who spoke it have left, and in their place are newcomers from the Washington suburbs and elsewhere…

Linguists are careful to stress that there is not one single Chesapeake Bay dialect but rather a vast array of accents and vocabularies.

There are distinctively southern speakers, like Tidewater Virginians who say “kyar” when they mean “car.” Further north are the residents of “Bawlmer, Merlin,” and along the Eastern Shore, in isolated waterman’s communities, people turn “wife” into “wuife.”

But to the west of this cacophony, there is Washington—a demographic behemoth, breaker of dialects.

Almost 50 percent of the region’s residents were born in a state other than the one where they live, which is more than other big cities and close to twice the national average. Linguistically, that means “nobody really has any idea what Washington, D.C., is,” said David Bowie, a linguistics professor at the University of Central Florida…

So far, there’s been no comprehensive linguistic study of the bay’s dialects to see if they’re all facing the same fate as Southern Maryland speech. But changes have been noted by old-timers and local historians across the area.

Northern Neck native W. Tayloe Murphy Jr.—the Virginia secretary of natural resources—said residents used to say they lived “in” the Northern Neck. Now, he said, many say “on,” as outsiders do.

In Delaware, historian Russ McCabe said he’s seen the decline of “among-ye,” which was that state’s rare way of saying “y’all.” One of the few times he’s heard it recently was at a church in Gumboro, in south Delaware.

“This older fella looked at me and [said], ‘Are among-ye going to stay for supper?’ ” said McCabe, who works for the state public archives. “I had a moment there, a twinge of almost sadness, because I hadn’t heard that in 20 years.”…

The most prominent exception to these changes is Smith Island, Md., a marshy place with about 360 residents, reachable only by ferry.

Here, with a brogue that’s been steeped in decades of isolation, Smith Islanders render house as “hace” and brown as “brain.” They use words that are relics of the British English used by American colonists, such as “progging”—which means to poke around the marshes looking for arrowheads.

University researchers were surprised recently to find that young Smith Islanders actually have a stronger accent than their parents. The researchers and islanders said they believe the change was a conscious attempt to assert the island’s culture in the face of declining catches and rising water levels.

I wonder if this reaction has any chance of actually preserving the dialect for a significant amount of time?

(Thanks to Joe Tomei for the link.)

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.)