John Emerson has put online (at Idiocentrism) a transcription and translation of a few passages from what sounds like a remarkable book, the sixteenth-century Portuguese Menina e Moça. Here is Emerson’s description:

The main narrator is doubly exiled, first from her childhood home, and then from the place where she was raised. Seemingly abandoned by her lover, she has come to a lonely place to live out her few remaining years. There she meets another exile, a mysterious older woman who refuses to tell her own tragic story but lets slip that it concerns her son. Most of the book consists of stories which the mystery woman had heard from her father and which she retells to the first narrator — stories of events happening at the desolate place of their exile, which had once been inhabited by noble knights and their ladies, of whom the relics were still occasionally uncovered by the simple shepherdesses who now inhabited the land.
The second narrator might be a ghost (the supernatural is evident throughout), and it is even possible that she and everything she says are projections of the first narrator’s disturbed mind: “In a strange way, I was transported to a place where my own pain was reenacted before my eyes in others’ lives”. The stories told by the second narrator are also all stories of doomed exiles, and when one character (Aonia) seems to end up attaining a mediocre happiness, that is not treated as a happy ending — and the first narrator occasionally reflects that she herself seems to be seeking and insisting on unhappiness, rather than trying to avoid it.

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Bob Becker has put online a useful resource for pre-war Jewish life in Eastern Europe:

Chaim Finkelstein was the last editor of Haynt, the Jewish newspaper in Warsaw, Poland, before the Holocaust. His book, Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper, chronicles the history of Jewish life in Poland between 1908 and 1939. It contains articles from the leading writers on the world.

Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper was published in Israel in Yiddish, but never in English. This website makes Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper available to Yiddish readers and seeks volunteers to translate a few pages each… As I receive these translations, I will add them to this website and credit the translators for their contribution. All translations will be in the public domain.

So any Yiddish-speakers who’d like to contribute to such a project can go try their hand. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey; haynt, incidentally, is Yiddish for ‘today.’)

Céline of Naked Translations has an amusing post about her difficulties trying to translate English into French and being told that her versions are too… French:

Coordinator: “Please write your ideas on the flip-chart.”
Céline: “Veuillez noter vos idées sur le… le…”

What’s flip-chart in French?? Don’t panic, don’t panic.

“Le… le…”

19 pairs of eyes are on me. I can feel drops of sweat slowing running down my cold forehead.

“Le… le…”

“TABLEAU DE CONFÉRENCE!”, I finally blurt out, a bit too loudly. I’m sure I can hear a crowd cheering and chanting my name in the distance.

French client: “Tableau de conférence? C’est marrant, nous on dit paperboard.” (That’s funny, we say paperboard).

I tell you, next time I can’t think of the proper way of saying something in French, I’ll just come out with a ridiculous made-up English word instead of risking brain meltdown.

There’s also a good story about translating “environmental stewardship,” and some thoughts on context.

From a comment in a previous entry I found a couple of very interesting blogs by zhwj: 化　境　神　思 (litserial) and Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy (both are in English, despite the name of the first, though with frequent use of Chinese). The first began with an introduction to “a short memoir called Journey to the West 西游记 by the American educated psychologist Shen Youqian 沈有乾,” which zhwj is translating in installments; the most recent entry is about onomatopoeia in a Chinese translation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The newest post in the sf blog is a discussion of the Chinese terms for fantasy, science fiction, and the like, with many quotes and examples. Both sites are highly recommended.

I have just learned (via a MetaFilter post) the word graticule, which is obscure enough that it’s not in the American Heritage Dictionary. The OED defines it thus:

1. A design or plan divided into squares to facilitate its proportionate enlargement or reduction; the style or pattern of such a division.
1887 GEN. WALKER in Encycl. Brit. XXII. 714/1 The graticule is sometimes rectangular, sometimes spherical, sometimes a combination of both.. Spherical graticules are constructed in various ways.
2. A transparent plate or cell bearing a grid, cross-wire, or scale, designed to be used with an optical instrument or cathode-ray oscilloscope for the purpose of positioning, measuring, or counting objects in the field of view; the scale, grid, etc., on such a plate. Hence graticuled ppl. a., fitted with a graticule.
1914 Handbk. Artill. Instrum. 42 In front of the eye-piece is fixed.. a diaphragm, with spider’s web graticules attached to it. 1919 Trans. Opt. Soc. XX. 277 Generally the graticules are on glass and it is usual to refer to the complete discs or plates with the measuring scales or marks on them, as ‘graticules’. Ibid. 286 Graticuled binoculars are not used much for peace purposes. […] 1971 Physics Bull. July 398/2 A graduation line is centred in the microscope eyepiece graticule.

If one were to be classically accurate, it should be “craticule”; the etymology is:
a. F. graticule, ad. med.L. grâtîcula, for crâtîcula gridiron, dim. of crâtis hurdle.

For meaning 2, the word reticle is also used; the words are unconnected, this one being from a diminutive of rête ‘net.’

A Boing Boing post describes the “curious censorship and intellectual property details of Microsoft’s new blogging tool MSN Spaces” as they affect Chinese sites; I was particularly struck by this (from Weizhong Yang in Taipei, Taiwan):

We found that the Traditional Chinese MSN Spaces censored words such as oral sex, anal sex and so on, by the way, they censored two important and common used words which make us feel unbelievable.

One is a word pronounced as cao which means fucking sometimes, however, it also means operating, handling, exercising or practicing, and there was a famous king/hero/tyrant in about the second century called Cao Cao. Therefore you cannot set certain derivations of that word (for instance Cao Cao and Yang Xiu, which is a famous traditional Chinese drama play) as the title of your MSN Space.

I can attest that Cao Cao (traditional transliteration Tsao Tsao) is an extremely famous figure in Chinese history, and it’s absurd that his name is censored because of homonymy! (Thanks to Songdog for the link.)

The Language Feed is a completely not-for-profit and free web site and email announcement list. Every Friday, the Language Feed is updated with the latest news stories found around the web that pertain to language and linguistics. Articles are selected with two criteria in mind – does this article have something to do with language? And does this article interest Sally? That’s it.

“Sally” is Sally Morrison, and she’s created a very useful website, which I found via Jessica Rett’s links page.

The December 10 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long piece by Richard Monastersky on Hawaiian professors who are trying to make sure Hawai’i’s native language survives (the link will only last about five days [see Update for permanent link]):

On the first day of “Hawaiian Studies 474,” a dozen students line up just inside a classroom doorway, open their mouths in unison, and breathe life into an ailing culture. Under a bank of fluorescent lights, young men and women wearing T-shirts and shorts chant an old Hawaiian poem asking permission to enter a place of learning.

“Kūnihi ka mauna i ka la’i ē,” they intone without stopping for breath, voices blending in a melody that hovers around a single ancient note. Kalena Silva, a professor of Hawaiian language and studies at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, asks his students to repeat the entrance poem several times before he chants a response, ending in a drawn-out tremolo that fades to silence. Then he begins his traditional-hula class, starting with a lecture on the history of the dance.

As he asks questions, tells jokes, and keeps the students engaged, not a word of English passes his lips. This upper-level course, like others offered by the department, is taught entirely in the Hawaiian language…

Teaching in Hawaiian was actually forbidden by state law—until 1986! The article describes the efforts to repeal the law and establish Hawaiian-language schools:

The nonprofit group created its first preschool, on the island of Kaua’i, to serve a small community of Hawaiian speakers from the nearby island of Ni’ihau.

That privately owned island has a population of some 200 people, who, to this day, use Hawaiian as their first language. The second Pūnana Leo, in Hilo, attracted families like that of Mr. [William (Pila)] Wilson and Ms. [Kauanoe] Kamanā, second-language learners rearing their children in Hawaiian.

When it was time for their son to enter kindergarten, Ms. Kamanā and Mr. Wilson started one of those, too, without authorization from the state. (A longstanding Hawaiian law prohibited educators from teaching in the native language.) They were prepared to go to jail for their actions. But they managed to get the law changed and to establish a full elementary school. Then came a laboratory school for middle and high school, called Nāwahi, which is run jointly by their college, the nonprofit corporation, and the state department of education.

Their efforts extend far beyond the usual activities of college professors. “We had to train the teachers and change the law,” says Mr. Wilson. “We had to make the curricular materials, and we even had to create words for things that hadn’t existed in the lives of the older people.” They brought Hawaiian into the modern world by inventing words such as huna hohoki, for neutron, and wikiō, for video.

Their efforts are bearing fruit:

“We’re finally at the graduate level, at the truly academic level,” says Mr. Silva. Hawaiians have watched for decades as non-native scholars studied Hawaiian historical documents indirectly through translations. But now, students fluent in the language are starting to mine the hundreds of thousands of historical sources written in Hawaiian. “We are able to look at Hawaiian cultural material in our own language,” he says. “It gives us added weight and insight into this material.”

Nonetheless, the academic advances are only a small step toward the professors’ main goal of bringing Hawaiian back into people’s lives. “I’m looking forward to a time—I’m not sure I’ll see it in my lifetime—when there is a large enough community of speakers” to sustain the language, says Mr. Silva, while driving on the outskirts of Hilo. Linguists estimate that it might take as many as 100,000 speakers to put Hawaiian on that solid a foundation. Only about 5,000 or 6,000 speak the language now, but schools and colleges are training more every year, says Mr. Silva as he pulls into the parking lot at Nāwahi, where faculty members and students are, day by day, resurrecting the language of Kamehameha. “We’re not there yet,” Mr. Silva says. “But maybe in 50 years.”

At the end of the article is a little tutorial on Hawaiian words:

aloha (ah-LOH-ha): Accent falls on the syllable “loh” instead of others.
Hawai’i (ha-VIE ee or ha-WHY ee): The correct spelling uses an ‘okino.
Mā’noa (MAH-NO-ah): The kahakō over the first “a” elongates that vowel, and the second syllable is stressed.
mu’umu’u (moo oo-MOO oo): a type of dress, often mispronounced as “moo-moo.”
O’ahu (o AH hoo): The glottal stop is often left out.

Geoff Pullum, from whose Language Log post I got the link, says there are two spelling errors among the seven Hawaiian words, one of them “a spelling that couldn’t possibly be right for a Hawai‘ian word for phonological reasons”; the first person who sends him both words (email to pullum at the ucsc site in the edu domain) “will win a free cup of coffee at the book exhibit at the LSA meeting from me personally.” Act now; supplies are limited!

Update (Oct. 2022). Monastersky’s article is now available here.

John Emerson, at Idiocentrism (scroll down below “Samuel Butler on Rat-traps”), discusses “The Ruins of Rome,” a poem by “a little-known Latin humanist, Ianus [Janus] Vitalis of Palermo.” He says:

At the link I have posted the versions by Bellay, Quevedo, Cohen, Pound, Spenser, Sęp-Szarzyński, Alex Ingber (from Quevedo), and an unknown translator’s English version of Sęp-Szarzyński. It can be seen that the translators allowed themselves quite a bit of freedom in the way they set up the clinching lines — for example, they address the poem variously to “the stranger”, “the pilgrim”, “the traveller”, and “the newcomer”.
The one version that Googling has not been able to find — not so oddly, really — is the Latin original by the almost-unknown Vitalis. All I have so far are these fragments:

….Aspice murorum moles, paeruptaque saxa
Obrutaque norrenti vesta theatra situ:
Haec sunt Roma. Viden velut ipsa cadavera taritae
Urbis adhuc spirent imperiosa minas?….
Disce hinc quid possit fortuna: immota labascunt
Et quae perpetuo sunt agitata manent.

So I’m asking my vast readership to help me find the rest of the poem. And if you can find more versions in more languages, send them by and I’ll post them too.

I hereby transmit his quest (and his offer) to my own readership; any Vitalis experts out there?

I’ve been familiar with (and enjoyed) the big, meaty mushrooms called portobello for years, and I had assumed that that was, well, their name. But I just read the entry in the invaluable Food Lover’s Companion, which begins:

An extremely large, dark brown mushroom that is simply the fully mature form of the cremino, which in turn is a variation of the common cultivated white mushroom. The name “portobello” began to be used in the 1980s as a brilliant marketing ploy to popularize an unglamorous mushroom that, more often than not, had to be disposed of because growers couldn’t sell them.

Apparently it’s also called portabella; either way, the origin is unknown—and the word itself is still unknown to the OED. Surely the 1980s are recent enough that it should be possible to pinpoint the creation of the term?

Update. See now the Wordorigins thread on this topic, and the chapter excerpt linked from it; lots of interesting leads, still nothing definitive. How can an etymology be completely unrecoverable after only two decades?

Update (1/6/2007): See now Portabello redux, with the new OED entry and a suggested etymology.

I should add that there is an entry portobello in the OED, but it doesn’t seem mushroom-related:

? A kind of game resembling billiards.

1777 HOWARD Prisons Eng. 26 Gaming in various forms is very frequent: cards, dice, skittles, Missisippi and Portobello tables, billiards, fives, tennis, &c. Ibid. 198 One can scarcely ever enter the walls [of the King’s Bench Prison] without seeing parties at skittles, missisippi, portobello, tennis, fives, &c.