languagehat.com

Yet another long, dense essay of which I can only quote a few appetizing bits; this one, The Harmony of Languages, is by old LH favorite Justin Erik Halldór Smith (see this post). It starts with the “so-called Muscovy duck,” which “is so called not in view of its homeland in the vicinity of Moscow –for in fact it is native to Central and South America– but rather in mistranslation of its Latin designation, Anas moschata, the ‘musky duck'”:

We may wonder, then, what led Daniel Gottlieb Messerchmidt, in his Forschungreise durch Sibirien [Research Voyage through Siberia], to suppose that he had seen such a bird, or that such birds could be seen, on his arrival in the far eastern region of the Siberian Governorate known as “Yakutia”. In his list of vocabulary items recorded in the Yakut or Sakha language of on February 4, 1724 –thus, following the Dutch traveller Nicolaes Witsen’s Noord en Oost Tartarye [Northern and Eastern Tartary] of 1692, the second oldest attempt in the history of Sakha to record the spoken language in writing–, the German explorer gives the word Turpàn as the equivalent of “the Moscowy duck Willughbeji”, referring, as contemporary readers would have known, to Francis Willughby and John Ray’s 1676 Ornithologia. But turpan is not a Sakha word; it is a Russian word, and it designates not the Anas moschata, but rather the Melanitta fusca, commonly known in English as a “velvet duck” or “velvet scoter”, whose habitat centers around the Yenisey River basin in Siberia, and whose feathers are an iridescent black.

Messerschmidt’s mistake is noteworthy, as it is the largest one in a list of forty-two Sakha vocabulary items, which includes forty-one names of different sorts of animal, plus the word for snow (Chár in Messerchmidt’s orthography, хаар in modern Sakha). Fifteen mammals are identified, seven species of fish, and nineteen of birds. Most of Messerschmidt’s mistakes make at least some sense. He correctly gives the name of the domesticated reindeer (Taba/таба), but wrongly infers that the generic term for any wild beast (Kýll/кыыл) is the specific term for the wild reindeer, as he presumable heard the term being used adjectivally (Kýll Taba/кыыл таба) but failed to notice that the noun it was modifying was the same as the name for domestic deer. For the Canis marinus or Seehund, which is presumably the name he uses for the so-called ringed seal or Phoca hispida common in Kamchatka and the far north of the Pacific Rim, Messerschmidt again gives the Russian name (Nérpa/нерпа), evidently unaware that the Sakha people of the Lena River basin with whom he was in contact had no native words for marine or littoral fauna.

Messerschmidt gives signs of only a cursory familiarity with the phonology of the languages he records. Thus he combines vowels that cannot occur together in Sakha according to the strict laws, common to all Turkic languages, governing vowel harmony. For example, he writes the word for “red” as Kysil rather than kyhyl/кыһыл: the s where we today write an h is comprehensible within the rules of Sakha phonetics and dialectal variation; the i where there should be a y is simply a result of imperfect hearing. One might be tempted to say that Messerchmidt is not searching for harmonies, and so does not detect them.

[Read more…]

Bathrobe is delving into translation studies, and he’s found another good link to send me: The Art and Craft of Translation, by Elborg Forster (from Johns Hopkins Magazine, way back in February 2001). As with the Johanna Hanink piece I posted recently, it’s full of good things, so I’ll just quote a few bits to pique your interest:

First, a few words by way of characterizing myself: although my first language was German, I am now a translator with many years of experience translating texts in such fields as history, anthropology, sociology, and history of science and medicine from French and German into English. Having stopped using German in my daily life 45 years ago, I now find it rather difficult to translate into German. This has to do with lack of practice, of course, but also with the fact that there are many areas of life and letters with which I was not familiar as a 20-year-old. Indeed I sometimes feel–no doubt erroneously–that I learned everything I know in the medium of English: politics, French history, child-rearing, cooking, life and death, gardening, healthcare, automobiles …. In any case, whenever these days I translate something into German, I send it to my verbally highly gifted sister in Germany, who usually finds a few anglicisms and some expressions “that we don’t use any more,” for of course the German language itself has evolved over the last 45 years. […]

My greatest adventure as a translator was a collection of letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, the 17th-century German princess living at the court of Louis XIV. It did not take me long to realize that her very lively and expressive German had become somewhat archaic after she had spoken mostly French for many years (a situation I intimately understand!). I therefore chose a somewhat old-fashioned American idiom, often using expressions marked ant. or F. in the dictionaries. I also realized that “Madame,” as she was called at the French court, varied the level of her style depending on the subject of the letter, her level of familiarity with the recipient, and especially that person’s position in the hierarchy of court society.

Even in letters to close relatives, Madame used the address “Your Grace” (Ew. Liebden) as a matter of course; it was obligatory for persons of a certain rank and gives modern readers a feel for the distance that separates us from 17th-century court society. It seemed necessary to make a point of this distance, for much of Liselotte’s writing calls for such colloquial translation that we might take her for our contemporary. Yet that would be unfortunate, for it would prevent the reader from realizing that in many respects this woman was way ahead of her time.

Translating Liselotte thus sometimes called for a simple vocabulary (“rumors flying,” “go after,” “do away with,” “a lot of useless information”) and a straightforward sentence structure (essentially run-on sentences) to convey easy familiarity. But at other times I had to search out inflated terms to render the painfully constrained formality of a letter, so that I used such expressions as “favor me with a letter or any word,” “filial trust,” “pay my respects in person,” “bestow,” “hard put to give credence,” “at length…” and a host of others. And I certainly had no right to cut up the endless sentences.

Sometimes authors are not consistent in their level of style, and then the translator gets into trouble with copy editors. In one rather formal German study of Weimar Germany published in the 1970s, the author suddenly–and effectively, I thought–used the word “aufgehübscht,” which I literally translated as “prettified,” but the copy editor felt that this kind of expression “did not belong into serious academic discourse.” Unable to persuade him that it might, I dropped it, to my regret.[…]

To begin with, linguistic communities have different historical memories, which are rendered in a kind of shorthand but must be spelled out in another language. Thus I once gave a word-for-word rendition of “a portrait of the King of Rome,” whereupon my copy editor suggested that for simplicity’s sake I make it “the pope.” Seeing that even this educated person had missed a cultural allusion that would be obvious to every French reader, I therefore wrote: “Napoleon’s son, who bore the title King of Rome.” A translator from American English, of course, would have to add similar glosses to “crossing the Delaware” or “the man from Independence”–and these examples only refer to historical allusions. Every language is full of cultural concepts that require paraphrasing and sometimes a complete transposition.

Thanks, Bathrobe!

Andrew Trounson writes for Pursuit about the ongoing quest to decipher Linear A:

How do you go about deciphering the script of a wholly different language that was lost more than 3,000 years ago? Linguist and archaeologist Dr Brent Davis says it’s like walking out on a tightrope anchored at just one end and supported by nothing but thin air, hoping you find something to stop you from falling. […]

Dr Davis, a lecturer in Archaeology and Ancient Egyptian at the University of Melbourne, is one of only a handful of people around the world to have made any significant headway on solving Linear A in the last 50 years. He established for the first time the word order of the language as being Verb-Subject-Object, like ancient Egyptian. So rather than ‘Minos has a minotaur’, a Minos would write ‘has Minos a minotaur’. […]

It was while he was doing his PhD at University of Melbourne that Dr Davis began to make real headway on solving Linear A. By establishing the word order of the language, linguists can identify the function of a word in a sentence just from its position. It’s like finding a key word in a massive crossword puzzle.

“The definite word order in English is Subject (S)-Verb (V)-Object (O), as in the phrase John likes cats. And we know that about 97 per cent of human languages are either in this form or S-O-V (John cats likes) or V-S-O (Likes John cats).” But when Dr Davis looked at other Bronze Age languages of this period in the region, none were like English. They were either S-O-V (like early Greek and Sumerian), or V-S-O (like ancient Egyptian). He guessed Linear A was likely to have one of these two word orders.

He then applied this framework to a series of inscriptions that appear on Minoan offering bowls. To put it simply, he found that the words on the bowls tended to recur in what was obviously a formula, except for the second word in the inscription, which was always different from bowl to bowl. His guess was that this word was probably the name of the person (the subject) making the offering. If correct then Linear A was likely a V-S-O language. That was confirmed when he found the Linear B sign for ‘olives’ (which had been borrowed from Linear A), occurring after the name as the object of the phrase. The repeated start of the phrase was therefore a verb, like “gives”, yielding the phrase gives Yasumatu olives, or in English [order] Yasumatu gives olives.

Davis points out that to actually decipher the language, more signs are needed:

“Discoveries are still being made, so I’m optimistic, but what we really need to find is a palace archive, which is where we are likely to find enough Linear A to finally decipher it.”

Thanks, Trevor!

Courtesy of JC, this enjoyable Wikipedia page features Old English words that did not survive into Modern English (although they really mean Standard Modern English, since a number survive in dialects, e.g. Old English āðexe ‘lizard’ survives as “rare/dialectal ask“). It’s divided into sections (Animals, Body parts, Colours, Other words); herewith one entry from each:

dūfedoppa: ‘pelican’.
earsgang: ‘anus’ (literally arse-exit).
weolucbasu: ‘purple’. Literally ‘whelk-purple’.
hæmed, liger: ‘sex’.

(Cf. “we’ll get ’em all back.”) Thanks, John!

Johanna Hanink, an associate professor of Classics at Brown University, has a fascinating discussion of classicists and translation at Eidolon; it’s so full of good things I’m going to have a hard time extracting representative samples, so if you like the bits I quote, go read the whole thing:

Yet our pedagogical reliance on translation habituates us to thinking about language learning in strange ways. In a brief overview of the history of translation, Juliane House observes that “At the end of the eighteenth century the teaching of Latin had turned into a highly formalized ritual, the idea being to instil discipline into students’ minds.” Two and a half centuries later, not much seems to have changed. I remember sitting in high school Latin class with a copy of Mandelbaum’s Aeneid under my desk, feeling like a kid in the outfield praying the ball never flies her way. For me, the “ritual” of in-class translation became linked early on with fear of humiliation.

This kind of pedagogy also hinders the development of real comprehension, since, among other things, it encourages students to translate Greek and Latin into their native languages even when they read on their own. We know that’s not how you learn a language; it’s also a hard habit to break. […]

In 2015, I met a journalist named Konstantinos Poulis in Greece. Poulis is also a talented fiction writer who had published a well-received collection of short stories called Thermostat the previous year. When I read the first story, “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia,” I was so compelled by the narrative that I wanted more people to be able to read it too. Over the next couple of years, Poulis and I spoke often about finding an English-language translator for his work. When that proved difficult, I decided to try for myself.

As much as I had loved reading “Leonardo,” translating it was another story. This was the first time I had ever attempted a literary translation, a translation stripped of quotation marks. Before, when I had “translated” Greek and Latin passages as part of my scholarly work, I had mostly been concerned with showing readers how — and even simply that — I understood the texts. But with Poulis and Thermostat, something more was at stake. I wanted to do justice to my friend’s writing and help him to build his reputation in the Anglophone literary world. Euripides and Plato had never needed anything like that from me. […]

Soon after “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia” appeared in English, I met Rob Tempio, an executive editor at Princeton University Press, and he suggested to me that something from Thucydides could work well for the Press’s “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series. I was heartened to hear him agree that he, too, was puzzled by the exalted position that Thucydides’ Athenians enjoy in American political discourse. The prospect of retranslating and reintroducing Pericles’ funeral oration and the Melian Dialogue — and of gently subverting the “ancient wisdom for modern readers” concept —did seem like a productive and creative way of encouraging people to revisit their assumptions about the text.

She gets accepted to a workshop at Princeton in literary translation and wound up “on an unforgiving daily schedule of translating Thucydides after breakfast and Poulis after lunch”:
[Read more…]

A clever initiative from Australia — indigemoji. From the About page:

This project began with a tweet. A tweet featuring a list of emojis with Arrernte words next to them. A tweet the internet couldn’t get enough of.

A few of us had recently been discussing why there weren’t any Indigenous Australian emojis out there. We didn’t have a good answer, except perhaps for the obvious – that no-one had made any yet. And then we saw the tweet and we knew it was time, so we rang Joel. Soon we had a team of emoji bosses in place – Joel Liddle Perrule, Veronica Dobson Perrurle and Kathleen Wallace Kemarre and together we began dreaming of what a set of emojis from Central Australia could look like. […]

Indigemoji is now a sticker set of 90 emojis representing life, culture and language of Arrernte Country in Central Australia, closely considered and guided by our emoji bosses. Each has an Arrente name, the traditional language of Mparntwe/Alice Springs, words we hope you’ll learn. We’ve also developed emojis for special totemic species, either endangered or extinct. A simple emoji of a bilby or a bandicoot promotes their memory, their name, their places in the landscape where they sprang into existence in the Altyerre and where they moved about on their epic journeys. This way they remain in our landscape.

There are links to Apmere angkentye-kenhe, a site about Central/Eastern Arrernte, and a Māori emoji site. (Arrernte previously at LH: tongue twister, Dreaming.) Thanks, Bathrobe!

I know you’ve all been waiting with bated breath to learn what I’ve been reading since I finished The Brothers Karamazov (see this post: “And now I have finished my Long March through 19th-century Russian literature…”). First I reread the Strugatskys’ Улитка на склоне (Snail on the Slope), enjoying its grim brio (how did they get away with alluding to so much of the repressed underside of Soviet life in the late ’60s?), and now I’ve started Valentin Kataev’s 1926 novella Растратчики (The Embezzlers), since it’s short and funny (I’ve got a nasty cold and am not up to anything Dostoevskian). I haven’t even finished the first page, but I had to post, because I ran across a letter of the alphabet that startled me more than perhaps any single letter ever has. The novel opens with a “citizen,” very proper-looking and no longer young, approaching a cigarette vendor on the steps of a Moscow telegraph office; the vendor takes one look at him and hands him a package of “Ira” cigarettes. This in itself is a nice touch; that brand was well known in tsarist times, and Mayakovsky wrote a famous couplet for a 1923 ad:

Единственное
        оставленное от старого мира —
папиросы «Ира».

The only thing
        left from the old world
is Ira cigarettes.

(You can see the ad, designed by Rodchenko, here.) If you’re thinking “Ad? Tsarist cigarette brand? What kind of Soviet Union is this??” the answer is that this was the heyday of NEP, the New Economic Policy that brought a watered-down version of capitalism to Russia for a few years and saved the economy from collapse. So our vendor has identified the citizen as the kind of fellow in the market for a classy holdover from the old days rather than a crude proletarian competitor.

But that’s not what startled me. Here’s the first bit of dialogue in the novel, with the translation by Charles Rougle (Ardis, 1975):

– А не будут они мокрые? – спросил гражданин, нюхая довольно длинным носом нечистый воздух, насыщенный запахом городского дождя и светильного газа.
– Будьте спокойны, из-под самого низу. Погодка-с!

“They’re not wet, are they?” the citizen asked, and he sniffed the dirty air, saturated with the smell of rain in the city and lamp gas, with his rather long nose.
“Don’t worry, I took ’em off the bottom. Boy, what weather we’re having!”

It’s not a bad translation, except that it ignores the letter that shocked me, that final -с [-s]. As I said in this 2004 post, it’s “a contracted form of sudar’ ‘sir,’ omnipresent in prerevolutionary literature as an indication of politeness or servility, depending on the situation.” In the Addendum to that post I quoted the third edition (1903-1909) of Dahl, who calls it “a mark of special politeness of former times,” and of course I assumed that if it was “former” in the first decade of the century it had surely died out entirely by Soviet times. But here it is being casually used by a vendor to a citizen on a Soviet street, for anyone to hear! I’m not sure whether it’s taken from actual city life, with holdovers from the old days (less than a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution) using the old forms out of habit, or whether it’s a bit of hyperbole by Kataev to show how NEP was turning the clock back, but in any case the translator should have thrown in at least a “sir,” if not “your honor,” to render the effect.

Cecelia Watson, a historian and philosopher of science who teaches at Bard College, writes for the Paris Review about one of the many lasting products of the Renaissance:

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts.

One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by the Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers. […]

Nearly as soon as the ink was dry on those first semicolons, they began to proliferate, and newly cut font families began to include them as a matter of course. The Bembo typeface’s tall semicolon was the original that appeared in De Aetna, with its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it. The semicolon in Poliphilus, relaxed and fuzzy, looks casual in comparison, like a Keith Haring character taking a break from buzzing. Garamond’s semicolon is watchful, aggressive, and elegant, its lower half a cobra’s head arced back to strike. Jenson’s is a simple shooting star. We moderns have accumulated a host of characterful semicolons to choose from: Palatino’s is a thin flapper in a big hat slouched against the wall at a party. Gill Sans MT’s semicolon has perfect posture, while Didot’s puffs its chest out pridefully. (For the postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme, none of these punch-cut disguises could ever conceal the semicolon’s innate hideousness: to him it was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.”)

There are images, including a side-by-side comparison of the various early varieties, and a discussion of “hand-wringing sages [who] forecast a literary apocalypse precipitated by too-casual attitudes about punctuation”; Watson warns against mistaking the –que abbreviation for a semicolon, something that is rarely a problem in these days of fallen Latinity. (Semicolons previously on LH: 2002, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2012 — inter, haud dubie, alia.)

The British Library’s Medieval manuscripts blog has a nice post about why “the number of classical writings that have actually survived is surprisingly low”; there are no new revelations, but it’s useful reading for those who aren’t au courant:

Traditionally, barbarian invasions and Christian monks have been blamed for intentionally destroying works of the classical past. The image of burning books and libraries is often evoked in scholarship, fiction and films alike. While this may have occasionally occurred, the biggest deciding factor for the survival or disappearance of classical texts is actually likely to be their use in medieval school education.

The reason for this is that works that made it onto school curricula tended to be copied more, so medieval scribes preserved them in large numbers. Texts that proved to be too difficult or unsuitable for use in schools were more prone to being lost. For example, of the 142 books of Livy’s exceptionally long work, The History of Rome from its Foundation, from the 1st century BC, only 35 books have survived intact, with the rest preserved only in extracts abridged for school use.

School curricula also explain why ancient grammatical literature was transmitted in surprising quantities across medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, including educational material for the study not only of Latin but also of ancient Greek. Popular texts, such as Priscian’s 5th-century Institutes of Latin Grammar, survive in large numbers, sometimes annotated with glosses or notes added in classrooms, as in this example from 11th-century France.

Although schools filtered the classical tradition rather heavily, omitting a number of texts that we would now be eager to read, the ancient schoolmasters had a surprisingly broad literary grasp. We have works on ancient mythology such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and encyclopaedic works such as Pliny’s Natural History. The works of Homer in the Eastern Mediterranean and Virgil, Cicero, Horace and Ovid in the West all survived thanks to their inclusion in late antique and medieval secondary education.

This key role of schools in the transmission of the classical past sheds a special light on other surviving texts, too. Ancient Roman plays, for example, have come down to us not as scripts for theatrical performances but rather as school manuals. […]

There are some wonderful images. For Priscian, see this 2013 post.

I normally try to avoid posting stuff relating to politics, especially emotion-laden politics, but this is so funny I can’t resist. Kate Connolly reports for the Guardian:

Germany’s Social Democratic party has backed down after becoming locked in a blame game with a florist and a printer over who was responsible for misspelling “fascism” on a war memorial wreath so that it resembled the word “fuckup”.

The error was only spotted once the wreath had been laid on Memorial Sunday, 17 November, when Germany traditionally commemorates the victims of war and fascism. Instead of the word “Faschismus” (fascism) the word “Verschissmuss” had been used. Although the word doesn’t exist, it closely resembles the word “verschissen” – a vulgar term for seriously messing up, close to “fucking up” in English. […]

“It has now emerged that the error on the ribbon of our wreath was not a sabotage attempt but down to human error,” the local party wrote. “There was an unfortunate chain of unlucky events where, despite several people handling it, nobody noticed the mistake … […] Heinz-Jürgen Jahnke, who specialises in ribbon printing, told the newspaper Bild: “We received the order by fax on 12 November. Everything was clearly written and perfectly legible. I print whatever the customer wants,” he said. As to why he didn’t notice the odd spelling and alert the customer, he said: “We sometimes print Arabic, Italian and Polish texts. How can I check if they are correct?” The only reason for calling back a customer, he said, would be “if something is illegible”.

Neither, apparently, did the florist notice anything when she picked up the wreath and delivered it, as requested by the SPD, to the memorial site. SPD members only noticed the highly embarrassing faux pas once the ceremony was under way.

I feel bad for the florist and for anyone who was upset by seeing it, but damn, “Verschissmuss” is hilarious. Thanks, Trond!