languagehat.com

Last December, I mentioned C. Lucas & S. Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and Contact-Induced Change: A Handbook as forthcoming; it has now come forth, and as bulbul wrote me, like all LSP books, it is completely free. Among the thirty chapters, from “Pre-Islamic Arabic” to “Contact and the expression of negation,” there are two of particular interest to LH readers: “Maltese,” by Christopher Lucas and Slavomír Čéplö (aka bulbul), and “Berber,” by Lameen Souag. Bulbul says, “The other recent book I was involved in and your readership may find of interest is, naturally, Maltese Linguistics on the Danube“; it ain’t free, but he says he might be able to help out LH readers — drop him a line if you’re interested.

Unrelated, but I recently finished reading Kataev’s excellent 1966 memoir Святой колодец [The Holy Well], about half of which consists of accounts of various trips to America in the late ’50s and early ’60s; at one point he’s in Houston describing its boom-town growth, and says that you can look out at a stretch of land that seems completely empty, but in fact a whole neighborhood can spring up there overnight because the нулевой цикл [nulevói tsikl] has already been laid down, so prefab houses can immediately be plugged into the sewer system, electricity lines, etc., and be ready for occupancy. I have had no luck finding an official translation for the technical term нулевой цикл, which literally means ‘zero cycle’; people online suggest things like “foundation work.” I thought maybe some knowledgeable LH reader (AJP?) might know the terminology.

In an ideal world, I’d post this on New Year’s Eve, but in the world we live in, there’s no way I’d remember it that long, so here is the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache’s Neujahrswünsche page. There’s one map for what you say on the eve, and another for what you say on New Year’s Day itself. Thanks, Nick!

Public Library of Science reports on an article by Gray, Danforth, and Dodds in PLoS ONE:

An investigation of Twitter messages reveals new insights and tools for studying how people use stretched words, such as “duuuuude,” “heyyyyy,” or “noooooooo.” Tyler Gray and colleagues at the University of Vermont in Burlington present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 27, 2020. In spoken and written language, stretched words can modify the meaning of a word. For instance, “suuuuure” can imply sarcasm, while “yeeessss” may indicate excitement. Stretched words are rare in formal writing, but the rise of social media has opened up new opportunities to study them.

Gray and colleagues have now completed the most comprehensive study to date of “stretchable” words in social media. They developed a new, more thorough strategy for identifying stretched words in tweets and used it to analyze a randomly selected dataset of about 10 percent of all tweets generated between September 2008 and December 2016—totaling about 100 billion tweets. […]

They also identified two key ways of measuring the characteristics of stretchable words: balance and stretch. Balance refers to the degree to which different letters tend to be repeated. For instance, “ha” has a high degree of balance because when it is stretched, the “h” and the “a” tend to be repeated just about equally. “Goal” is less balanced, with “o” repeated more than any other letter in the word.

Stretch refers to how long a word tends to be stretched. For instance, short words or sounds like “ha” have a high degree of stretch because people often repeat them many times (e.g., “hahahahahahahaha”). Meanwhile, regular words like “infinity” have lower stretch, often with just one letter repeated: “infinityyyy.”

Interesting stuff; my only quibble would be that “goal” is in a category of its own, since it is notoriously stretched almost to infinite length by announcers and was frequently written with many “o”s to reflect that long before Twitter was dreamed of. Thanks, Jonathan!

I’m not an anime buff, but even I am aware of Studio Ghibli and have enjoyed some of their movies. I always pronounced it /ˈgɪbli/ because duh, how else would you pronounce it? But I just heard someone on the radio say /ˈdʒɪbli/, so I turned to Professor Google and got the Wikipedia article linked above, which begins “Studio Ghibli, Inc. (/ˈdʒɪbli/) (Japanese: 株式会社スタジオジブリ, Hepburn: Kabushiki gaisha Sutajio Jiburi)…” This infuriated me; why in the name of heaven would you spell Jiburi “Ghibli” in English? But then I got to the Name section:

The name Ghibli was given by Hayao Miyazaki from the Italian noun ghibli, based on the Libyan-Arabic name for the hot desert wind of that country, the idea being the studio would “blow a new wind through the anime industry”. It also refers to an Italian aircraft, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli. Although the Italian word is more accurately transliterated as ギブリ (Giburi), the Japanese name of the studio is ジブリ (Jiburi).

What a mess! But I feel licensed to continue using /ˈgɪbli/, which accurately reflects the etymon; it’s not my fault if the Japanese choose to misrepresent it. And if you’re curious (which of course you are), Italian ghibli is “from the Libyan Arabic form of Standard Arabic قِبْلِيّ‎ (qibliyy, ‘coming from the qibla’), pronounced with an initial [ɡ] in Libyan Arabic.”

Addendum (Apr. 2024). StoryDive did an excellent five-minute video about exactly this issue; there you will hear the Libyan Arabic, Italian, Japanese, and anglicized versions of the word/name, coming to the sensible conclusion that you might as well say it however feels right to you.

Eric Schluessel has published An Introduction to Chaghatay: A Graded Textbook for Reading Central Asian Sources and made it freely available (287-page pdf) — what a great service to everyone interested in the Turkic languages! As the publisher’s blurb says:

The Chaghatay language was used across Central Asia from the 1400s through the 1950s. Chroniclers, clerks, and poets in modern-day Afghanistan, Xinjiang, Uzbekistan, and beyond wrote countless volumes of text in Chaghatay, from the famed Baburnama to the documents of everyday life. However, even more and more material in Chaghatay is becoming available to scholars, few are able to read the language with ease.

Thanks go to Wm Annis, who sent me the link and added:

I wish he cared a bit more about the vowels, but this seems to be aimed at getting Sinologists into reading original sources. On the other hand, it does try to help readers learn to deal with Nasta’liq.

Another great thing on the internet:

Digital Dante offers original research and ideas on Dante: on his thought and work and on various aspects of his reception. Though our editorial structure is that of an academic journal, we do not publish prose essays, instead showcasing work that intersperses prose with visual components (see Author Guidelines). We accept contributions from scholars and Dante lovers around the world.

We feature original scholarship on Dante in three different contexts:

1) The Commento Baroliniano is the first online commentary to the Divine Comedy. The Commento is an original work written expressly for Digital Dante and it distills a lifetime of scholarship.

2) Intertextual Dante is a vehicle for intertextual study of the Divine Comedy developed by Julie Van Peteghem and featuring her original scholarship on Dante and Ovid.

3) Image, Sound, History and Text are the categories through which we present original pieces contributed by artists, philosophers, and scholars from around the world.

I discovered it by googling a line and being directed to a page of the Commento Baroliniano; gobsmacked, I investigated further and found the riches above. I’ve only read Dante as a whole in translation (though of course I’ve read bits and snatches in the original); if I ever get around to doing him up right, this will be a constant companion.

Margaret E. Boyle reviews Janet Hendrickson’s translation of Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco’s 1611 dictionary, Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language, and Nicholas R. Jones’s study of “Africanized Castilian” language, Staging ‘Habla de Negros’, for Public Books. I found the discussion of Covarrubias particularly interesting:

Over a century after the imperial events of 1492, an enormous monolingual Spanish dictionary was published, which has now been excerpted and translated into English for the first time, by Hendrickson. Covarrubias’s Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language was a new kind of book, one whose function was stunningly unlike Nebrija’s grammar.

Although, on the surface, a dictionary relies on definition and containment, Covarrubias’s volume compels modern readers because of its ongoing contradictions and inconsistencies. Indeed, Hendrickson describes Covarrubias as “profuse,” “digressive,” “funny,” “personable,” and “diaristic.” In fact, Hendrickson explains, “I was distracted from the dictionary’s instrumental function by its seemingly unregulated beauty.” […]

The translation process is unconventional throughout: “This translation erases the greater portion of the Treasure,” explains Hendrickson. “I translated entries, or rather, fragments of entries, that I found of interest, with an eye toward shaping the strange, fabulous histories within the dictionary into a poetic whole. Sometimes I translated stray sentences within entries, sometimes isolated phrases in those sentences, translation and erasure becoming twin procedures. My rule was to follow the order of the original text.” The result of this translation practice is a slim “poetry pamphlet,” which feels all at once historical, ahistorical, and deeply resonant.

Consider Hendrickson’s translation of the entry for estrella (star): “If you find yourself in the depths of a very deep well, where the light does not reach, you will be able to see the stars from that darkness, though it is day, because the sun’s rays there do not hinder them.” This sentence is a nearly direct citation of Covarrubias’s concluding lines from the dictionary entry, and Hendrickson’s version showcases the author’s ability to pull in the reader.

And yet, the full definition from the Spanish original also includes a longer history of astronomy, alternate uses of the word as a verb (estrellarse), as well as colloquial expressions such as this one: “Contar las estrellas: no porque ellas no tenga número, pero es tan grande que no le podemos alcanzar, como las arenas de la mar y las hojas de los árboles.”

I find that kind of abridgment somewhat irritating, but I admit I’d probably enjoy the book. Thanks, jack!

I’ve finished Yury Dombrovsky’s Хранитель древности, translated by Glenny as The Keeper of Antiquities, rendering the name under which Novy mir insisted on publishing it in 1964; I prefer to call it The Keeper of Antiquity, following Dombrovsky’s original title (restored in later book publication). It’s an amazing novel, bearing no resemblance whatever to the vague idea of it I had from reading references to it as “a key to understanding the terrible Stalinist purges of the late 1930s” and the like — a pox on criticism that’s obsessed with politics! The purges are there, yes, and they become more present and frightening in the latter part of the book, but it’s a novel, not a tract, and the focus is on the protagonist, an archeologist trying to focus on his work and the distant past while the present, the terrible year 1937, intrudes more and more. (One of the saddest moments comes in the last few pages, when the narrator says “В этих людях еще жило, продолжалось и волновалось прошлое, то, что для меня вообще не существовало” [For these people the past was still alive, it continued to agitate them, while for me it just didn’t exist].) The complete review does a decent job in its brief account of the book, but it is too smug and dismissive (“Dombrovsky is perhaps too obvious in his choice of symbols… The episodes Dombrovsky relates are interesting and amusing, an unusual picture of a part and a time of the Soviet Union still too unfamiliar in the West”), treating it as an aperitif rather than the hard liquor it manifestly is (“Dilute it!” cries an appalled drunk when the narrator mischievously offers him pure alcohol).

I’d rather approach it from a different direction. At the start of the novel the narrator describes how he came to Alma Ata in 1933 and had to walk from the outskirts to the center of town, frequently losing his way because the ubiquitous gardens, orchards, and poplars made all the blocks look alike. Finally he finds an old watchman dozing in a park next to a strange building that reminds him of St. Basil’s in Moscow; he awakens the man, who immediately starts telling him about the local architect Andrei Zenkov, who built the cathedral next to them as well as many other buildings in the center of town. Dombrovsky then goes into an excursus on Zenkov, complete with footnotes, praising him as a little-known local genius with his own way of approaching his art. Later he does the same with the collector Castagnier, who scoured the world looking for objects that might relate to the history of the region, and the local artist Nikolai Khludov, who had no artistic training and was dismissed by sophisticates but was a master of drawing and loved everything he painted — Dombrovsky devotes an entire chapter to him. All these people are dismissed by the Soviet bureaucrats who are interested only in what can provide socialist education to the people, but the narrator loves them for their love of the region (he quotes a description of Zenkov that says “Он любил город и край” [He loved the city and the region]) — at one point his colleague says “Надо же знать край!” [You have to know the region!], which sums up one of the core truths of the book.
[Read more…]

I knew that epidemic was from Greek ἐπιδήμιος (ἐπί- + δῆμος ‘people’), but I wasn’t aware of the details of its development in Greek, well laid out by Marcel Detienne in Dionysos at Large (tr. Arthur Goldhammer), via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti:

In Greek, however, the word “epidemic” belonged to the vocabulary of theophany. Emile Littré, the nineteenth-century French lexicographer, was aware of this when he introduced the word into the French language.⁶ It was a technical term used in talking about the gods. “Epidemics” were sacrifices offered to the divine powers when they came to visit a region or a temple or attended a feast or were present at a sacrifice.⁷ Symmetrically, “apodemics” were sacrifices offered upon the gods’ departure. For there was a traffic of the gods, a traffic that became particularly heavy during Theoxenia, occasions when a city, individual, or god offered hospitality to some or all of the deities.⁸ The gods came to the place and lived there for a time; they were actually present,⁹ or “epidemized.” Being resident but not sedentary, they resembled the Hippocratic physicians, itinerant practitioners who composed what were called Epidemics: sheafs of notes, brief protocols or, rather, minutes relating the course of the disease—a careful record of the symptoms, the crisis, the care administered, and the patient’s reactions.¹⁰ The technique was that of a reporter, practiced by Ion of Chios, an intellectual of the fifth century B.C., in his work entitled Epidemics: a series of sketches, portraits, interviews with artists like Sophocles and politicians like Pericles and Kimon of Athens.¹¹

The footnotes are at the link, along with relevant entries from Liddell-Scott-Jones and a correction from Robert Renehan’s Greek Lexicographical Notes. (The relevant OED entries haven’t been updated since 1891.)

Facundo Corradini has an impassioned LogRocket post (from 2018) about HTML and semantics:

In the dark ages of HTML, <em> was barely used at all, despite being part of the specs since really early on (HTML 2.0 standard, 1995). But at that point in time and for some years to come, (almost) no one was thinking of semantics or even separation of concerns. Italics were simply marked up with <i> tags, and we wouldn’t give it a second thought.

Then somewhere along the way, someone shouted “Semantics!” and everybody started to hate the poor little <i> tag like a bad neighbor. A really, really bad neighbor.

<em> was all the rage, with supposed benefits for accessibility and SEO, which got us all using it everywhere. By HTML 4, everybody knew <em> was for emphasis and styled as italics, <strong> was for stronger emphasis and styled as bold text. If you ever dared to use <i>, you would be instantly tagged as a bad developer. […]

But when HTML5 rolled out, they made sure to draw a clearer line on what they intended <em> to be, while redefining the <i> from a text-italicising tag into a semantic tag that pretty much wraps most other use cases for italics.

He gives examples, then:

Why it matters

Accessibility, of course. Every time we use the wrong tag to italicise a word, most of our users won’t even notice. As long as we are doing so according to our language conventions, the word will be read with the intended emphasis.

But we are making things so much more complicated for screen readers, especially when nesting. If we were doing our job right, speech synthesizers would be able to easily make the right pitch corrections. But we’re so far gone in this that all of them (as far as I know) have it disabled by default, and that’s a big part of what makes them feel so unnatural.

He ends with a series of takeaways (“Whenever you’re throwing italics at a word/phrase, think about why are you doing so and choose the right tag for the task if possible”); it all makes me feel bad for knowing so little about it and just using the “i” tag my software supplies, but obviously I’m one of a vast multitude. I expect my readers will have thoughts about all this.