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Vittoria Traverso has yet another great Atlas Obscura post:

Before children learn how to speak properly, they go through a period of imitating the sounds they hear, with occasionally hilarious results, at least for their parents. Baby talk evolves into proto-words, so that “octopus” might come out as “appah-duece,” or “strawberry” as “store-belly.” But it’s not just children who ape the sounds of spoken language. There’s a long tradition of songs that “sound” like another language without actually meaning anything. In Italy, for example, beginning in the 1950s, American songs, films, and jingles inspired a diverse range of “American sounding” cultural products.

The most famous is probably “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” a 1972 song composed by legendary Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano and performed by him and his wife, Claudia Mori. The song’s lyrics sound phonetically like American English—or at least what many Italians hear when an American speaks—but are clearly total, utter, delightful nonsense. You really have to hear it to appreciate it. […]

By the time Celentano’s song came out, the sound of American English had been “contaminating” Italian culture for decades. Linguist Giuseppe Antonelli analyzed Italian pop songs produced between 1958 and 2007, and revealed the ways in which Italian singers have incorporated American sounds into their music.

One way was to use intermittent English words, with preference for trendy terms. The most notable example of this is “Tu vuo’ fa l’americano” (“You Want to Be American”), a 1956 song by Renato Carosone about a young Neapolitan who is trying to impress a girl. […]

Similarly, in the 1960s there was a trend of bands in England singing in Italian—with strong English accents. Both phenomena resulted in a similar hybrid sound, one that Italians responded to. According to Francesco Ciabattoni, who teaches Italian culture and literature at Georgetown University, this Anglo-Italian pop genre grew from Italy’s collective interest in America, as well as the British Invasion of the 1960s. “I am not sure how much thinking they put in it, but producers must have realized that imitating English and American sounds would sell more,” he says. Linguistics may have played a role, too. “The phonetic structure of English makes it more suited to rock or pop songs compared with Italian,” he adds.

She goes on to discuss the Divine Comedy (“Nimrod … approaches Dante and Virgil, and says ‘Raphèl maí amècche zabí almi,’ a series of words that has no meaning but, according to some scholars, can sound a little like Old Hebrew”), Charlie Chaplin (“The otherwise silent 1936 film Modern Times sees the comedian performing a song that sounds like a mix of Italian and French, but means absolutely nothing”), and Grammelot, “a system of languages popularized by Commedia dell’arte”:

Grammelot was used by itinerant performers to “sound” like they were performing in a local language by a using macaronic and onomatopoeic elements together with mimicry and mime. Dario Fo, an Italian playwright and actor who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, featured Grammelot in his 1996 show Mistero Buffo (Comic Mystery Play).

There are, of course, illustrative video clips at the link. (N.b.: “Prisencolinensinainciusol” was discussed at the Log in 2011.) Thanks, Trevor!

Victor Mair recently had a Log post about a Tangut Workshop at Yale which is full of striking tidbits:

The Tangut were a Tibeto-Burman-speaking people whose name first appears in the Old Turkic Orkhon inscriptions of 735. Sometime before the 10th century, the Tangut moved to Northwest China where they founded the Western Xia / Xixia or Tangut Empire (1038–1227).

I have long been interested in the Tangut because of their complicated Siniform script. It looks sort of like Chinese characters (square shaped logographs, similar brush strokes, etc.), but even more complicated. Many people who encounter Tangut script for the first time joke that the Tangut, while seeming to borrow the basic structural principles of Chinese characters, tried to outdo the Chinese by making their characters more dense and complex.

As the renowned Turkologist, Gerard Clauson, put it:

The [Tangut] language is remarkable for being written in one of the most inconvenient of all scripts, a collection of nearly 5,800 characters of the same kind as Chinese characters but rather more complicated; very few are made up of as few as four strokes and most are made up of a good many more, in some cases nearly twenty. It is extremely difficult to remember them, since there are few recognizable indications of sound and meaning in the constituent parts of a character, and in some cases characters which differ from one another only in minor details of shape or by one or two strokes have completely different sounds and meanings.

[…] Beside the script, another aspect of Tangut language that has intrigued me is the fact that it exists in two registers. These are lhwe and mi. Nikita Kuzmin, a budding Tangut specialist who was present at the Yale workshop, states:

The majority of Tangut texts (dictionaries, sutras, translations) were written in mi register (which has more or less been researched). Only Tangut odes were written in lhwe register, therefore it is sometimes called “odic language”. Despite the fact that these two registers were expressed in the same Tangutgraphs, the syntax, grammar, and lexicon are different, which creates problems in translation. A leading Chinese scholar in Tangut studies, Nie Hongyin 聂鸿音, points out that lhwe is a different type of language, hence a Russian scholar Ksenia Kepping (Ксения Кеппинг) supposes that it is Tangut ritual language (probably the dichotomy lhwe – mi can be compared to wenyan [literary] – baihua [vernacular] in Sinitic).

There are a bunch of links for both people and language. I thought I’d studied some difficult languages, but I’m glad I never had to master Tangut.

Matthew Petti writes for America about an interesting community:

A strip mall 15 minutes down the highway from Manhattan is the last place I expected to hear the language spoken by Jesus Christ. But northern New Jersey is one of the places where Syriac Christians, driven from the Middle East by violence and persecution, have come to call home over the past few decades. If Jacob Hanikhe has his way, it will also remain one of the few places where Aramaic, an ancient tongue found throughout the Talmud and Gospels, is a living language.

Syriac, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians—their chosen name varies by denomination, but most recognize themselves as part of the same ethnic group—originally hail from the Middle East, where their Aramaic dialects were once the dominant language. Forced into diaspora by both ethnic and religious conflicts, the Syriac Christians in New Jersey, who number about 2,000 families and are mostly members of the Syriac Orthodox Church, have created Syriac establishments ranging from language schools to restaurants. They are now attempting to balance the American Dream with preserving their faith and reviving their ancient culture.

Petti describes the sad history of the Syriac community in the Middle East and the history of the language itself (“It spread across the Fertile Crescent … during the Assyrian Empire and attained the status of a world language under the Persian Empire and remained dominant well into the Islamic era”), then turns to local history:

Deacon Yildiz fled Turkey with his family in 1979. One of his Syriac friends in America knew Mor Yeshue Samuel, who was the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Jerusalem before leaving for the United States during the 1948 war and becoming the first Syriac archbishop of the United States and Canada. (He was also famous for helping discover the Dead Sea scrolls.) Archbishop Samuel hired Deacon Yildiz as a deacon and Aramaic instructor for a congregation in New Jersey.

The official history of the Syriac Archdiocese for the Eastern United States says that a deacon from Mosul named Micha al-Nakkar “probably settled in or around Boston” in the 1840s. Larger groups of Syriacs came over in later decades, as silk weavers from Tur Abdin moved to Rhode Island to work in the silk mills there. The archdiocese’s history says that their children often went into highly educated fields like law and engineering.

Deacon Yildiz says there has been a Syriac community in New Jersey dating back to the mid-19th century, and it has made some enduring contributions. Taw Mim Semkath, an Assyrian school in Beirut, Lebanon, established by immigrants to New Jersey, is “the oldest known Syriac Orthodox organization that is still functioning,” according to the archdiocese. Naum Faiq, a major neo-Aramaic literary figure and Assyrian nationalist thinker, came to New Jersey in 1912, where he wrote for and founded a variety of Aramaic publications. One of them, called Huyodo, is still printed by the diaspora in Sweden as Hujådå. […]

Nationality quotas imposed in the 1920s all but ended Syriac immigration to America until such quotas were banned by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. During that period many Syriacs fell out of touch with their homeland and culture, but some family ties remained strong—even across long distances.

It turns out “the head of the entire Syriac Orthodox Church, His Holiness Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, started his career in New Jersey,” and there’s promising news about the younger generation: “many who had been disconnected from their Aramaic heritage are rediscovering it.” I hope the community flourishes and keeps the language alive. (Thanks, Trevor!)

I recently ran across a reference to Imbolc, an Irish festival marking the beginning of spring. It will not surprise anyone who has read much of this blog to learn that I care little about the festival but a great deal about the name, to wit: why is it spelled that way? The Wikipedia article begins “Imbolc or Imbolg (/ɪˈmɒlɡ/ i-MOLG),” but it is much more commonly referred to under the former spelling, which uses the Old Irish convention of c to represent /g/. But it is very unusual to use Old Irish spellings except in an Old Irish context; we talk about Maeve, not Medb, and Cooley, not Cúalnge. The Etymology section says:

The etymology of Imbolc/Imbolg is unclear. The most common explanation is that is comes from the Old Irish i mbolc (Modern Irish i mbolg), meaning “in the belly”, and refers to the pregnancy of ewes. Another possible origin is the Old Irish imb-fholc, “to wash/cleanse oneself”, referring to a ritual cleansing. Eric P. Hamp derives it from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning both “milk” and “cleansing”. Professor Alan Ward derives it from the Proto-Celtic *embibolgon, “budding”. The 10th century Cormac’s Glossary derives it from oimelc, “ewe milk”, but many scholars see this as a folk etymology. Nevertheless, some Neopagans have adopted Oimelc as a name for the festival.

The usual Wikipedia farrago, but it doesn’t provide any explanation. The eDIL entry says:

n o (? v.l. Stowe), TBC 2473. o lúan taite ṡamna co tate imbuilg (go taitte n-earraigh v.l., Stowe), 3186 . fromad cach bíd iar n-urd | issed dlegair i n-Imbulc, Hib. Min. 49.27 . iar n-imbulc, ba garb a ngeilt `after Candlemas (rough was their herding),’ Met. Dinds. iii 370.61 . Fanciful etymological explanation: óimelc .i. ōi-meilg .i. is[ī] aimser andsin tic as cāirach. melg .i. ass arinní mblegar, Corm. Y 1000.

Which is fun but also no help. This reminds me forcibly of the geas/geis mess we hashed out a few years ago; since I’ve studied both Old and Modern Irish, it doesn’t surprise me a bit that that fine language is such a good provider of conundrums, but I’d still like to get some clarity if anyone can provide it.

Julie Beck at the Atlantic has a superficial but lively piece called “Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read” that focuses on one of the things that interests me most — what and how we remember. It begins:

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”

Sadly familiar, right? Beck says:

The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.

Useful information, but nothing new, and I’ve long since learned to rehearse stuff to myself before I forget it. I’m a little dubious about the follow-up statement that “In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary,” but I grew up before the internet age, so what do I know? She quotes a study that showed that “those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week” and says:

The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,” he says.

Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”

She quotes a New Yorker piece “The Curse of Reading and Forgetting,” in which Ian Crouch writes: “reading has many facets, one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment and then fade. How much of reading, then, is just a kind of narcissism—a marker of who you were and what you were thinking when you encountered a text?” I agree with Beck that that doesn’t seem like narcissism, but I disagree that “it’s true enough that if you consume culture in the hopes of building a mental library that can be referred to at any time, you’re likely to be disappointed.” It all depends on how you build your library. It may take rereading and conscious digesting (as Crouch says, “A simple remedy to forgetfulness is to read novels more than once”), but it doesn’t all have to vanish into the woodwork. Thanks, Bathrobe!

(For an earlier LH discussion of reading and memory, see this 2010 post.)

Jacob Mikanowski at Cabinet Magazine presents a fascinating look at a mysterious script whose key was lost in frustratingly recent times:

Of all the literatures in the world, the smallest and most enigmatic belongs without question to the people of Easter Island. It is written in a script—rongorongo—that no one can decipher. Experts cannot even agree whether it is an alphabet, a syllabary, a mnemonic, or a rebus. Its entire corpus consists of two dozen texts. The longest, consisting of a few thousand signs, winds its way around a magnificent ceremonial staff. The shortest texts—if they can even be called that—consist of barely more than a single sign. One took the form of a tattoo on a man’s back. Another was carved onto a human skull.

Where did the rongorongo script come from? What do its texts communicate? No one knows for sure. The last Easter Islanders (or Rapanui) familiar with rongorongo died in the nineteenth century. They didn’t live long enough to pass on the secret of their writing system, but they did leave a few tantalizing clues. The island’s spoken language, also called Rapanui, lives on, but today it is written in a Latin script and its relationship to rongorongo is unclear. So far at least, no one has successfully connected one with the other. To this day, rongorongo remains a puzzle, an enigma, and a mirror for the folly of those who try to solve it. […]

[Read more…]

I saw Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1994 movie «Утомлённые солнцем» (Burnt by the Sun; video) in a theater shortly after it came out; as I recall, I found it impressive but didn’t understand much of what was going on. Now that I’m reading about the Terror of the late 1930s, I thought I’d take a look at it online, and was struck by a linguistic feature of the very opening (the first four minutes, before the titles). A man who we later learn is an NKVD operative named Mitya arrives at his apartment (in the House on the Embankment) and is greeted by his servant Philippe, whose native language is French and who occasionally slips into that language (prompting an irritated “I told you to always speak Russian!”). Philippe starts reading aloud from a copy of Pravda, and Mitya corrects his mispronunciations, usually a wrong stress (“НЕсколько, not неСКОЛько!”). Then Mitya takes out a revolver, removes all the bullets but one, and places it at his temple, continuing to correct the reading. Just before he pulls the trigger (spoiler: it doesn’t fire), he says “часть!” (Philippe had read the Russian word for ‘part’ as част, with unpalatalized -t). Now that’s what I call dedication — spending what might be your last moment on earth correcting someone’s pronunciation.

An interesting Quora discussion:

Bulent Cetin:

Sometimes it sounds funny, due to the difference in vocabulary and emphasis.

Though it can be understood. Modern Turkish, and the most used accent “Istanbul Accent” is highly corrupted since the Ottoman era with gazillions of Arabic and Persian words. As far as I know Azeri Turks use the Turkmen dialect of Oguz Turkish, which contains more words of purely Turkic origin.[…]

Kozan Soykal:

They are the same language with some differences in how words are used. For example, Azerbaijani verb for (a plane) landing is the Turkish verb for (a plane) crashing.

The experience is perfectly understandable Turkish, suddenly interrupted by such a different use of a word that breaks that rhythm. Note that this is the same structure as jokes (in any language) – a straight story with a sudden twist at the end.

So Turks find listening to Azerbaijani fun – it’s sounds like an endless stream of jokes. That it’s not intended to be so makes if even funnier.

Tolga Han:

It never sound to me funny.

Turkish people are very egocentric about this issue. They are laughing when an Azerbaijani saying ‘Qapı'(door) to football target , but they dont realize they are calling the same thing ‘Kale’(castle).

Or they are get angry when an AZE call to bus a ‘Maşın’. They are grumbling that about the Russian influence on the Azerbaijani Turkish. But they dont think they called it ‘Otobüs’ . It is completly from French.

Those are just the top three responses; there are 21 so far, and it’s a lot of fun to get this kind of impressionistic picture of how people react to a closely related language. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Emily Monaco writes for the always interesting Atlas Obscura about Why Menu Translations Go Terribly Wrong:

When I first came to Paris, I was confronted with a strange problem: I couldn’t understand restaurants’ English menus, even when I knew the French dishes. From “chicken in her juice” to “chicken wok way” and “baba with old rum,” menu translations ran the gamut from slightly-dirty to just plain surreal.

It wasn’t until I became a culinary translator myself that I realized just how hard this job is. I had assumed that laughable menu translations were the result of restaurant managers and chefs (with limited language skills) making mistakes. But even for fluent experts, food and menus are uniquely challenging to translate. (The results can be hilarious: We asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us some of the best mistranslations they’ve seen, and you can admire them in this article’s images.)

She lists some of the obvious problems, then says:

But even someone with a firm grasp of both languages can find themselves stumped when confronted with certain menu items. This is especially true, notes Marrakech-based food and travel writer Amanda Ponzio-Mouttaki, because some food words just “don’t exist in English, or the words that are closest don’t really adequately explain what something is.”

She points to Moroccan mechoui, which, she says, “means slow-roasted sheep, but it’s not roasted in the way that it would be anywhere else.” The same issue arises with the international varieties of fermented dairy: Should it be “strained yogurt cheese” or labneh? Should quark be called a “German fresh cheese”? A similar question was posed in France when kale was reintroduced by Kristen Beddard of the Kale Project in 2012—should servers and menus call it chou plume, a pretty name that means “feathered cabbage,” chou frisé non pommé, a technically correct if lengthy term meaning “curly, non-knobbed cabbage,” or chou kale—an Anglicism that ended up becoming the norm?

A related problem is that food names or terms often have positive associations in one culture, but nowhere else. Cubans love ropa vieja (a shredded beef dish whose name literally translates to “old clothes”), Mexicans enjoy tacos sudados (literally “sweaty tacos”), and Moroccans are all about roasted sheep head. In Croatia, bitter flavors are valued, while in many countries, calling a dish or drink bitter is an insult.

Don’t miss the “three possible translations for the classic French comfort food dish, ile flottante,” and of course don’t miss the images, which have some terrific specimens. I apologize if all this makes you hungry; I’m now jonesing for the ropa vieja of my New York days. (By the way, we discussed some of this stuff back in 2008.) Thanks, Trevor!

Stuck in the Middle: A Bilingual, Multicultural Comic Series by Ru Kuwahata is obvious LH fodder; I particularly like the suggested European responses to “How are you?”: French “It is what it is,” Dutch “I am terrible but such is life,” and Eastern European “We live, we die, so what.” (Obviously, these are not what people actually say but the cartoonist’s version of their general attitude.)