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I recently discovered Uppercase Alif, “Andreas Hallberg’s notes on Arabic linguistics.” From the About page:

I am an Assistant Professor in Arabic at the University of Gothenburg. This blog is a space for me to write informally about Arabic linguistics, research and writing tools, and related things that interest me. Posts are written in English or Swedish depending on topic. Typos and poor grammar may occur. Typically, posts that get more views are more carefully edited post publication.

My dissertation, Case Endings in Spoken Standard Arabic (Lund University, 2016), can be downloaded here.

There’s plenty of interesting stuff, like Minimal pairs in Standard Arabic. Check it out!

I was if not shocked then, perhaps, unsettled to learn of the death of the redoubtable Reinhold Aman, who was an expert in both collecting and using offensive language; he even did me the honor of dropping by LH in 2005 to call me an “anonymous dickhead” and a “backstabbing faceless weasel.” Jesse Sheidlower at his blog Strong Language has a well-balanced and thoughtful reminiscence:

Reinhold “Rey” Aman, the expert on offensive language, died on March 2 at the age of 82. Aman is best known as the editor and publisher of the journal Maledicta (“The International Journal of Verbal Aggression”).

Born in Bavaria in 1936, Aman gained fluency in several languages at a young age, and worked as a translator for the U.S. Army in Frankfurt. He studied chemistry and chemical engineering, and worked as an industrial chemist before and after he emigrated to Milwaukee in 1959. He received his PhD in Medieval German from the University of Texas in 1968, his dissertation analyzing the 151 battle scenes in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. A scholar with high standards for the work of others and higher standards for his own work, he was rooted in Bavarian scholarship. After receiving his PhD, he returned to the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee as an assistant professor of German, teaching a range of courses in linguistics and German; he retained an interest in German dialectology, writing about Bavarian and Yiddish, and published Bayrisch-Österreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch (“Bavarian-Austrian Dictionary of Swearing”) in multiple editions.

Maledicta was published in 13 volumes from 1977 to 2005, and was a useful mix of scholarly and irreverent study of a tremendous range of offensive language. Articles covered AIDS jokes, “The Pronunciation of Cunnilingus in Dictionaries”, “Verbal Aggression in Dutch Sleeptalking”, the OED’s entry for cock ‘penis’, a translation of Catullus 41, the politics of excrement in Black Arts poets, a semantic analysis of terms for sexual intercourse, “Canadian Gay Jokes”, and “I Wanna Hot Dog for My Roll: Suggestive Song Titles.” Contributors included many prominent figures in the study of language and folklore, such as G. Legman, Allen Walker Read, Leonard R.N. Ashley, Vance Randolph, Roger Steiner, Laurence Urdang, Irving Lewis Allen, Richard Lederer, Dennis Preston, Wolfgang Mieder, and Timothy B. Jay, as well as a number of anonymous or pseudonymous academics. Special issues included festschrifts for Peter Tamony, G. Legman, and the Yiddishist Lilliam Mermin Feinsilver.

He goes on to catalogue Aman’s less attractive side (he was actually imprisoned for sending threatening materials to his ex-wife, her lawyer, and a judge) and ends:

In person, Aman was polite and often charming. He had deep, unqualified love and loyalty to his daughter and her family. He loved feral cats, maybe above all, and would skimp on his own needs to provide for them.* [*The family has requested that any donations go to Forgotten Felines.] He reserved his antagonism for his perceived enemies. Aman genuinely loved language and insults, and loved arguments. His inability to control his conduct was based on a genuine belief that it was the right thing to do; he did not suffer fools lightly, and had absolutely zero tolerance for the hypocrite. The slang lexicographer Tom Dalzell says, “He considered hypocrisy to be his mortal enemy. He was a First Amendment absolutist who spoke what he considered truth to power,” adding “He was as loyal a friend as I have ever had.”

Though his legacy is tarnished by his problematic behavior, it’s nonetheless the case that he was willing to explore difficult topics at a time when serious, or indeed any, treatment of such language was not really possible in academia. Maledicta remains an important source for the study of offensive language. Aman’s wide-ranging knowledge of offensiveness was unparalleled, and he often complained about being typecast as the dirty-words guy. “Obscenity is less than 2 percent of what I do,” he told an interviewer. “I’m interested in verbal aggression. Anything negative. Unfortunately, it’s the vulgarity that gets all the attention. If I never have to write about ‘fuck,’ ‘shit,’ and cocksucker’ again, I’m happy.”

A complicated man. As I wrote elsewhere: He wouldn’t want to rest in peace, so I’ll just hope he’s resting however he would prefer.

Another interesting term has come up in my editing work: the Adena culture, “a Pre-Columbian Native American culture that existed from 1000 to 200 BC, in a time known as the Early Woodland period.” My questions were two: how is the word Adena pronounced, and what is its origin? The Wikipedia article I linked to says “The Adena Culture was named for the large mound on Thomas Worthington’s early 19th-century estate located near Chillicothe, Ohio, which he named ‘Adena’,” which is helpful but doesn’t go far enough. Some scavenging in Google Books turned up E. S. Blackwell’s Stories Told In Whispers (Lulu.com, 2014), where a footnote says “Adena: Word meaning ‘a place remarkable for the delightfulness of its situation’, according to Sept. 18, 1811 diary entry by Thomas Worthington,” and further Googling found Wonderful West Virginia (Volume 35, Issue 11, p. 9):

ADENA
Oddly, the name given to an important Indian culture existing in West Virginia from about 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1 is Adena, a Hebrew word meaning a place remarkable for the delightfulness of its situation.

I’m guessing the Hebrew root is עדן, from which Eden is derived, but I’d be curious to know more. And I’m morally certain Worthington would have pronounced Adena with “long e” (/əˈdiːnə/, ə-DEE-nə), and that is how I’m mentally saying it, but I would not be even a little bit surprised if it has been retro-“corrected” to /əˈdeɪnə/, ə-DAY-nə. (I would also not be surprised if people assumed it was of Native American origin.) Anybody know how anthropologists, historians, and others who study Adena culture say it?

Like most aging culture-vultures, I find I have less and less time for new additions to the culture-hoard and less appreciation when I try to sample them. In particular, I tend to skim over the poems in the New Yorker with a mental note of either “This isn’t what I call poetry” or “This seems like it might be good if one liked that sort of thing.” But just now I hit a poem by a name I wasn’t familiar with, Bianca Stone, that set my poetry bells ringing; it’s called “Artichokes,” and here’s the start:

I bet I’ll never appear in a dream or a summer dress
or next door. Displaying on one hand my prowess, the other
my difficultness, I bet there will be just enough pain
to keep me alive, long enough for the moon to be mine,
just as the sea is of women: the cockle, the star,
and the movements of the earth. Just as
the whale, stuck in its baleen grin, climbs up
out of the depths and moves to its hidden
spawning grounds—

I don’t know. What is it to be seen? I can forget
it’s language I long for. Man and his ciphers
cannot save me. Meaning cannot not pile me up
with more meaning.

You can read the rest (and, if you like, hear it read by the author) at that link. It grabbed me with that opening, especially the surprising “or next door,” and kept grabbing me with “difficultness” and “just enough pain to keep me alive” and “baleen grin,” and later in the poem “having felt/ like an artichoke, scraped away at with the front teeth,/ one scale at a time, worked down/ to the meaty heart”: I mean, just that lovely phrase “scraped away at with the front teeth” tells you this is somebody who loves the sounds and syntax of the English language and knows how to wield them. There’s more Stone at Poets.org and at her website; we discussed artichokes (their etymology and uses) back in 2007.

Lynne Peskoe-Yang has an enjoyable piece for Popula on the problems with the term “vegetable”; she begins with the Supreme Court case (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 [1893]) that determined that John Nix’s tomatoes were properly subject to vegetable tariffs even though they were technically “fruits” in botanical terms, because they were commonly understood to be vegetables:

In this way, Gray and his fellow jurists sealed the tomato’s identity crisis into law. The legal definition would be what common speech suggested, even if biology indicated the opposite. Nix’s tomatoes would be called “vegetables” because that’s what everyone called them. […]

Botanically speaking, it’s still clear: eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, and squash are all fruits. It’s equally clear that mushrooms and truffles are fungi, more closely related to humans than they are to plants. But these are all, also, in common usage, “vegetables.” Yet when an authority like the Oxford English Dictionary should provide clarity on what a vegetable actually is, it instead defines vegetables as a specific set of certain cultivated plant parts, “such as a cabbage, potato, turnip, or bean.” And since carrots and turnips are roots, potatoes are tubers, broccoli is a flower, cabbage is a leaf, and celery is a stem, we find that “vegetable” rarely applies to the entire plant (or to the same parts of the plant), while it also has a way of applying to things that aren’t actually vegetables. It is a category both broader and more specific that the thing it’s supposed to describe.

In a botanical sense, it’s easy: vegetables don’t exist as a discrete, coherent category. And the more you know about botany–the nuanced phylogeny that gardeners and farmers know and the centuries of research into plant evolution that botanists have learned–the more likely you’ll be a dissenter in the vegetable debate. “This is why people hate botanists,” as one disillusioned commenter wrote in a particularly heated r/Botany thread.

Unfortunately, there’s a silly excursus on how dictionaries “betray the [descriptivist] cause by appealing to the etymological past, breaking words down into their simplest and oldest-known usages” (!), but there’s plenty of good stuff about veggies and their history, e.g.:
[Read more…]

Alison Flood reports in the Graun about an unexpected find:

A 15th-century vellum manuscript of the writing of the revered Persian physician Ibn Sīna, or Avicenna, has been found being used to bind a later book, revealing for the first time that his seminal Canon of Medicine was translated into Irish.

The manuscript had been trimmed, folded and stitched to the spine of a pocket-sized Latin manual about local administration, which was printed in London in the 1530s. It had been owned by the same family in Cornwall since the 16th century. When they decided to satisfy their curiosity about the unusual binding last year, they consulted University College Cork professor of modern Irish Pádraig Ó Macháin, who said he “knew pretty much straight away” that it was a significant find.

“It really was very, very exciting, one of those moments which makes life worthwhile,” said Ó Macháin.

Professor Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, an expert on medieval Irish medicine, identified the text as a fragment of Ibn Sīna’s Canon of Medicine, a previously unknown Irish translation. Ibn Sīna lived between 980 and 1037 and was one of the Islamic golden age’s most influential scholars.

“While there are references to Avicenna scattered through other medical texts in Irish, we now know, for the first time, that the Canon was translated into Irish. This fragment must have come from a seriously big manuscript,” said Ó Macháin. “The use of parchment cut from old manuscripts as a binding for later books is not unusual in European tradition, but this is the first time that a case has come to light of such a clear example of the practice in a Gaelic context.” […]

Ó Macháin said that medical scholarship in medieval Gaelic Ireland was on a par with that practised on the continent, with evidence of Irish scholars travelling to European medical schools and bringing their learning back to Ireland. “The reason [the fragment] was translated was that Irish was the language of learning in medieval Ireland, whereas Latin fulfilled that role everywhere else,” he said.

It would have been cut up, he said, following the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, which put an end to the old Gaelic society. “Early universities in Ireland, supported by the Gaelic lordships, that all fell asunder as the Elizabethan conquest proceeded. Books like these were destroyed, and others were damaged and cut up, and it’s in that wider context you have to see whoever owned this book clearly came into possession of some such manuscript and thought nothing of trimming it and making a binding of it,” he said.

The book’s owners agreed that the binding should be removed, opened out and digitised. It can now be seen on the Irish Script on Screen website.

Not only discovered but put online — long live the internet!

Update (Dec. 2024). I have provided an updated link for Irish Script on Screen.

I’m a day late posting this (International Women’s Day was yesterday), but better late than never: Meduza highlights the work of “eight women who write literature in Russian but are poised to make major breakthroughs in English translation.” Even though I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about women writers, I had never heard of the first, Galina Rymbu (“Trained as a critic and political philosopher, Rymbu is also an editor and an active advocate for new literature. Thanks to translator Jonathan Brooks Platt, her work is on the rise in English as well as Russian”); needless to say, I was curious about her curious surname, and after some assiduous googling I figured out it was the equivalent of Romanian Rîmbu (I’m afraid I don’t know the etymology of that). The others are Alisa Ganieva, Anna Starobinets, Nariné Abgaryan, Linor Goralik, Maria Stepanova, Alexandra Petrova, and Guzel Yakhina; there are links to translations of their work at the Meduza site. I’m particularly excited about Stepanova’s Памяти памяти (In Memory of Memory, translated as Post-Memory by Sasha Dugdale and forthcoming from New Directions), having read about it at Lizok’s Bookshelf (“although sometimes the book feels almost addictively readable, it’s better to read in very small doses, to absorb, even try on, levels of meaning and significance”).

This Facebook post by Lev Oborin made me laugh so much I had to preserve it for posterity:

— Петя, к нам сегодня придет учительница, и нам надо…
— Купить водку, — вдруг заканчивает Петя.

Петя имел в виду, что на прошлой неделе Яша изрисовал фломастером клавиши пианино и я предположил, что их можно оттереть водкой, но диалог выглядел как типичный пример из учебника русского языка для иностранцев.

Translation:

“Petya, your teacher’s coming today, and we need to…”
“Buy vodka,” Petya interrupts.

Petya was remembering that last week Yasha drew all over the the piano keys with marker and I thought they could be cleaned with vodka, but the dialogue was like a typical example from a Russian language textbook for foreigners.

Alexander Snegirev imagines this dialogue in the comments:

а что это с нашим папой?
– а это он опять клавиши протирает…

“What’s daddy doing?” “He’s cleaning the piano keys again…”

Addendum: Anatoly quotes another excellent Facebook joke:

Главный редактор – журналисту:
— Пишите срочно статью.
— На каком языке?
— Иврите.
— Да это я понял, на каком языке писать-то?

Editor-in-chief to reporter:
“I need you to write a piece right away.”
“In what language?”
“Hebrew.” [Ivrite; sounds exactly like I vrite ‘And tell lies.’]
“Sure, I get that, but what language should I write it in?”

My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette (published across the river in Northampton), has a lot of printing errors. A lot. I don’t mean just the normal kind, “it’s” for “its” and the occasional misspelled word, I mean total disasters, stories ending in the middle of a sentence, headlines like “Cleveland Browns sign give troubled RB Hunt” and “A racquet and some friends may be the key to a longer,” that sort of thing. My wife and I groan and pass them to each other for appalled inspection and wonder whether anyone actually reads the paper before it’s published. Well, apparently not; Brooke Hauser, the Gazette’s editor in chief, had a column yesterday in which she began by admitting that lots of people complain to her about this sort of thing:

Every once in a while, my neighbor, who is in his 80s and a faithful reader of this newspaper, walks over to my house and hand-delivers a fresh batch of typos clipped from our pages. The errors are circled, annotated, cut out and sorted. He is a wonderful neighbor who also has brought our family homemade pie, handmade wooden toys and a bird feeder. But the typos are not of his making — they are of the Gazette’s. And he just wants me to know about it. He’s not the only one.

A few weeks ago, I spotted a writer I admire at the grocery store and decided to introduce myself, with my 2-year-old daughter in tow. I recognized this writer from her author’s photo, and to my surprise, when I told her my name, she recognized me, too — as the editor of the Gazette. She reads the Gazette daily, she told me, as we chatted in the checkout line. She couldn’t start her day without it, she said.

After singing the paper’s praises, the writer, who shall remain anonymous, mentioned that she has noticed a decline in typos recently. And she has been keeping track. Somewhat sheepishly, she told me she keeps a file of Gazette typos and other copy errors. Her favorite one? A reference to “anti-Semiotic graffiti.”

I remember “anti-Semiotic graffiti”; my wife and I agreed it almost made the general sloppiness worth it. Then she goes on:
[Read more…]

The same editing job that led me to complain about the hominid/hominin confusion brings us another such: the prehistoric continent now known, to some at least, as Sahul. To quote the Wikipedia article:

Archaeological terminology for this region has changed repeatedly. Before the 1970s, the single Pleistocene landmass was called Australasia, derived from the Latin australis, meaning “southern”, although this word is most often used for a wider region that includes lands like New Zealand that are not on the same continental shelf. In the early 1970s, the term Greater Australia was introduced for the Pleistocene continent. Then at a 1975 conference and consequent publication, the name Sahul was extended from its previous use for just the Sahul Shelf to cover the continent.

In 1984 W. Filewood suggested the name Meganesia, meaning “great island” or “great island-group”, for both the Pleistocene continent and the present-day lands, and this name has been widely accepted by biologists. Others have used Meganesia with different meanings: travel writer Paul Theroux included New Zealand in his definition and others have used it for Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. Another biologist, Richard Dawkins, coined the name Australinea in 2004. Australia-New Guinea has also been used.

What a mess! I swear, scientists enjoy sowing confusion.

By the way, does anybody know anything about the etymology of Sahul? Wikipedia says merely “The name ‘Sahull’ or ‘Sahoel’ appeared on 17th century Dutch maps applied to a submerged sandbank between Australia and Timor,” and maybe that’s as much as can be known, but I can’t help but be curious.