Frequent commenter rozele wrote to me about the afterword to Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, calling it “a pretty amazing example of the godawful things done to people’s words in the name (quite explicitly) of turning what we actually speak into True Language”:

in the course of a psychoanalytically-informed account of journalists’ writing processes, and what she describes as a defense of “the necessity for [journalistic] mediation” (by “showing how the literally true may actually be a kind of falsification of reality”), malcolm gives us a transcription of a section of a tape-recorded interview, and then what she asserts is the rendering that appeared in the main text of the book. the latter, she has already told us, is “English”; the former something she calls “tape-recorderese”, which she very clearly considers not to be language at all. “translating” the one into the other is, apparently, absolutely necessary for “trustworthy quotation”.

it’s fascinating on several levels. to my ear the rewrite (without altering its abstract factual content) quite thoroughly transforms the tone, emphasis, and impact of what malcolm’s interviewee says, rather than simply shortening the passage or cutting false starts or abandoned shifts of direction. on top of that, what she claims is the published rendering in fact omits the entire last sentence of what is actually printed in the book as a quotation – no trace of which appears in any form in the transcription excerpt she provides. and what comes through most strongly is her absolute contempt for what she denies is “English”: the language people actually speak and the ways we speak it.

it makes me wonder whether people whose conception of language is constrained to literary writing are even aware of the layers of meaning that they’re refusing to acknowledge. i get the impression that malcolm is not – that she thinks what she’s doing is adding, not destroying, meaning and complexity – though perhaps this is because i can’t picture taking pride in that endeavor, much less calling attention to it at length while discussing my working methods.

I haven’t read the book, but I certainly agree with rozele’s point. (We discussed Janet Malcolm and a different trial back in 2010.)

Guillermo Carvajal writes about what sounds like an interesting, if frustratingly limited, discovery:

Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered a basalt tablet with inscriptions in an unknown language near Lake Bashplemi, in the Dmanisi region of Georgia. The discovery is significant not only because of the rarity of the material found but also because it could reveal unknown aspects of the ancient civilizations that inhabited the Caucasus.

The finding, made in 2021, is a tablet the size of a book, on which 60 different symbols have been recorded, of which 39 have no exact equivalents in other known ancient writing systems. Archaeologists, based on the archaeological and geological context, believe that the tablet may date from the Late Bronze Age or the early Iron Age, around the first millennium BCE. […]

The basalt tablet contains 39 unique symbols arranged in seven horizontal lines or registers. Some of these symbols repeat, allowing for a total of 60 characters on the stone’s surface. The arrangement and frequency of some of the characters suggest that they may have been used to denote numbers or punctuation marks. Researchers have suggested that the writing system may have been used to record religious offerings, construction works, or military inventories, although these interpretations are preliminary.

By “preliminary” is meant, of course, “completely imaginary”; it’s possible that further examples may come to light, enabling us to understand it better, but it will probably remain yet another mysterious fragment of the past. You can see the tablet, an image labeled “The symbols of the tablet, highlighted and numbered,” and a photo of the place it was found at the link, and you can download the recent paper by Ramaz Shengelia, Levan Gordeziani, et al., here; the abstract:

In Georgia, numerous sites date back to the Bronze Age. Nearby Bashplemi Lake, the site of the discovery of a basalt tablet bearing an inscription with unknown characters, is the site where the skull of a 1.8-million-year-old hominin, the first European, was discovered. This tablet, which bears 60 signs, 39 of them different, raises the question of the origin of the Georgian script, proto-Georgian. While the basalt on which it is based is known to be of local origin, its meaning is unknown and there remains a long way to go to decipher it. An initial comparative analysis conducted with over 20 languages shows that the characters, which could belong to an aboriginal Caucasian population, beside proto-Georgian and Albanian writing signs, bear some similarities with Semitic, Brahmani, and North Iberian characters.

Thanks, Dmitry!

Adam Gopnik writes about crowds for the New Yorker (archived); the topic is interesting in general (and I really have to get around to reading Canetti), but this is the Hattic bit:

In his new book, “The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages” (Princeton), Shane Bobrycki, a medieval historian at the University of Iowa, describes a hinge moment in the way people have thought about crowds. It was a period when the rapid de-urbanization of society had reduced or eliminated the Roman vulgus, or mob, but when memories of Roman order and disorder lingered. Bobrycki has devoted himself to a blessedly old-fashioned kind of scholarship, digging through ever-finer shades of meaning, sifting through all the Latin terms that refer to crowds and mobs and gatherings. If you have long wanted to discern the subtle differences in medieval Europe between vulgus, plebs, turba, populus, and rustici, here at last is the book to assist you. And these differences do indeed have weight and significance. It’s fascinating to learn how, when the vulgus was forced out of the dying cities and into the countryside, it became the rustici—the peasants with pitchforks. Plebs, meaning, in classical Latin, “common folk,” came to mean, more neutrally, “the community.” Bobrycki assures us, “Even vulgus could be just another equivalent of the broad populus that was now the lodestar of all crowd words.”

I’m sure there are nits to be picked, so pick away!

Adam Neely has a YouTube channel containing “music theory, music cognition, jazz improvisation, musical performance technique, musicology and memes”; AntC sent me this example (11:14) in which he analyzes why “every pop singer of the past 20 years” sings the phrase “caught in the middle” in a particular way. It’s full of interesting phrases like prosodic dissonance, Picardy third, and Scotch snap, and he discusses the cot-caught merger, but I confess I’m posting it at least as much for the phonetic rendering I’ve used as the post title. I’m a sucker for fish puns.

(Oh, and if you’re thinking of the same half-century-old Stealers Wheel song that I was, impatiently waiting through the whole thing for it to get mentioned, he does so at the very end. He baited me, caught me, and reeled me in!)

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a poignant passage from Jaspreet Singh Boparai, “Why Read Lesser Writers? Politian on Silver Latin Literature” (Antigone [November 2024]):

The translator’s task here does not stop at the dictionary: you really do need to read all the Latin (or Greek) texts that Politian mentions, if you have not already done so, and take good notes, because this man is never lazy or vague in how he uses words. You must have a clear sense of what he is talking about. The only way to gain this is by reading everything that he expects you to have read — which sometimes feels like every single ancient text ever written.

No wonder translators shy away from this dismal grind. Alas, there is no way of getting around it. You cannot use American-style ‘theoretical’ gobbledygook to cover up your lack of comprehension. You must sacrifice your eyesight, posture and sanity amidst the dim light and strange smells of your local academic library, and move from your uncomfortable seat only to find copy after copy of a great many Greek and Latin books and add them to the pile on your desk. Those worryingly shabby, unhealthy-looking people who seem to have nowhere else to go, and drip from the mouth when they stare at you? Congratulations. You are one of them now.

[….]

The next time you read an accurate-sounding translation of a Neo-Latin text that seems to make coherent sense, and is written in recognisable English rather than objectionable translationese, spare a thought for the hapless wretch who has spent hours on every page, checking and double-checking both the original work and his own rendition of it, whilst knowing that perhaps half a dozen people will fully recognise the effort — and those who do will be those other lost souls who stare occasionally at one another from across the reading-room in the same cursed library, as their only relief from the work to which they have condemned themselves, for reasons no sane or normal man can fathom.

I’ve retained Gilleland’s choice of snippets because it’s a nice self-contained lament, but the whole essay is worth reading — I had heard of Politian, but knew far too little about him, and Boparai brings him to life vividly (and reproduces some gorgeous Renaissance paintings).

This review by Michael W. Clune (in The Point) of Céline’s novel War (the first English translation, by Charlotte Mandell, has just appeared) makes it sound like a book any Céline fan (me, for example) should investigate (“In War, he sets these elements swirling around each other, each interacting on each, to produce in the reader—me, at least—an absolute convulsion of hippopotamic laughter without any parallel in my experience, and which caused my wife and daughter to literally recoil in shock and disgust as I sat there in the corner reading”), but what brings me to post it here is this passage of literary analysis:

Perhaps the most original aspect of War—when compared both with Céline’s classic published novels of the 1930s, Death on the Installment Plan and Journey, as well as with most other great examples of dark comedy—is its liberation from the Quixotic model. Of course Don Quixote’s influence as the greatest and arguably the first Western novel extends far beyond dark comedy. But Céline’s example sensitized us to a special branch of Cervantes’s progeny—call it dark comic quixotism. Quixote provides the template for virtually all literary dark comedy that succeeded it, ranging from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust to George Schuyler’s Black No More to Nabokov’s Lolita to Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote.

Central to all these works is what I will call the Unidirectional Downward Comparison (UDC). Cervantes’s novel is organized around the comparison between the idealized images of chivalric romance and the quotidian images of daily life. Don Quixote sees windmills as giants, roadside taverns as castles. This constant comparison between the real and ideal takes a form so strange and even perverse in its logic that it’s very difficult to find analogues for it outside Don Quixote and its progeny. To explain it, I often draw on a photograph that a friend drew my attention to 25 years ago.

The photograph shows the rappers Big Pun and Fat Joe standing next to each other in a space without other visible objects. I think they were in an alley, with walls to either side of them. Perhaps the photo can still be found somewhere on the internet. At any rate, the feature that my friend pointed out to me was that, in setting up a comparison between Fat Joe and Big Pun, each made the other one look thinner. […]

[Read more…]

I recently ran across the Dutch term kater ‘hangover’ and was curious enough to look it up; Wiktionary told a story interesting enough to pass on:

From German Kater (“tomcat; hangover”), a humorous alteration of Katarrh (“catarrh, mucosal inflammation”, loosely also “malaise”) based on somewhat older German Katzenjammer (“hangover”, literally “caterwaul”). An influence by a brand of beer called Kater is also often cited, though this is doubtful.

Doubtful indeed, but I like the “humorous alteration of Katarrh” origin. Hangover terms must include a wide range of odd etymologies.

The Dial (the new “online magazine of culture, politics and ideas,” not the Transcendentalist/modernist predecessor that published Yeats and Eliot) has a Language issue with a number of interesting items, of which I will feature Julia Webster Ayuso’s Can a Comma Solve a Crime?: “How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.” After introducing us to “France’s best-known unsolved murder case,” that of four-year-old Grégory Villemin, Webster Ayuso goes into the history of her topic:

According to forensic linguists, we all use language in a uniquely identifiable way that can be as incriminating as a fingerprint. The word “forensic” may suggest a scientist in a protective suit inspecting a crime scene for drops of blood. But a forensic linguist has more in common with Sherlock Ho[l]mes in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” “The man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence?” the detective asks in the 1891 short story. “A Frenchman or a Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.”

The term “forensic linguistics” was likely coined in the 1960s by Jan Svartvik, a Swedish linguist who re-examined the controversial case of Timothy John Evans, a Welshman who was wrongfully accused of murdering his wife and daughter and was convicted and hanged in 1950. Svartvik found that it was unlikely that Evans, who was illiterate, had written the most damning parts of his confession, which had been transcribed by police and likely tampered with. The real murderer was the Evans’ downstairs neighbor, who turned out to be a serial killer.

Today, the field is perhaps still best known for its role in solving the “Unabomber” case in the United States. […] While U.S. authorities hunted down the Unabomber, the field of forensic linguistics was developing in other countries. The University of Birmingham hosted the first British Seminar on Forensic Linguistics in 1992, bringing together academics from Australia, Brazil, Holland, Ukraine, Greece and Germany. Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University has had a forensic linguistics laboratory since 1993. But it wasn’t until the next decade that the field became more structured, with the creation of university research teams, master’s degrees and government-funded police laboratories and agencies.

“It’s still emerging in places outside where it initially started, but it is growing gradually as people are getting trained,” said Nicci MacLeod, a senior lecturer at the Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics in Birmingham, England, which was established in 2019.

She goes on to discuss authorship attribution (“identifying the author of a given text and, in some cases, shedding light on long-standing literary mysteries”); I like this example:
[Read more…]

I recently rewatched La Haine for the first time since it came out almost thirty years ago, and it was just as good as I remembered. But this time I noticed something that must have zipped right past me back then: at one point Saïd says “Tes parents, ils habitent Rue Gama !” It turns out this is not an actual street but a reference to an ad campaign for Gama detergent; here’s a 1980 example. Why Gama is called that I do not know.

It reminds me of the Fry and Laurie Treaty of Westphalia skit, which culminates in the laugh line “you are really spoiling us” — to get the joke you have to be familiar with the Ferrero Rocher ad campaign.

I am familiar with the word condign pretty much exclusively in the (pompous but not obsolete) phrase “condign punishment,” and I suspect this is the case for most modern users of the language; that Wiktionary article defines it as “Fitting, appropriate, deserved, especially denoting punishment.” But when I checked the OED, whose entry dates back to 1891, I find a whole series of senses, beginning with the obsolete senses “1. † Equal in worth or dignity (to)” (c1470 “This Kyng Arthure, to whom none was condigne Through all the world,” J. Hardyng, Chronicle lxxxiv. vii), “2. † Worthy, deserving” (a1513 “She hath great honour..As most condigne to beare the principalite,” H. Bradshaw, Lyfe St. Werburge ii. xxi. sig. r.v), and “3.a. Worthily deserved, merited, fitting, appropriate; adequate” (1413 “Take him vp in to thy blysse on hye in what degree that to hym is condygne,” J. Lydgate, Pilgr. of Sowle ii. xlii. 48) before getting to the modern sense:

3.b. Since the end of 17th cent. commonly used only of appropriate punishment: a use originating in the phraseology of Tudor Acts of Parliament.
Johnson 1755 says, ‘It is always used of something deserved by crimes’. De Quincey Templars’ Dial. in Wks. IV. 188 note, ‘Capriciously..the word condign is used only in connection with the word punishment..These and other words, if unlocked from their absurd imprisonment, would become extensively useful. We should say, for instance, “condign honours”, “condign reward”, “condign treatment” (treatment appropriate to the merits).’ [Cf. 1873 at sense 3a.]

1513 The godly power..Onto tha wikkyt Sawlis..Hes send conding punytioun, and just panys.
G. Douglas, translation of Virgil, Æneid xiii. vii. 64
[…]

1849 He had been brought to condign punishment as a traitor.
T. B. Macaulay, History of England vol. I. 575

1878 To wreak condign vengeance on the common oppressor of them all.
R. B. Smith, Carthage 195

It’s from French condigne, which has the theological sense “Exactement proportionné à la faute ou à la récompense. Peine, satisfaction, mérite condigne” (apparently not restricted to negative senses as in English) but is not in even my largest printed dictionary; the ultimate source is Latin condignus ‘wholly worthy.’ I love that De Quincey quote about its “absurd imprisonment.”