From the About the Project page:

ARETE is a project of the UCLAB at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The central result of the project is the interactive visualization of the history of the Latin alphabet. In particular, the visualization shows the temporal and formal relationships of the different scripts and typefaces to each other.

Our main concern was to show the diversity and variance of the Latin alphabet over the centuries. It is often suggested that the Roman Capitalis evolved to Antiqua scripts to today’s Grotesk in a linear way. However, we believe that this is only one possible view among many. Like any cultural development, the history of type and script is, at its core, a network. Over the centuries, designers have learned from others, referred to existing designs, and developed variants. There were times of greater standardization and then again times of great variance. The Arete project wants to show and clarify this diversity and these different design lines.

Another concern was to show not only the typographic history, but also the history of calligraphy and handwriting. Even after the invention of printing, a lot of text production occurred by hand. In the 17th and 18th centuries, various social, economic and cultural developments even caused handwriting to flourish.

Lots more info at the link; it’s a pleasing layout, even if I don’t understand all the ins and outs — there are lots of things to click on. (Via chavenet’s MeFi post.)

Brilliant Maps has a page with two terrific images, one “a colourful map of Toronto’s most widespread languages” shown together, and another, “54 Languages in Toronto,” with separate (tiny) maps for each language showing where in the city each is spoken; they “are both the work of Alex McPhee, aka Pronghorn maps,” and there’s a link to his site, where you can buy copies if you so desire. I do love this sort of thing, and there’s a lot more information at the Brilliant Maps link.

As I anticipate my chicken curry and lemon bars, I’ll mention some of the gifts that have come my way. There was a group of movies, for some reason all Asian: two by Tsai Ming-Liang (Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L’amour), Mother by Bong Joon-ho (I loved his Parasite and Memories of Murder), and the new 2-Blu-ray Criterion edition of Seven Samurai (replacing my ancient DVD), one of my favorite movies (I last watched it in conjunction with a reread of The Last Samurai and am due for another viewing). Oh, and I almost forgot Gimme Shelter, one of the greatest and most troubling of rock movies. My lovely and generous wife gave me this Mingus box set (7 CDs!). And I got a book of great Hattic interest: Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (her name has the tone marks on the cover, the first time I remember seeing that). The NY Times review by Shahnaz Habib (archived) gives an idea of what I mean about its interest:

Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist, is traveling around Taiwan with O Chizuru, a brilliant translator with deep knowledge of the island’s layers of culture. Having received an official invitation to conduct a lecture series, Chizuko plans to spend a year on the island writing travel articles for Japanese publications. […]

Who better to answer these questions than a translator, adept in the language and culture of the colony and the colonizer? Translation, after all, can be both a capitulation and an act of resistance to the soft power of an empire. Having mastered the master’s toolbox, the translator understands precisely how cultural domination works.

Perhaps this is why Yang fashions “Taiwan Travelogue” as a nesting doll of translations. Richly detailed conversations about food, for example, serve as code for the growing erotic tension between Chizuko and Chizuru, which remains unspoken.

Beyond this, the book itself is presented as a fictional translation of a Japanese novel written by Chizuko years after she returns to Nagasaki. According to this framing device, the novel was published in Japan in 1954, and translated into Mandarin twice, first by Chizuru, and then decades later by Yang. There are multiple afterwords and many footnotes from both fictional and real translators. It all amounts to a virtuosic performance of literary polyphony.

In her disorientingly convincing afterword, Yang, writing as the book’s fictional translator, recounts how she discovered Chizuko’s novel by following a breadcrumb trail of archival material. (To complicate matters further, Yang Shuang-zi is actually a pseudonym, but, for your sanity and mine, I refer to her as the author in this review.)

A few pages later, the novel’s English-language translator, Lin King, writes in her own (real) afterword that she consulted the Japanese translation of “Taiwan Travelogue” for help with certain terms, noting the irony of turning to “the Japanese translation of a Taiwanese novel that claims to be a Taiwanese translation of a Japanese novel.”

I imagine I’ll be posting about it in due course.

Update. A couple of later-arriving novels: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar.

I just heard an announcer say he was going to play Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, which he pronounced /ˈrɛnɪʃ/ (REN-ish). I was irritated, because I myself say /ˈriːnɪʃ/ (REE-nish), so I looked it up to see what reference works said. Imagine my horror on learning that the OED, AHD, and M-W only give the former version, with the short vowel. I was relieved to see that Collins gives both, with mine first (/ˈriː-, ˈrɛnɪʃ/), and downright triumphant to discover that Daniel Jones gives mine as the main entry, with the other in square brackets (“rare”). But I am perturbed, so herewith one of my pop-quiz survey questions: how do you say this word? And does anyone know anything about the history of its pronunciation?

By the way, in the course of my researches I learned of the existence of the Rhenish Republic (1923 – 1925); I have mentioned my affection for long-forgotten, short-lived territorial entities before, e.g. here.

In my continuing investigation of the movies of Jacques Rivette (lately Jeanne la pucelle and La Bande des quatre), I recently watched Va savoir and enjoyed it enough that I’ll doubtless be getting the Radiance Blu-ray, which has not only the theatrical cut that I saw — a mere two and a half hours — but the 3:44 director’s cut, which includes much more of the play-within-the-film, Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi (Italian text; translated by Samuel Putnam as As You Desire Me). Needless to say, I took time off from the movie to read the play, checking against the translation (my Italian is OK but not dependable), and I noticed one idiom that Putnam got wrong even though, as he says, “I have enjoyed the advantage of close association with Signor Pirandello himself, and I am indebted to him for constant encouragement and sympathy and for frequent and always helpful suggestions.” The plot concerns a woman, identified only as L’ignota ‘the Unknown,’ who may or may not be the wife of the Venetian Bruno — she disappeared a decade ago and has been presumed dead. When she is brought to Venice in that capacity, various squabbles ensue, and at one point the exasperated Zio Salesio says “Ma no! Io non c’entro piú! Son fuori causa, io, ormai! Tagliata la testa al toro, col tuo ritorno!” Putnam renders this as “No, no! I’m out of it! I’m out of the case, from now on! You put a crimp in everything with your return!” But tagliare la testa al toro, literally ‘to cut off the bull’s head,’ is an idiom meaning ‘to definitively settle a matter.’ (One would like to know how it arose!)

Unrelated, but I got a chuckle out of the title of a collection of the Parisian poetry of Boris Bozhnev (Russian Wikipedia, French), an émigré of the first (post-Revolution) wave: Вниз по мачехе, по Сене ‘Down stepmother Seine,’ a play on the famous song Вниз по матушке, по Волге ‘Down mother Volga.’ Clever!

Adam Aaronson (a software engineer who also plays jazz trombone and electric bass) has a blog post with all sorts of Hattic material; it starts with an observation made by Alex Boisvert on Crosscord, the crossword Discord server:

JET BLACK and JETBLUE have very different meanings, even though they look superficially similar. Same thing with CATNAP and DOGNAP. Any other examples of this?

Adam continues:

Suffice to say, the Crosscord hivemind had other examples of this. Will Nediger replied a few minutes later with the clever MULTITOOL and MULTIPLIERS (words with completely unrelated meanings, despite the fact that PLIERS are a TOOL). Several messages later, Alex chimed back in with the elegant PUB QUIZ and BAR EXAM, a pairing that had been used in some form in crosswords by constructors Christopher Adams (2018) and Robyn Weintraub (2021).

Something about this concept—two sets of synonyms (PUB and BAR, QUIZ and EXAM), which when paired together, form phrases that themselves are not synonyms (PUB QUIZ and BAR EXAM)—captured the minds of Crosscord. Suddenly, the floodgates were open.

People suggested UBEREATS / SUPERFOOD, THROW SHADE / PITCH BLACK, BOOTY CALL / BUTT DIAL, ROMAN MARS / CLASSICAL RUINS, PERMANENT PRESS / FOREVER STAMP, and others.

There’s something going on here. Something more than a shitpost or an ephemeral trend. Double doubles have the proverbial juice, and the juice lies in their structure. Each pair of pairs can be modeled as a square, where the corners are words and the sides are relations between those words […]

It’s this square structure that makes each double double feel tight, feel satisfying, feel like a real “find”. This is the essence of what I’ve started calling square theory, and it applies to much more than just posts in a Discord server.

Click through for much more, including crossword examples (e.g., Will Shortz’s all-time favorite clue, [It turns into a different story] for SPIRAL STAIRCASE). Via MeFi.

A couple of links from the Commenter Known as Bathrobe:

1) Can AI help revive Ainu? Jessie Lau writes for BBC Future:

There are only a handful of native Ainu speakers left. The language is currently listed by Unesco as “Critically Endangered”. Records suggest that in 1870 – one year after Ezo or Ezochi (now Hokkaido) was declared part of Japan – some 15,000 people spoke local varieties of Ainu, and the majority spoke no other language. But various government policies, including the banning of Ainu in schools, almost wiped the language and culture out. By 1917, the estimated number of speakers had plummeted to just 350 and has dropped precipitously since then.

Despite this, Ainu is arguably undergoing a revival. In 2019, Japan legally recognised the Ainu as Indigenous people of the country through a bill that included measures to foster their inclusion and visibility. And now various projects aim to preserve and revitalise the language – including with the help of artificial intelligence. There’s a chance that Ainu could survive for generations to come.

We talked about Ainu in 2016 and earlier this month.

2) Translation in Ukraine During the Stalinist Period: Literary Translation Policies and Practices, an open-access chapter (in Translation Under Communism, pp.141-172); it deals with the translation-related aspects of what I wrote about in this 2010 post and goes into some interesting details, e.g.:
[Read more…]

In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris declared that it wanted no more submissions about the origin of language, and I should probably resist the temptation myself (Betteridge’s law of headlines can be applied here as usual), but hey, it’s a Languagehat tradition — back in 2003, this post, about an “attempt to construct a coherent narrative about the prehistory of language,” began: “The NY Times has decided once again to clamber aboard their spavined, cross-eyed nag and charge creakily into battle with the windmills of linguistics.” So without further ado, I present Carl Zimmer’s NYT “Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?” (archived):

If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.

“It’s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,” said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language. […]

Humans and apes are similar in another way: Their babies need time to learn how to make sounds like adults. Scientists have done much more research into how human infants develop language than into how wild baby apes learn to make calls. One striking feature of humans is the way that adults speak to young children. Baby talk — known to scientists as infant-directed speech — often features repeated words, an exaggerated stress on syllables and a high, singsong tone.

This distinctive pattern is very effective at grabbing the attention of young children — even when they’re too young to understand the meaning of the words that adults are saying. It’s possible that children pay attention to infant-directed speech because it helps them learn some of the basic features of language.

So they did studies on bonobos and chimpanzees:
[Read more…]

The phrase “needs must” popped into my head, and I realized it was so elliptical I had no idea how it worked grammatically or how it originated. Fortunately, the OED updated the entry needs adv. “Of necessity, necessarily, unavoidably” in 2003, so I can provide a satisfying answer. This is under II. “With the modal auxiliaries †mote and must, emphasizing the sense of the verb”:

II.4.b. needs must: it is necessary or unavoidable. Cf. needs must that needs shall at shall v. III.27c.
Apparently originally the impersonal use of must (see must v.¹ II.3c [“It behoves (or behoved), it is (or was) necessary to”]) with anaphoric ellipsis of the main verb; by the 19th cent. used in isolation (probably originally as a shortened form of needs must when the devil drives: see sense II.5). Now frequently taken to be a plural noun and verb.

1604 We beleeue them no more then needs must.
E. Grimeston, translation of True Historie of Siege of Ostend 195

1629 Her vnaduised sickle shall not thrust Into her hopefull Haruest, ere needs must.
F. Quarles, Argalus & Parthenia i. 36
[…]

1734 I shall stay no longer in Dublin than needs must.
G. Berkeley, Letter in Works (1871) vol. IV. 218
[…]

1821 I..would have no more of these follies than needs must.
W. Scott, Kenilworth vol. II. iv. 73

1839 ‘Faith, then, needs must,’ said the ensign.
W. M. Thackeray, Catherine vi. 112
[…]

a1902 Then needs must that Laura go with the cook to see if the range was finally and properly adjusted.
F. Norris, Pit (1903) ii. 51
[…]

1998 ‘I’m pleased you have adapted yourself to our work ethic so readily.’ Larkin shook his head. ‘Needs must.’
M. Waites, Little Triggers (1999) ii. 17

Here’s the section on the “devil drives” phrase:
[Read more…]

Jim Bisso posted to the Facebook group The Morphology of Peevology:

Code switching in Yiddish by a Chasid youth. So much English, Yinglish, what have you. Anyway, he went to Iran to find the tombs of Ester and Mordekay.

https://youtu.be/D5TZPlO4Se8?si=GOLMHQI8TesQjzZr

If you know even a tiny bit of Yiddish it’s well worth watching at least some of the 46-minute video; I’m in awe at the language-mixing. Description of the content:

I landed in Tehran and headed straight to Hamadan, where I spent the night. The next day, I explored the vibrant bazaar and visited the sacred Tomb of Mordechai and Esther. Then, I set off to the breathtaking Ali-Sadr Cave, an underground wonder with vast waterways and boat rides—an unforgettable experience.