languagehat.com

Tariq Panja reports for the NY Times (archived) about a man with a difficult job:

There is perhaps no one in the world who has paid closer attention to the diction and pronunciation of the former England soccer captain John Terry over the past month than Lassaad Tounakti, a 52-year-old Tunisian with a gift for languages, a passion for cologne and an accidental television career.

For Tounakti, understanding the minute details of the way Terry speaks is no casual affair. His ability to understand Terry’s every utterance has been a vital part of one of the World Cup’s toughest, and least forgiving, man-to-man assignments: As the main interpreter for beIN Sports, Tounakti has since the start of the tournament served as the voice of Terry and other retired stars hired by BeIN as it has transmitted the tournament night after night to Arabic-speaking viewers across the Middle East and North Africa. […]

Interpreting their words — quickly, precisely and live on the air — requires an extraordinary fluency in not only languages but soccer. For Tounakti, it means translating every word of Arabic into English in the ears of the former soccer stars before flicking a switch — literally and in his mind — and immediately rendering their thoughts, delivered in English, back into Arabic.

Every voice is different. The English diction of Kaká, a World Cup-winning Brazilian, is different from that of the Dutch soccer great Ruud Gullit, and the nuances of their pronunciations are different from those of the former Germany captain Lothar Matthäus.

Because of the sheer volume of coverage it is providing, beIN is employing four staff interpreters and supplementing them with freelancers for the World Cup. Most interpreters work in a rotation, but there are some accents, some ways of speaking, that require just a little bit more expert handling. Terry’s thick East London accent is one of those. […]

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John Cowan writes:

This is a YouTube channel that I’ve been listening to, moderated by Bahador Alast. He gets together two or more people who speak different languages or dialects and has each of them read out words, sentences (sometimes made-up sentences, sometimes literary, sometimes traditional proverbs), or whole paragraphs to see how much the others understand. None of the participants are linguists; they are mostly college students in various subjects. They giggle charmingly a lot.

Sometimes the languages are related genetically (German/Swedish), sometimes the similarities are due to borrowing (Turkish/French), and sometimes both (Romanian/Italian); some are sheer coincidence (Japanese/Kannada/Tamil). Of the “borrowing” pairs, some are shallow like Spanish/Filipino and others are deep like Hindi/Filipino (old Sanskrit borrowings). Usually the interchange is symmetrical: the German-speaker is asked to decipher Yiddish and vice versa, but sometimes it’s asymmetrical: the Norwegian is asked to figure out Icelandic, but it’s plain that the Icelander already understands Norwegian.

A few of the videos are different: there is one in which a couple of Greeks are asked to understand some Aristotle, Plato, and Homer, and another in which a Turk and a Türkmen are given some Old Turkic of various ages to figure out. In all cases modern pronunciation is used.

Bahador is particularly good at digging up speakers of lesser-known languages such as Arbëreshë Albanian (there is a funny bit in this one where the Balkan Albanian says “So your people changed your name to Arbëresh?” and the Italo-Albanian replies, “No, before Skanderbeg’s time all Shqiptar called themselves Arbëresh!”), Neo-Aramaic, Balochi, etc. Each video is 15-30 minutes long, and they are a good distraction for me from my ongoing situation. You only need English to follow what’s going on, and I think the Hattics will enjoy them.

Definite LH material — thanks, JC!

A thought-provoking Facebook post by Michael Rosen:

There are two German words which people who write about literature and culture get very interested in: ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ and ‘unheimlich’. The first one was made popular by Brecht and is mostly translated these days as ‘alienation effect’ and the second was used by Freud and is mostly translated as ‘uncanny’.

They both express ideas of being unfamiliar or ‘distanced’ or ‘alienated’ from the piece of literature or or spectacle (film, play, drama) that you’re watching. In Brecht’s case, he was talking about something he tried to achieve in his plays in which one moment the audience would be ‘involved’ or ‘in’ the drama and the next, reflecting, debating about what they had just seen. He and his ‘dramaturg’ (theatre expert, if you like) Erwin Piscator, discussed how ‘Epic Theatre’ as they called it, did that as with the Chorus in Greek Tragedy or Shakespeare did it with characters discussing the whys and wherefores of their actions, often through soliloquies.

In Freud’s case, ‘unheimlich’ is a feeling that you get in dreams, or in literature – particularly of the ‘horror’ genre, where you feel strange, (literally un-at-home-like). In his essay on the ‘uncanny’ he linked it with other horror features like the ‘labyrinth’, being buried alive.

Now let’s jump to speaking a language that you’ve been taught at school. I’m 76, so languages I was taught at school happened 60 years ago. I speak French pretty fluently and when I’m in France, I find that I can often talk without knowing that I’m talking. Stuff just surfaces and I don’t have to think through phrases, grammar, vocabulary. I just say it. Every now and then, though, of course, I stop and grope in my mind for something. Where do I go? Sometimes, I find myself going to a lesson or even a teacher in my mind for the way of saying a ‘difficult phrase’ like, say, , ‘I should have done that’ or the word for an ash tree.

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An interesting suggestion at Michael Gilleland’s Laudator Temporis Acti:

1 Corinthians 4:6 (Revised Standard Version):

I have applied all this to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brethren, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another.

ταῦτα δέ, ἀδελφοί, μετεσχημάτισα εἰς ἐμαυτὸν καὶ Ἀπολλῶν δι’ ὑμᾶς, ἵνα ἐν ἡμῖν μάθητε τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται, ἵνα μὴ εἷς ὑπὲρ τοῦ ἑνὸς φυσιοῦσθε κατὰ τοῦ ἑτέρου.

τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται del. Frid. Aug. Bornemann, “De memorabili glossemate, quod locum I Corinth. 4, 6. insedisse videtur,” Biblische Studien von Geistlichen des Königreichs Sachsen 2 (1843) 37-44 (at 37-40).

Bornemann, p. 38 (my translation):

I would like you to recognize in the words τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται nothing but an annotation, by which the scribe wanted to indicate that in the original in front of his eyes, the negative word μή had been written above the final letter of the conjunction ἵνα, in such a way that the scribe doubted whether he should consider it as genuine or not, whether he should put it in the text or omit it.

In verbis τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται nihil nisi adnotamentum velim agnoscas, quo librarius indicaturus erat, in archetypo, quod ipsi ante oculos erat, negationem μή literae ultimae coniunctionis ἵνα superscriptam fuisse, ita ut haesitaret scriba, pro genuina haberet necne, in textisne poneret, an omitteret.

In other words, the scribe meant to note that “μή has been written above α (of ἵνα).”

Gilleland adds this from Joseph A. Fitzmyer ad loc. (3rd of 4 explanations of τό μὴ ὑπὲρ ἃ γέγραπται):
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Paul Celan, «Du darfst mich getrost» (Atemwende, 1967):

Du darfst mich getrost
mit Schnee bewirten:
sooft ich Schulter an Schulter
mit dem Maulbeerbaum schritt durch den Sommer,
schrie sein jüngstes
Blatt.

Scots translation by David Kinloch:

Ye caun traistly
ser me wi snaw:
whenever shouder tae shouder
ah stapit thru simmer wi the mulberry
its smaaest leaf
skreicht

Traistly ‘confidently; assuredly; truly’; ser ‘to be of service or advantage to; to satisfy or content, specif. with food or drink’; stap ‘to step, walk, stroll’; simmer ‘summer’; skreich ‘to shriek, scream, screech, utter a high shrill cry.’ I like the translation a lot; “ser” for “bewirten” ‘to treat, feast, regale, entertain’ is particularly successful. (Snaw previously at LH. In case you’re wondering, mulberry is a perfectly good Scots word; it just happens to be spelled exactly like the English equivalent.)

An interesting Atlantic piece by Gretchen McCulloch:

You walk into your favorite coffee shop. You greet the familiar barista, who knows your daily order. You say “Hi, I’ll have the”—wait, I can’t figure out how to write the next word. You know, “the usual,” but shorter. Hip! Casual! I’ll have the … uzhe. I mean, the yoozh. The youj?!

Why does this shortened form of usual, which rolls off the tongue when it’s spoken, cause so much confusion when we try to write it down? When I offered my Twitter followers 32 different options for spelling the word, nobody was fully satisfied with any of them. Youge to rhyme with rouge? Yusz as if it’s Polish? Usjhe in a desperate hope that some letter, somewhere, would cue the appropriate sound? The only thing everyone could agree on was that all of them felt weird.

Our confusion about how to spell uzh/yooje/ujhe reveals some of the breaking points between English spelling and pronunciation.

(To preempt an obvious gotcha: yes, “Yusz as if it’s Polish” doesn’t work. McCulloch is a linguist but not a Slavicist, and we all make mistakes.) I’ll skip over her long explanation of the problems with English spelling and pronunciation, which will be old hat to my readers, and get to the conclusion:
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Elizabeth Preston reports for the NY Times (archived) on an important discovery in swearology:

“Holy motherforking shirtballs!” a character exclaimed on “The Good Place,” a television show that took place in a version of the afterlife where swearing is forbidden (as it is in this newspaper, most of the time). In a way, this celestial censorship was realistic.

A study published Tuesday in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that curse words in several unrelated languages sound alike. They’re less likely than other words to include the consonant sounds L, R, W or Y. And more family-friendly versions of curses often have these sounds added, just like the R in “shirt” or “fork.” The finding suggests that some underlying rules may link the world’s languages, no matter how different they are.

“In English, some of the worst words seem to have common phonetic properties,” said Ryan McKay, a psychologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. They’re often short and punchy. They also tend to include the sounds P, T or K, “without giving any obvious examples,” Dr. McKay said. These sounds are called stop consonants because they interrupt the airflow when we’re speaking.

Dr. McKay teamed up with his colleague Shiri Lev-Ari to learn whether this familiar pattern went beyond English. They wondered whether it might even represent what’s called sound symbolism.

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From the Letters to the Editor page of the Dec. 2 TLS:

Book jackets

Bernard Richards (Letters, November 25) asks if the Bodleian Library continues its “evil and reprehensible” practice of stripping book jackets. I can’t speak for the Bodleian, but it is certainly the case that the British Library has stripped book jackets from the day it was founded, and has not stopped. I became aware of this sustained vandalism in 2011, when I was asked by its curators to provide some covers for a BL exhibition – all examples held in-house had been defaced as a matter of principle. There may be some derelict (but unargued) bibliographical propriety involved in this imposition of cultural amnesia from “above”. But propriety, as we know, is theft.

John Clute
London NW1

I join Richards and Clute in strongly objecting to the practice, but I like the last line very much.

Last year I posted about the Twitter feed of Paul Anthony Jones; now we learn his origin story and some pleasing words in his Guardian piece Flapdoodler, roorback, yulehole: Why forgotten words need rescuing from obscurity. He begins with a Christmas gift of “a hardback illustrated children’s edition of the Oxford English Dictionary” when he was around seven:

It’s fair to say I became obsessed with it. For the next day or two I sat and read it, cover to cover, as you would a novel. I wrote down all the words I came across that I didn’t know, starred and highlighted all those I liked and made lists of all those that seemed truly bizarre to me in sound, shape or spelling. Incognito. Flummery. Hullaballoo. Canoodle.

I really have no idea why I became so immediately enamoured. But looking back, there’s no denying that the gift changed my life. A love of language had been sparked and over the years and decades that followed I took that interest and ran with it. From school to university, my love of language grew until eventually I found myself on a postgraduate linguistics course, studying the history and psychology of our language in more detail than ever before. It should have been unendingly fascinating – and yet I absolutely hated it.

Towards the end of my course, it struck me that there had been something joyless about it. Everything I had loved about language – about sharing my love of language – was gone. It felt as if all the most interesting aspects of it were being kept behind glass, like rare artefacts in a museum that no one visits any more. I wanted to tell everyone about everything I was learning and discovering, but, instead, here it was, locked away in rooms and classrooms that only those who already found language interesting would ever think to enter. It was stifling and infuriating. I completed my course, told my tutor I’d had enough (an interesting conversation, to say the least), and went back to waiting tables. “The most highly qualified waiter in Newcastle,” as my mates knew me.

It was a reset moment. I realised that what I truly enjoyed – and what I believed I excelled in – was taking what I had learned and repackaging it in such a way that anyone could appreciate it, and find our language and its origins as fascinating as I do. After all, just like art and sport and music, language is one of the few things found in every culture on the planet. I resolved to tap into that shared interest and open this wonderful subject up to everyone, regardless of their background or academic experience.

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Thomas Keyes, an Irish artist amd manuscript illuminator, writes about his project of recreating the Book of Kells; he begins with an account of the medieval monks of the British Isles and continues:

The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones credits the monk Eadfrith with being Britain’s first great artist for his work ‘Cotton MS Nero D IV’, better known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Lindisfarne Abbey was devastated by the pandemic and embroiled in the argument over Easter, losing its abbot and other monks that would not conform in 664. Eadfrith lived into old age and died in 721 as Bishop of Lindisfarne, a role he was appointed to in 698 meaning that he is likely to have worked on the manuscript earlier in his career. […]

What is now the greatest Book of the English inspired the greatest Book of the Irish, the Book of Kells, to be produced at the turn of the ninth century. The book of the four gospels, takes innovations found in Lindisfarne and expands upon them to an incredible degree, suggesting that there was a vibrant century of innovation between the two manuscripts, evidence of which has mostly been lost. The level of technical skill on display within the Book of Kells has never been matched. It still isn’t fully understood. The chemical knowledge required to create pigments that remain stable after 1200 years is centuries ahead of what we thought they were capable of. This coupled with the mathematical ability required for draughting the designs and the scriptural familiarity needed to skilfully add the appropriate marginal characters to bring the text to life shed light on an incredibly vibrant culture of learning and sharing. 

We still can’t be certain where the Book of Kells comes from exactly but the leading contenders are all islands and remote peninsulas which turned out to be the worst place to be staying for the next apocalypse that came to Britain and Ireland from the north, first striking Lindisfarne in 793. In the Book of Armagh, a manuscript contemporary with Kells, the name of the Abbot of Iona ‘Cellach’, appears next to an ominous passage from the Gospel of Mark ‘For those days will bring distress such as has never been until now since the beginning of the world that God created- and will never be again’

Eventually he gets to his own project:
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