This nifty tool takes Irish input and spits out dictionary definitions and morphological analysis of each word; it will also provide all other forms of the words if you ask it to. I should add that this is Modern Irish we’re talking about; if you tried to do it for Old Irish the computer would probably shriek, gibber, and die. (Via ilani ilani.)

Dennis Des Chene, a philosopher at Washington University, has a blog Philosophical Fortnights (note the admirable URL); a recent post made me very happy. First off, the cover of Marie Corelli’s novel attracts me as it did him:

On my way to Coleridge the other day I couldn’t help but notice the work whose front cover you see here. Could I resist? Of course not. It was that emdash between ‘love’ and ‘philosopher’. I have a soft spot for eccentric punctuation.

Then there’s the fact that the heroine of the book “is the daughter of a rich old man who with the Philosopher’s help is completing his lifework, The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived as a Precursor to the Decadence of Civilization.” And the icing on the cake is that Corelli’s own use of language is so dreadful:

Simply because even the million do not know “how” to read. Moreover, it is very difficult to make them learn. They have neither the skill nor the patience to study beautiful thoughts expressed in beautiful language. They want to “rush” something through. Whether poem, play or novel, it must be “rushed through” and done with. […] They have time for motoring, cycling, card-playing, racing, betting, hockey and golf,—anything in short which does not directly appeal to the intellectual faculties,—but for real reading, they can neither make leisure, nor acquire aptitude.

This vague, sieve-like quality of brain and general inability to comprehend or retain imprssions of character or events, which is becoming so common among modern so-called “readers” of books, can but make things very difficult for authors who seek to contribute something of their utmost and best to the world of literature.

Tu quoque, sweet Marie!

My wife asked if she should turn off the radio yesterday morning while we were listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition; I said no, the stimulation of hollering at the radio was good for me. What occasioned my high blood pressure and her solicitude was an interview with James Cochrane, a former editor at Penguin Books who’s written the latest in an endless series of interchangeable English-is-going-to-hell books, with entries on all the usual suspects: disinterested/uninterested, comprised/composed, free gift, you know the drill. What particularly got my goat, however, was an especially ill-informed rant about may and might; alas, just as I was composing my own rant in response, my site (for mysterious reasons) used up its bandwidth allotment for the month and I was unable to post. Now I don’t have to compose a detailed analysis of the man’s idiocy, because Geoff Pullum (“Q: Is James Cochran, then, nothing but a mendacious pontificating old windbag? A: Yes, it would appear that he is an utter fraud.”) and Arnold Zwicky (“he’s also ignorant, lazy, and self-important”) have done it for me. Thanks, Language Log! And don’t anybody buy that book, or I’ll have to smack you upside the head.

The Business & High-Tech Dictionary Project is a promising new online lexicon:

This project got its start with the realization that there are no web sites that focus on the etymology and usage of business and high-tech jargon terms. There are many business jargon glossary sites, but none that apply rigorous lexicographic standards to the subject.
The world of business, and particularly high-tech business, is fertile ground for neologisms and catch phrases. General and slang dictionaries do not cover many of these terms, either because they are used in too limited a context or because they appear faster than print dictionaries can react. The internet is the ideal medium for capturing these terms and describing how they are used. Not only can a web site respond to new terms and phrases much faster than a print source, but it can also rely on a web of contributors to expand the dictionary and provide citations of usage.

As they say, it’s “very much a work in progress,” and you can help it grow: go to the Contribute page, read the criteria, and fill out the form.
A sample that gives a sense of how useful (and entertaining) the project can be:

[Read more…]

A satisfyingly comprehensive page on the first Lithuanian book, Martynas Mažvydas‘s 1547 Catechism, or to be more precise Catechismusa prasty Szadei, Makslas skaitima raschta yr giesmes del kriksczianistes bei del berneliu iaunu nauiey sugulditas… At this page you can read the Foreword (in verse) and even hear the first two lines read aloud, and here is a lengthy discussion of the book (by Leonardas Vytautas Gerulaitis, from Lituanus). All this comes via the ever-industrious Mithridates, who has also put up some excellent links on Kyrgyz in two posts (1, 2).

The Tokyo National Museum has a gorgeous online calligraphy collection; I’m not sure what distinguishes the Books & Documents from, say, the Ancient Superb Writings in Japan, but it doesn’t really matter—it’s all good. Enjoy. (Via Plep.)

Bridget Samuels has a blog, ilani ilani, with the enticing description “Putting the ‘sin’ back in syntax and the ‘ho’ back in phonology.” Recent posts are on protosyntax and snowglobes (or whatever you call them). And in her first post she says this about the blog’s name: “The title comes from the Hittite expression for step by step, which perhaps explains the cuneiform background and the little pointy-headed figurine dude in the corner.”

I discovered her via Christopher Culver’s new Безѹмниѥ [Bezumnie], and anyone who remembers his former blog Nephelokokkygia will be as delighted as I am that he’s returned to blogging. In his Welcome post he says:

A year ago I managed a weblog called Nephelokokkygia, charting my interest in comparative Indo-European linguistics. I later took it down, feeling that I would be speaking too authoritatively for an undergraduate student, and frequently finding I had little to write about. Immediately afterward, however, my studies began to give me much more to think about, and I decided to see training in comparative Indo-European linguistics as a stepping-stone to comparative Uralic linguistics. Encouraged by some acquaintances, I have decided to set up a new blog. Безѹмниѥ (Old Church Slavonic for ‘Ignorance’ but the root of the Russian word for ‘Insanity’) will serve as a record of my progress as I have gotten way over my head in a field bent on maddening and impoverishing me.

Finally, Heidi Harley’s HeiDeas (ie, “Heidi’s”) describes itself as “Linguistics, science, books, movies, cartoons, whathaveyou,” but so far the focus is on linguistics, with recent posts on the phrase grand theft auto and Longer-than-your-average-compound compounds, the latter ending with a truly magnificent picture of a “run you over horse.”

Welcome, all!

So I finally got a copy of the new 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, and in flipping through it I happened on the unfamiliar word chukar. It represents a rather handsome partridge, Alectoris chukar, but what caught my attention were the pronunciation and etymology:
chukar \’chə-kər also chə-‘kär\ [Hindi cakor & Urdu chakor]

My immediate reactions were:

1) The preferred pronunciation sounds exactly like chukker ‘one of the periods of play in a polo match’ and doesn’t go with the etymology. What’s going on?

2) “Hindi cakor & Urdu chakor“? Those are the same word; you’re just using two different language names and transcription systems! What’s going on?

I went back to the 9th and 10th editions of the dictionary and found an interesting sequence:

9th:
chukar partridge \chə-‘kär\ [Hindi cakor]

10th:
chukar \’chə-kər also chə-‘kär\ [Hindi cakor]

So here’s what I think. In between the 9th (1987) and 10th (1993) editions, the M-W lexicographers discovered that the people who had imported the bird into the western US called it simply “chukar,” not “chukar partridge,” and furthermore pronounced it in a completely anglicized form, not knowing or caring that that made it a homophone of some polo term. So far so good. But then somebody decided that it wasn’t fair to say it was from Hindi, since it was borrowed at a time (two hundred years ago) when there was no clear separation between what we now call “Hindi” and “Urdu,” both of them being cultural variants of the local lingua franca then called “Hindustani.” This makes perfect sense. But then, instead of calling the etymon “Hindi-Urdu cakor” or “Hindustani cakor,” they invented a completely spurious distinction between what look to the untutored eye like two different preforms, apparently because their transcription system for Hindi uses c for the unaspirated \ch\ (presumably using ch for the aspirated consonant), whereas the one for Urdu uses ch for the same phoneme (and presumably chh for the aspirated one). I’m sorry, but this just won’t do. If you get a result like that, it’s time to revisit your theories of transcription, etymology, or entry writing.

Incidentally, the AHD gives only the etymological pronunciation (chuh-KAHR), which I’m guessing is out of date for American use (or why would M-W have changed it?), but a simpler and better etymology: Hindi cakor, from Sanskrit cakorah.

I’ll finish with the charming definition found in Platt’s Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English:

cakor S[anskrit] چکور चकोर ćakor, s.m. The Bartavelle or Greek partridge, Perdix rufa, or Tetrao rufus (fabled to subsist upon moon-beams, and to eat fire at the full moon).

I’ve discovered an excellent new word, apophenia, described here:

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger)…

According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.”…

In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., ghosts and hauntings, EVP, numerology, the Bible code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld “hits”, most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena.

I presume the word (which has not yet made it into the OED) is based on Greek apophaino ‘show forth, display’ and thus represents a hypothetical *apophainia (the actual Greek derived nouns are apophansis and apophasis), so that the proper UK spelling would be “apophaenia” (though googling that form turns up only a page from a Russian medical dictionary giving it as the etymon of Russian apofeniya; a nice question is whether that can be considered a correct etymology).

Anyone curious about why this word should appeal so to me may consult my entries on Coincidence and More coincidence. Probability theory is extremely unintuitive for us poor Homo sapiens, doomed to see meaning in every damn thing.

Warning: Do not click on this link if you are subject to motion sickness; it’s an unsettling experience anyway. Simon Whitechapel has created a font in which each letter is constantly moving:

Rotor is an experimental script created to realize the concept of letters that literally move on the “page”. It consists of seventeen minimal pairs of graphemes in which the members of each pair are identical except for the way they move: unvoiced consonants and the first member of the pairs m n, w y, l r, h j, q x, a o, “. :”, “, ;”, “ ‘ ’ ”, and “! ?” turn clockwise, voiced consonants and the second member of the pairs turn anti-clockwise (c rocks first clockwise, then anti-clockwise). Of the remaining graphemes, e turns a vertical figure-of-eight and u a horizontal one, and i alone, consisting of two “zoophors” turning clockwise, is unambiguous when at rest.

While I admire the ingenuity, I cannot bring myself to regard this as a Good Thing. (Via No-sword.)

Update (June 2021). I’ve replaced the dead link with an archived one; you can also see the script at Omniglot.