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Yukiko Duke’s ‘The Joy of Translating is Gone’ in Swedish Book Review, translated by Ian Giles, is both an affecting memoir and an interesting look at the practice of one pair of translators. She begins with her mother’s death last year at the age of 98, followed quickly by her father’s, saying “For me, the passing of my parents marked not only the end of an era in my personal life, but also the definitive end of part of my professional life as a translator.” After a description of how she got into it (a friend called in desperation, needing someone to turn Kenzaburo Oe’s novel M/T and the Narrative About the Marvels of the Forest into Swedish after the original translator dropped out, and she called her mother, who said “Of course we’ll translate Oe… Then we might get to meet him”), she turns to their working methods:

But how were we to approach it in purely practical terms? Mum was in Stockholm and I was in Tokyo. We agreed to do a rough translation first so that we could get a feel for Oe’s language and its rhythm. Hundreds of emails pinged back and forth between Sweden and Japan, but progress was sluggish. The Japanese sentences had to be completely taken apart, the words recast and then bolted back together. Cultural phenomena had to be explained; tricky words and names from Shikoku had to be checked so that they were correctly spelled. What on earth had we got ourselves into? After a month’s work, we’d made it through a pitiful one and a half chapters of the book. We trudged on heroically, but the work felt increasingly Sisyphean.

‘My God – at this rate we’ll never make our deadline,’ Mum lamented.

The summer holidays arrived and I went home to Sweden. Mum and I sat side by side beneath the linden trees at our summer house on Gotland, working together. She would read the source text aloud, we would discuss it and then I would write down a rough translation. Never have we got through as much tea, coffee or chocolate as we did then, but suddenly everything was flowing. It was almost magical. […]

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Heikki Lotvonen at Glyph Drawing Club Blog posted Why is there a “small house” inIBM’s Code page 437?, which is not really in my wheelhouse, but since Kattullus at MetaFilter (where I got the link) said “This is an extremely satisfying read because it sets out a mystery, and then comes to a conclusion that’s simultaneously obvious, and one I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years of thinking just about that one thing,” I couldn’t resist clicking through; it is indeed a satisfying read, and the conclusion resonates with something I like to emphasize here at LH:

The consistent inconsistencies in IBM’s technical documentations, fonts, and registries, sounds like a classic case of miscommunication between the different departments of IBM. Did the font’s designers intend 0x7F to be a house, but the engineers interpreted it as a delta, mislabeling it in the System BIOS? Or did the designers intend it to be delta, but the botched rendering made it look like a house, and publications like the IBM BASIC Manual perpetuated the wrong interpretation until IBM decided to make it official in the registry? Or what? There is no clear answer.

Whether IBM meant 0x7F to be a delta, or a house, remains a mystery. But it doesn’t really matter. What the house character looks like, is, after all, just a matter of interpretation. The legacy of CP437 is not defined by IBM’s intentions, but by all the different ways designers, programmers, ASCII artists and other users adopted it. It is delta and house, but also rocket, players ammo, gun, spike, energizer, or whatever else we want it to be. As IBM engineer Charles E. Mackenzie observes in Coded Character Sets, History and Development:

“There is an aspect of human nature which surfaces in data processing. Experience has shown that if graphics are provided on a computing system, they will be used in one way or another by customers, even if they have no intrinsic meaning.”[11]

This is probably best exemplified by how the house character is used in PC ASCII art. In the hands of ASCII artists, the character goes beyond meaning and returns to pure form, demonstrating that there is no shape that has an “intrinsic” meaning, until we give them meaning.

L’arbitraire du signe, baby!

Ian Duhig posted on Facebook:

Gabriel Moreno asked for the text of my poem for Elio Cruz, poet, artist and playwright from Gib who first got me writing poetry. He often wrote in Llanito, the language of the working class there now in danger of dying out — the title [“The Register”] refers to social register of Llanito, presumably what Bernstein would call a ‘restricted code’ of society’s poorer members although Llanito is linguistically very rich.

I was unfamiliar with Llanito; Wikipedia says:

Llanito or Yanito (Spanish pronunciation: [ɟʝaˈnito]) is a form of Andalusian Spanish heavily laced with words from English and other languages, such as Ligurian; it is spoken in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. It is commonly marked by a great deal of code switching between Andalusian Spanish and British English and by the use of Anglicisms and loanwords from other Mediterranean languages and dialects.

The English language is becoming increasingly dominant in Gibraltar, with the younger generation speaking little or no Llanito despite learning Spanish in school. It has been described as “Gibraltar’s dying mother-tongue”. Llanito is a Spanish word meaning “little plain”. Gibraltarians also call themselves Llanitos.

Etymology

The etymology of the term Llanito is uncertain, and there are a number of theories about its origin. In Spanish, llanito means “little flatland” and one interpretation is that it refers to the “people of the flatlands”. It is thought that the inhabitants of La Línea with important social and economic ties with Gibraltar, were actually the first to be referred to as Llanitos since La Línea lies in the plain and marsh land surrounding The Rock.

Another theory for the origin of the word is that it is a diminutive of the name Gianni: “gianito”, pronounced in Genoese slang with the “g” as “j”. During the late 18th century 34% of the male civilian population of Gibraltar came from Genoa and Gianni was a common Italian forename. To this day, nearly 20% of Gibraltarian surnames are Italian in origin. It has also been speculated that the term comes from the English name “Johnny”.

It has also been hypothesized that the term originated as a reference to the language of the people, with llanito originally referring to the “plain language” spoken by ordinary Gibraltarians.

That last suggestion is absurd on its face (the two meanings of plain exist only in English, not Spanish); [I was wrong; see Noetica’s comment below.] I have no basis for judging between the otherssuggestions, but it’s certainly an interesting term. As for the rest of the article, I can’t tell what’s well founded and what’s folk belief (e.g., chachi ‘cool; brilliant’ allegedly from Winston Churchill). At any rate, mixed languages are fun. (Thanks, Trevor!)

I received in today’s mail a copy of Charles F. Haywood’s Yankee Dictionary: A Compendium of Useful and Entertaining Expressions Indigenous to New England (available for borrowing at the Internet Archive), which frequent commenter cuchuflete had offered me, saying:

Was going through books, for planned donations […]. Found one you might enjoy, whether or not useful for The Hattery. Entries include Pindling, Stivver, Throw a Tub to the Whale, and more mirthful stuff. This is not the work of a linguist or scholar of any stripe; he loves the expressions and describes them reasonably well.

It is indeed both entertaining and instructive; here’s the entry for ruddle:

The attic of a house. In New England the ruddle or attic, is the place for things not presently needed but which may be useful someday, somehow, somewhere. Here one may expect to find anything from a genuine Benjamin Franklin signature to a suddenly needed chamber pot. The uniformed fireman who calls for the annual inspection never approves of the multitude of items of possible future value stacked in the ruddle and often gives a lecture, but does not have the slightest notion that these treasures are going to be thrown out.

(Note that “notion” here = ‘expectation.’) The interesting thing is that the OED is unaware of this pleasing word, and I find few mentions of it elsewhere; it is, however, in Crescent Dragonwagon’s Bean by Bean, p. 219:

The students collected the reminiscences of then-octogenarians (now all deceased, of course) and transcribed them, creating a paperback book called The Ruddle (an old New England word for an attic or garage, a place where you store old things you don’t use but that just might come in handy some day).

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Over at The Conversation, Charles Kemp, Temuulen Khishigsuren, Ekaterina Vylomova, and Terry Regier discuss a much-discussed topic: Do Inuit languages really have many words for snow? The most interesting finds from our study of 616 languages:

Languages are windows into the worlds of the people who speak them – reflecting what they value and experience daily. So perhaps it’s no surprise different languages highlight different areas of vocabulary. Scholars have noted that Mongolian has many horse-related words, that Maori has many words for ferns, and Japanese has many words related to taste.

Some links are unsurprising, such as German having many words related to beer, or Fijian having many words for fish. The linguist Paul Zinsli wrote an entire book on Swiss-German words related to mountains. In our recently-published study we took a broad approach towards understanding the links between different languages and concepts. Using computational methods, we identified areas of vocabulary that are characteristic of specific languages, to provide insight into linguistic and cultural variation. […]

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I have just learned a splendid word. OED (entry revised 2011):

ɴᴏᴜɴ
1. More fully †rouncival pease, rouncival pea. A large variety of garden or field pea. Also (in plural): peas of this variety. Now chiefly historical.

1570 Set (as as [sic] a deintie) thy runcyfall pease.
T. Tusser, Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry (new edition) f. 15
[…]
1622 The Rouncefall, great Beanes, and early ripening Peason.
M. Drayton, 2nd Part Poly-olbion xx. 12
[…]
1997 Dubbed rouncivals, the sweet-tasting green peas had become all the rage by the 17th century.
San Diego Union-Tribune (Nexis) 16 December h19
2005 It’s a special fork, not a spoon at all. Used..for eating so-called rouncival peas.
J. Miller, Murder’s out of Tune 21

That “not a spoon at all” made me think of Lear’s “runcible spoon”; OED s.v. runcible:

Origin uncertain. Perhaps an entirely arbitrary formation, or perhaps an arbitrary alteration of rouncival adj. or rouncival n.

At any rate, here are the rest of the definitions for rouncival:
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Alan Yuhas writes for the NY Times (archived) about a very cool find:

Torn, folded and stitched, rare tales of Merlin shapeshifting into King Arthur’s court and Sir Gawain gaining power from the sun were bound into a book of property records from the 1500s. They went unnoticed for centuries, stacked among the records of an English manor and then among the millions of volumes of a university library. At least until an archivist took another look, setting off a yearslong project to identify and then reassemble the medieval manuscript, which someone in Tudor England had taken apart and used to help hold together a ledger.

The manuscript turned out to be a priceless find: extremely rare stories of Arthurian romance, copied by a scribe between 1275 and 1315, and part of the “Suite Vulgate du Merlin,” an Old French sequel to the start of the Arthur legend. Cambridge University researchers announced their findings this week and published a digitized version of the manuscript online.

There are fewer than 40 copies of the Suite Vulgate sequel known to exist, and no two are exactly the same. “Each manuscript copy of a medieval text, handwritten by a scribe, is going to be changed little by little,” said Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, the French specialist at the university library. “As the copies come along, each scribe imposes his own taste.” […]

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Jim Bisso’s The Morphology of Peevology Facebook post says (I’ve added links):

Language Jones does a good job of explaining unaccusative verbs (as opposed to unergative ones). What’s that? Per the article in Wikipedia: “In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccusative verb’s subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice.”

For example, in English “the tree fell”, “the window broke”, &c. It is related to the reason why some verbs in, e.g., French or German use “to be” as the auxiliary verb in past tenses, instead of “to have”: “je suis tombé” (I have fallen) versus “j’ai travaillé” (I have worked). (It was first described, in 1978, by David Perlmutter.)

Unaccusative verbs have been mentioned a few times at LH, at length in this 2012 comment by Wimbrel:

In linguistics this distinction is encapsulated in the contrast between unergative and unaccusative verbs, i.e., intransitive verbs whose subject is, from a semantic perspective, the doer (agent) or the experiencer (patient) of the action. In Romance and Germanic languages (like French, Italian, German, and Dutch) that have two different auxiliaries for forming the perfective past (preterite), unergative verbs take “to have” (avere/avoir/haben/etc.) as the auxiliary and unaccusative verbs take “to be” (essere/être/sein/etc.). Vestiges of the unergative/unaccusative distinction seem to have survived as late as Early Modern English (hence “the Lord is come”). Radford’s Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction gives some examples from Shakespeare, like “How chance thou art returned so soon?” (Comedy of Errors, I.ii) “She is fallen into a pit of ink.” (Much Ado About Nothing, IV.i)

The Wikipedia article provides the history of the concept and gives examples in English and other languages, notably Russian: “Unlike the subtle evidence for unaccusatives in English, Russian provides strong tests to determine unaccusativity.” I’m hoping making a separate post of it will help the concept (which was invented just as I was dropping out of grad school) stick in my head. Oh, and that Language Jones video is indeed good; it ends up showing how such verbs are reflected in brain scans, aphasia, and child speech.

Peter E. Gordon, reviewing Paul Reitter’s Englishing of Capital in the LRB (3 April 2025; archived), provides one of those analyses of translations that give me so much pleasure and that I can’t resist passing along. After describing Engels’ irritation with the first English excerpts (“Mr Broadhouse is deficient in every quality required in a translator of Marx”) and his hard work on the first complete version, Gordon proceeds to general considerations:

The German word for translation, übertragen, implies that we can simply ‘carry over’ meaning from one language to another. But no two meanings are wholly alike; the act of translation seems, inevitably, to be an act of infidelity. Perhaps this is true of the translation of any text. But among scholars of Capital the question of what Marx meant is burdened with added importance: a proper translation of Capital can tell us how capital works. In this respect Engels’s comparison to the Bible was apt. When Saint Jerome produced the Vulgate, he obeyed the principle of ad fontes: he went back to the Hebrew original as the spring from which revelation flows. When Marxists wrestle over a term or phrase in Capital they honour the same philological method, treating the original as the privileged source of instruction.

Yet no translation can be definitive, for the obvious reason that language changes over time. A translation that once seemed to hit the mark will later seem stale or imprecise. What’s more, in this case, there isn’t even agreement on what should count as the original text. Marxists continue to debate whether Le Capital in the first French edition should be seen as a welcome improvement on the German edition of Das Kapital (published in Hamburg in 1867) or an unfortunate simplification.

The frontispiece of the French translation reads: ‘Traduction de M. J. Roy, entièrement révisée par l’auteur.’ In a letter to Nikolai Danielson (who translated the first volume of Capital into Russian), Marx confessed that he had felt it necessary to ‘smooth out’ (aplatir) the French version. […]

Then he gets down to business:
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Via Edwin Battistella’s Facebook post, I was alerted to Volume 100, Issue 1 of American Speech. I don’t have access to it, but I enjoy just reading the table of contents:

Louise Pound, H. L. Mencken, and the Founding of American Speech: In Memory of Ron Butters
Connie C. Eble

The Politics of Prescriptivism: One Style Manual, One Century
Kristin VanEyk; Anne Curzan

DARE, Literature, and Enregistered Regional Identities
Michael Adams

Algae, Fungi, Binomial Nomenclature, and the Search for “Correct” Pronunciations
Dale F. Coye

The Representation of Earlier African American Vernacular English By Charles W. Chesnutt
Irene Kimbara

Describing 400 Years of American English Can be Like Comforting, Super Interesting, and Literally Challenging
David Johnson

Discovering the Many Englishes of North America
Samantha M. Litty

And at least we can read the first page of each! (In the VanEyk/Curzan piece, the manual in question is the New York Times style guide: “By tracing the changing prescriptions over the decades, this study highlights the complicated but important nature of the politics of prescriptivism.”)