languagehat.com

Jonathon Owen, the linguist/editor who blogs at Arrant Pedantry (“Examining language rules and where they come from”) and whose post on “as such” I quoted with fervent approval in May, has another winner, I Am Begging You to Learn How Dictionaries Work:

It’s a phenomenon as predictable as the tides: a dictionary adds new words or definitions, and then people grouse about those changes, either because they don’t like the new words and think that the dictionary is declaring them acceptable, or because they personally have never heard of those words before and therefore don’t see why they should be included. They often blend in grumpiness about the language supposedly declining or about kids these days. In both cases, of course, the real problem is that readers just don’t understand how dictionaries work.

Take this recent example from Maura Hohman at NBCLX, a site dedicated to “thought-provoking content” “about tech, the environment, politics, community, social issues, and current events.” It takes the familiar kids-these-days trope and gives it an unusual spin: the author is only thirty, but she feels old because she doesn’t recognize a few of the 455 words recently added to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. She starts off by calling herself an elder millennial, which I found cute as a millennial who just turned forty. I also found it odd from someone complaining about definitions. Definitions vary, of course, but elder or geriatric millennials are generally considered to have been born somewhere between something like 1980 and 1985 or 1981 and 1988. Even by the more generous definition, Hohman misses the cutoff by three years. Nevertheless, she says it was “a gut punch” to realize that she didn’t know a lot of these new words, which she calls “wrinkle-inducing additions.”

The first word she complains about, zero-day, means “of, relating to, or being a vulnerability (as in a computer or computer system) that is discovered and exploited (as by cybercriminals) before it is known to or addressed by the maker or vendor”. Weirdly, though, the definition she gives appears to be for a noun, not the adjective that Merriam-Webster enters. At any rate, Hohman imagines that this is a term used by children and that her unfamiliarity with it makes her old, when really it just means she doesn’t read much about device security. And that’s fine! But if she ever reads an article that mentions a zero-day vulnerability, now she’ll be able to look up that phrase in Merriam-Webster.

He goes on to discuss blank check company (a term I, like Owen, was unfamiliar with), deplatform, oobleck, and teraflop in equally lively and convincing style, concluding:
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I found Dmitri Sitchinava’s FaceBook post (in Russian) interesting enough I thought I’d translate it here:

Many, many years ago, the Russian Language Corpus compiled a list of “turns of phrase” (units of more than one word that, at the whim of Russian spelling, are written with a space). Useful stuff. It was based on Rogozhnikova’s dictionary (2003) The Explanatory Dictionary of Word-Equivalent Combinations and on the corpus’s frequency collocations.

Well, in this list the combination “и так далее” [‘and so on’] (48700 occurrences, counting [the abbreviations] “и т. д.” and, especially for Victor Sonkin, “итд”) does NOT exist, but there is a hyperfrequency [?] combination “в супряге с” [‘in a yoke with,’ i.e. ‘together’] (2 occurrences, both in [Sholokhov’s] Quiet Don).

This is not a criticism or mockery of the corpus — it is an objective typological and theoretical “hole” in the description of language (not merely Russian, but language in general), and it is clear why it happened. The point is that these “turns” are classified according to the syntactic function they perform — conjunction, adverb, parenthetical word, or particle, whatever that means. And “и так далее” [‘and so on’] is a continuation of any homogeneous list, it doesn’t care about part of speech. It’s a cross-category… cross-category what? Rogozhnikova’s dictionary has “и так далее” [‘and so on’], of course, but where there should be a particle marking, it says in italics “at the end of an enumeration.” Thanks, cap.

Of course, this problem has nothing to do with how many words it takes to write an expression with the meaning of “and so on.” You don’t have to go far from Russian — in Ukrainian, it’s one word, тощо. I started thinking about this when I encountered the Chinese Penn Treebank part-of-speech tagset, where for the corresponding character (which can be doubled) there is the special notation ETC.

A kind colleague tells me this is described as a general extender (Overstreet, Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse. If the morpheme is arranged in this way (this includes, as I understand it, the legendary китаб-митаб [redoubling of китаб ‘book’], consequences shmonsequences, маслице да фуяслице, etc.), it is a similative plural.

WALS has such constructions under The Associative Plural: “By virtue of its referential heterogeneity, the associative plural construction is related to other non-homogeneous plurals, such as what might be called the similative plural (e.g. Telugu (Dravidian; India) puligili ‘tigers and such’ (Colin Masica, p.c.)), which differs from the associative plural in that it denotes a class of objects sharing similar features rather than a group of closely related associates.”

I’m going to quote the start and end of Grace Schulman’s “The Examination: Remembrance of Words Lost” (Poetry 113.5 [Feb. 1969]: 319-321), because I’ve remembered much of it for half a century now and want to have it conveniently to hand (I have the issue of Poetry somewhere around the house, but who knows where?). It begins:

—What happened at your orals, Grace?
Taking a pipe from a row of suckling pigs, The chairman swung
In his chair. An A-shaped face, kind voice. Eyes, rubber stamps:
Failure. Special case.
          —I lose it now,
But I will try to call it back. Dim stars
That fade to a stare can shine at a backward glance.
—Why did you fail?
          —I did not. Words failed me […]

And ends:

Oh, yes. Of course. But nowadays we can’t
Give Ph.D.s for that. What’s your profession?
—Poet.
   —Published poet?
            —Yes.
               —Well, poetry
Has nothing to do with scholarship. Your sentence:
A year of failure and a crown of silence.

Five fathers vanished. One remained.
                 —My friend,
I see you have been walking under water.
Look upward now.
          I surfaced then, saw shadows
That had been knives, and moved into myself.

I have often muttered “Well, poetry has nothing to do with scholarship” to myself over the years. Those italics in the chairman’s speech are devastating.

Last year I wrote about Andrei Bely’s Симфония (2-я, драматическая) [Symphony: Second, Dramatic], and I’m happy to announce that Columbia’s indispensable Russian Library series (see this post) has published The Symphonies, a complete translation by Jonathan Stone of all four of his first published prose works, and Columbia was kind enough to send me a copy. As I expect of the Russian Library, it’s well produced, with a gorgeous cover, a good introduction by the translator, and helpful endnotes. The introduction starts by describing a sunset Bely watched from the balcony of his family’s apartment and wrote about as an instance of “a world transformed — the everyday became magical, the ordinary became mythical”; the prose “symphonies” he wrote and published between 1902 and 1908 “demonstrate a reformed vision of the world that reflected the combination of optimism and fear that accompanied the new century” and that “was captured by the emerging literary and artistic movement of Russian Symbolism.” Stone then has sections on Russian Symbolism and on Bely’s life before proceeding to the symphonies themselves:

In addition to being literary works, the Symphonies are musical, philosophical, autobiographical, visual, and theurgic compositions that continually destabilize all notion of genre and bombard the reader with vaguely familiar allusions and echoes (both internal to the work and drawing on outside elements). […] The vision of a world transformed is always lurking at the edges of even the most realistic and biographical moments in the Symphonies, and as readers we cannot escape the sensation that a centaur or serpent or mystical eagle may suddenly interrupt our evening walk home. The simultaneity of both this world and the other is the most constant feature of these stories because it was how Bely had come to see reality around him, a reflection of his view from the balcony on the Arbat. […] One of the most frequent words we encounter in the Symphonies is “passerby.” Bely fixates on the anonymous Muscovites, a city whose population had surpassed one million around the time Bely began writing the Symphonies, because he sees in each of these ordinary and unremarkable characters the potential to be mystical, magical, mythical.

He ends with this summary:
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A good point, from Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Vol. II, p. 90, n. 1 (on line 149 ἐχενῇδας):

In all periods poets have the right to restore to a word its ‘original’ meaning, which in daily usage it has entirely or almost entirely lost. Horace, Odes 1.36.20 lascivis hederis ambitiosior provides a good example. The peculiar use in Horace, Odes 4.4.65 of evenit, to which several critics have objected, belongs to the same category; Baiter ad loc. rightly says ‘Horatius saepius ad propriam vocabulorum vim redire ausus est’.

Tradition-minded poets still do this, and it’s a good thing to my mind, keeping the thread of the language unbroken — though of course poetry in the spoken language of its day is also a good thing. (Via Laudator Temporis Acti.)

A piquant description of a situation familiar to anyone who has studied various languages and has to toggle from one to the other, from The Amur River: Between Russia and China, by Colin Thubron (Harper, 2021), courtesy of Joel at Far Outliers:

Next morning, the day before I cross to China, I lock myself in my hotel room and prepare to ease into the language that I learnt poorly more than thirty years ago, and have rarely spoken since. My Mandarin notes and textbooks, squashed into my rucksack, spill out like ancient scripts, still covered in my tutor’s red biro, and stained with the rings of coffee cups. Beyond my window, through an opening in the shoreline flat-blocks, a section of the Amur gleams, with Heihe lying beyond under a clouded sky. A Russian patrol boat is crossing the gap.

The only sounds in the room are my own. I return to my makeshift table. It’s a relief to leave behind the complexities of Russian grammar, the dual aspects of verbs, the exacting cases of nouns, the sheer length of words. Chinese, which lacks verbal tenses, genders, even the singular and plural, seems suddenly, radiantly simple. I shift my table to the light of the window and the glint of the Amur, and my exhilaration rises. The vocabulary flows back. Sometimes I have the illusion that I am not remembering, but learning anew. I anticipate the stark thrust of Mandarin replacing Russian wholesale. A change of language feels like a change of person. Sounds and structures dictate emotion. New concepts emerge, while others die. I have the illusion that I become more aggressive in Mandarin, and that my voice descends an octave. Perhaps I will need this. I have no idea what dialects may be coming my way. Yet for a long time I hear Mandarin returning, and imagine all will be well.

But as the hours go on, this happy remembrance stiffens. The unfamiliar structures start to weigh on me. There are words I have clean forgotten. Perhaps it is all too long ago. The blessed existence of Western borrowings (in Russian there are many) is all but absent. Mandarin is a tonal tongue – its words change meaning with their pitch – and the language turns, in my memory, to an echo of discordant gongs. I remember finding it easier to speak than to understand: the reverse of what I wish. Suddenly I miss the pliant beauty of Russian.

By evening a self-induced dementia has set in. When I go down to the hotel restaurant I mistakenly ask for the lavatory in Mandarin, then order a meal in Russian and chat to the bewildered waitress in a deranged mixture of both. Often my poor grasp of either leaves me suspended in mid-speech. I have no idea what is going to come out of my mouth.

Joel recounts his own similar experience involving Romanian and Chinese; I have had it happen with French and Spanish.

A nice eight-minute piece from PRI’s The World (for which I’ve had a soft spot ever since they interviewed me); here’s the setup:

How many times over the past 19 months have we all (mostly) said, “I’m hanging in there,” when asked the question, “How are you doing?” A lot. Marco Werman wanted to know how the answer is expressed in other parts of The World.

They get responses in Israeli Hebrew (יהיה בסדר yihyé be-séder), Mexican Spanish (allí), Mandarin Chinese (過得去 guò dé qù, 馬馬虎虎 mǎ ma hū hū [literally “horse horse tiger tiger”]), Farsi (explained as “this too shall pass”: too long to transcribe and seems to be particular to one family), and Brazilian Portuguese (song “A gente vai levando”). Alas, no Russian; the best I can come up with is держусь, but I’m sure there are more colorful expressions. Thanks, Songdog!

Ben Macaulay writes for Gizmodo:

It was a balmy day in Taiwan in November 2019, and I was rummaging through the Family Mart adjoined to the Qishan Bus Station. It was my last chance for 9V batteries and spicy tuna rice balls before taking a taxi into the mountains, where many of the remaining Indigenous languages of the island are spoken, the rest having been replaced by Chinese—the language of settlers from the Asian mainland who slowly took over the arable plainsland over the last few hundred years, as well as of the current ROC regime.

The 16 Indigenous languages still spoken in Taiwan today—the Formosan group—are tragically endangered, with three Formosan languages down to a single-digit number of speakers and a fourth rapidly encroaching. The languages are very well documented in some areas of their grammar and very poorly in others. The available documentation is the result of efforts by community members who create resources for their language’s revitalization movement and from local and foreign scholars.

The goal of my PhD dissertation project is to investigate one of the most poorly documented aspects of language. And I’m going to use a secret weapon, which I bought at B&H. To record, I use a Sony PCM-M10 recorder and a Røde Videomic, which I bought in a $379 bundle marketed to aspiring YouTubers, which I am not. Thankfully, it’s a directional (or ‘shotgun’) microphone, which records whatever you point it at louder than sound coming from other directions. This has allowed me to record analyzable elusive data in a sawmill, during a military drill, and while surrounded by dogs. (Not at the same time, luckily!)

There are examples from English and a discussion of transcription and pitch-tracking systems that was a little too detailed for me, and then:
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The Conversation reports on a new dictionary:

It’s been in existence since the 1500s but the Kaaps language, synonymous with Cape Town in South Africa, has never had a dictionary until now. The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps has been launched by a collective of academic and community stakeholders – the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape along with the hip hop-driven community NGO Heal the Hood Project. The dictionary – in Kaaps, English and Afrikaans – holds the promise of being a powerful democratic resource. Adam Haupt, director of the Centre for Film & Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, is involved in the project and tells us more.

(If you click on the dictionary link, you see an “About us” section, which on the Afrikaans side is designated “Oo ons.” I didn’t want anyone to miss that delightful phrase.) Here’s the first part of the interview:
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I’ve finished reading Victor Pelevin’s first novel (and the first book by him I heard of), Омон Ра, translated by Andrew Bromfield as Omon Ra. All I knew about it going in was that it’s about a Soviet astronaut, and that’s all you’re going to find out from me — the plot is too much fun to spoil it! Instead, I’ll explain the title (the hero, young Omon Krivomazov, thinks of himself as the Egyptian sun god Ra) and elucidate some of the allusions that the English-speaking reader will miss. You should definitely read the novel; Bromfield’s version is perfectly adequate, even if he skips some difficult bits and makes a couple of embarrassing gaffes.

Chapter 10 begins as follows (in Bromfield’s translation, followed by the original):

Another subject that appeared in our study timetable — “The General Theory of the Moon” — was classed as optional for everyone except Mitiok and me. The classes were given by a retired Lieutenant-Colonel of Philosophy, Ivan Evseievich Kondratiev. Somehow I didn’t take to him, although I had no real reason for disliking him and his lectures were quite interesting. I remember the unusual way he began his first class with us — he spent half an hour reciting various poems about the moon from pieces of paper; eventually he became so moved that he had to stop and wipe off his glasses. I still used to take notes then, and what I was left with from this class was a senseless accumulation of fragmentary quotations: “Like a golden drop of honey sweetly gleams the moon… Of the moon and hope and quiet glory…The moon, how rich the meaning of this word for every Russian ear…But the world has other regions, oppressed by the tormenting moon, to highest strength and supreme courage out of reach…But in the sky, schooled to endure all things, a senselessly distorted disc…He did control the flow of thought, but only by the moon…The cheerless liquid moonness…’ And so on for another page and a half. Then Lieutenant-Colonel Kondratiev grew more serious and began speaking in an official singsong voice:

“Dear friends! Let us recall the historic words of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, written in 1918 in a letter to Inessa Armand. ‘Of all the planets and heavenly bodies,’ Lenin wrote, ‘the most important for us is the moon.’ […] In this course we will study Lenin’s two major works on the moon—‘The Moon and Rebellion’ and ‘Advice from an Outsider’. […]”

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