Search Results for: palindrom

Some interesting stuff I’ve run across:

1) The Un-X-able Y-ness of Z-ing (Q): A List with Notes: Sean Cotter reports on a translated title that “like a spot of dye, dropped into the flow of culture and altered the hue of English as it diffused downstream.” I had not realized that Milan Kundera didn’t want to use “the unbearable lightness of being” as the title of the English translation of his Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí; he told Michael Heim, the translator, that “for you Americans the title will be a bit hard-going.” Heim said, “We’re not children. If The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the title, so be it.” And a meme was born.

2 De Vulgari Eloquentia: Not Dante, but a board game based on Dante (Suggested Ages: 14 and up; Playing Time: 120 minutes):

Italy, late Middle Ages. The fabric merchants need to write down their contracts in a language that everyone can understand and the literates are looking for an alternative to the elite of the traditional Latin language. So, the Volgare, the language spoken by the common people, taken from the dialects spoken in the various Italian regions, starts to gain relevance. … The players will have to do their part in the creation of this new language! But who will provide them the proper knowledge to understand the manuscripts in the different dialects? Who will succeed to uncover the secrets of the books inside the Papal Library? Who will embrace the religious life and who will remain a merchant? Some of the players can become a famous banker, someone else can climb the church’s hierarchy to be the next Pope! But in the end, who will be the most appreciated and respected for his status and his culture?

3) The Space between Languages is a talk by Herta Müller, a writer born to a German-speaking family in the Banat region of Romania who “learnt Romanian quite late in life, when I left my small village for the city at the age of fifteen to go to high school.” The discussion of her relationship to that language is interesting (“There is not a single Romanian sentence in any of my books. But Romanian is always with me when I write because it has grown into my way of seeing the world”), but the main reason I’m bringing it here is to correct an irritating error. She writes:

A swallow suddenly appeared in a different light in Romanian, where it is called rindunica, “sitting-in-a-row”. The bird’s name suggests how swallows perch on a wire, close together in a row. I used to see them in my village every summer, before I knew the Romanian word. I was amazed that a swallow could have such a lovely name. I became more and more aware that the Romanian language had words that were more sensuous, more in tune with my perception, than my mother tongue.

No. The Romanian word rândunea or rândunica ‘swallow’ is not from rând ‘file, row,’ it is from hirundinella, a diminutive of Latin hirundo. I hate to burst such a poetic, sensuous balloon, but there it is.

4) The ever-readable Gasan Guseinov has a brief post saying that all those who use the blatantly foreign бабуин for ‘baboon’ instead of the good Russian word павиан (which, as of course Guseinov knows perfectly well, is borrowed from German Pavian, which ultimately goes back to the same source, French babouin, as бабуин) should be made to repeat the palindrome А НИ У БАБУИНА НИ У БАБУИНА (something like ‘and neither at the baboon nor at the baboon’). I note that Wikipedia has separate articles for бабуин and павиан. Can my Russian-speaking readers tell me whether these two words are distinguished in ordinary use, and which of them is commoner?

I’ve long been familiar with the Russian palindrome а роза упала на лапу Азора [a roza upala na lapu Azora] ‘and a/the rose fell onto the paw of Azor’—I don’t know if it’s the most famous, but it’s the example given in the first paragraph of the Russian Wikipedia article on palindromes—but I had no idea it had any real-world meaning. Now I learn from yesterday’s gilliland post that there’s a whole backstory, which I am going to share.

When we think of late-eighteenth-century opera, we think of Mozart and maybe Gluck, but the leading composer of comic opera (which I’m guessing was more popular at the time) was André Grétry, and one of his best-known works was Zémire et Azor, which premiered in Paris in 1771 and was staged in Saint Petersburg in 1774. (Berlioz thought highly of it in the 1830s: “ces chants si vrais, si expressifs.”) It was based on the story of Beauty and the Beast, first published in 1740, and Azor was the prince who had been turned into a monstrous beast-like creature by enchantment; Zémire, of course, was the merchant’s youngest daughter who eventually changed him back with her tears of love, and as gilliland points out, the rose falling on his paw is an excellent symbol of that second transformation. He adds all sorts of further material about various rulers of the day and their joint attendance at a performance of the opera, but since he admits to tossing in some ringers (for instance, he says “they had all read Аленький цветочек [The Scarlet Flower],” but he knows as well as I do that Aksakov’s Russian version of the story wasn’t published until 1858), I’ll let people who read Russian go to the link to get his version. Me, I’ll add some interesting information I turned up about the names:

The names Zemire and Azor link Oriental to American slavery in French theatrical history. They derive directly from a 1742 comedy Amour pour Amour, which takes place near Baghdad, featuring Azor as a genie…. But these names, in turn, refer to and invert those of Zamor and Alzire, the heroes of Voltaire’s Alzire, ou les Américains, which appeared six years earlier and is set in Peru.

–Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction And the Reform of Colonial Slavery, pp. 94-95.

I love these hidden threads running back through forgotten history.

Lucy Sisman’s wwword.com piece “Changing Times,” about the variety of headlines used at the NY Times, may not be of earthshaking consequence, but to lovers of print journalism, it’s pretty interesting—especially to me, who have been following the Times at least since my teenage years; I vividly remember many of the front pages shown, and I used to have a yellowing copy of MEN WALK ON MOON (with an apposite palindrome by Voznesensky: а луна канула [and the moon sank]; you can see it, along with an amazing selection of other Russian literary palindromes, here) until I had to clear out my parents’ garage and realized it was not in good enough shape to be worth anything and I didn’t want it cluttering up my garage. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout both world wars the Times frequently ran long headlines, in bold italic capitals, spread across all six columns and running three lines deep. It hardly needs pointing out that these were times with a lot of dramatic news. By contrast, the headline on the morning of September 12, 2001, was “U.S. ATTACKED,” in capitals with no italics. “Italics give importance and vitality, but this wasn’t a time for sensationalism,” Bodkin says. The trend to shorter headlines started with the moon, he adds. “The line on July 21, 1969, was ‘MEN WALK ON MOON,’ and the first time the Times went beyond a standard banner head.” Compare this brevity to the verbiage of October 15, 1912: “Maniac in Milwaukee Shoots Col. Roosevelt; He Ignores Wound; Speaks An Hour; Goes To Hospital.” That’s practically an entire story in today’s New York Post!

A reader sent me a link to this remarkable Wikipedia article: “Su Hui … was a Chinese poet of the Middle Sixteen Kingdoms period (304 to 439) during the Six Dynasties period. … She is most famous for her extremely complex ‘palindrome’ (huiren) poem, apparently having innovated the genre, as well as producing the most complex example to date. Apparently, all of her other thousands of literary works have been lost.” I suspect she wouldn’t be happy to know that her elaborate literary stunt would be all that survived of her work, but hey, at least she’s remembered for something. At any rate, gaze at the multicolored reproduction of her magnum opus in the Wikipedia article and marvel: “The poem is in the form of a twenty-nine by twenty-nine character grid, and can be read forward or backwards, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. This arrangement allows for 2,848 different readings.” I presume it’s no masterpiece as a poem, but I’d be curious to know what my Sinophone readers have to say about it. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Following up this post:
Adonis to Zorro: Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion, by Andrew Delahunty and Sheila Dignen, is the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Allusions (1st ed. 2001). It’s very nicely produced and laid out, with each phrase provided with both an explanation and one or more citations; thus “cupboard was bare” has the “Old Mother Hubbard” rhyme and includes a quotation from BusinessWeek Magazine 2004 (“We were barely breaking even, and the cupboard was bare”). I did not know that the phrase “naughty but nice” comes from an 1871 music hall song “It’s Naughty but It’s Nice.” The problem with such books is that they’ve largely been superseded by the internet, and yet that last bit of information is not easily found by googling (cf. the unhelpful Wikipedia page). So maybe there’s a place for such a book after all.

[Read more…]

I was a Pogo fan as a child and remain one to this day; as far as I’m concerned, Walt Kelly was one of the great American humorists (and unlike most such, he did not lose his sense of humor when politics intruded). One of the things I’ve always loved is his gift for nonsense verse, and since Songdog has sent me a couple such from a book he borrowed from the library (I Go Pogo, 1952), I thought I’d share them with you. First, the palindromic:

Smile, wavering wings
Above rains pour,
While hopefully sings
Love of shorn shore
Shore shorn of love
Sings hopefully while
Pour rains above,
Wings wavering, smile.

Secondly, the mystical, à la Churchy LaFemme:

How pierceful grows the hazy yon!
How myrtle petaled thou!
For spring hath sprung the cyclotron,
How high browse thou, brown cow?

Addendum. An AskMeFi thread provides a couple of excellent jingles for Chooly Wummys (“They’re gristle to your mill!”), with pistol shots added by Albert Alligator.

Verbatim is “working towards having the complete run of VERBATIM back issues available online, and searchable, too” (in the words of Mark Liberman at Language Log, from whom I got the link).

Verbatim is the only magazine of language and linguistics for the layperson. We write about words and their uses with verve and humor, concentrating on English in all its variety and all the fun parts of other languages. Names, palindromes, puns and proverbs are also topics of interest. Puzzles, book reviews, SIC! SIC! SIC! and more round out each issue.

The back issues so far available are here; there looks to be a lot of interesting stuff.

This week’s New Yorker has a “Talk of the Town” piece by Dana Goodyear on Demetri Martin, a Greek-American comedian obsessed with language games. Along with creating “one of the longest, non-computer-generated, sensemaking palindromes in English” (called “Dammit, I’m Mad”), he has composed the wonderful “All the Words Printed on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order”:

Women, your ability to operate extra tender springs from birth.
Good machinery comes as your contents cause enjoyment.
Cash, beer, a car: rock and rolling.
During “it,” the general warning:
“We may risk pregnancy according to old problems.”