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Another quote from Ford Madox Ford’s Memories and Impressions (see this post). He’s been talking about how the English avoid saying anything that anyone might take offense at, whereas the Germans are constantly saying provocative things in loud voices; he goes on:

Take German philologists. These are formidable people. To set out upon the history of a word is an adventurous and romantic thing. You find it in London or in Gottingen to-day. You chase it back to the days of Chaucer, when knights rode abroad in the land. You cross the Channel with it to the court of Charlemagne at Aix. You go back to Rome and find it in the mouth of Seneca. Socrates utters it in your hearing, then it passes back into prehistoric times, landing you at last in a dim early age among unchronicled peoples, somewhere in the Pamirs, on the roof of the world, at the birth of humanity. Yes, a romantic occupation — but, in a sense, piratical. For why otherwise should a comfortable and agreeable gentleman over a large pot of beer become simply epileptic when one suggests that the word “sooth” may have some connection with the French sus, the perfect participle of savoir, which comes from the Latin scire? Personally I care little about the matter. It is interesting in a mild way, but that is all. But my friend became enraged. He became more enraged than I have ever seen in the case of a learned gentleman. You see, some rival Captain Kidd or some rival Francis Drake had enunciated the theory as to the word “sooth” which I had invented on the spur of the moment.

Funny and clearly LH material. (If you’re curious, sooth is actually from Old English sōth, from the PIE root *es- ‘to be.’)

Cathleen O’Grady writes about a possible result of Brexit that hadn’t occurred to me; after describing a guide called “Misused English words and expressions in EU publications” that details “many of the ways in which European English has gone a bit wibbly” from the point of view of UKanians, she says:

Following Brexit, the UK will no longer be able to call these kinds of shots. In a paper published in the journal World Englishes last week, linguist Marko Modiano speculates about what this is likely to mean for the future of English in Europe. He argues that the newfound neutrality of English is likely to help it survive Brexit – and that without the UK’s clout in Europe, European English will be free to do what language does best: change. […]

Modiano argues that Brexit will give English a surprise boost, by making it the neutral option. Without the UK’s 60 million native English speakers, the five million native speakers from Ireland and Malta will make up only 1% of the total EU population. This will leave almost everyone else who speaks English in Europe on an equal footing, all using their second language to communicate. Even after losing the UK’s native speakers, the 38% (and growing) who speak English as a second language will make it the most widely-spoken language in Europe: German sits at around 27%, including native and second-language speakers, and French at around 24%. […]

The major change, argues Modiano, is that the UK will no longer have a say in how English is used. There will be no chance to exert the kind of influence exhibited by Gardner’s document, pulling the continent’s use of English towards a British English standard. This will leave European English free to drift towards US or Commonwealth conventions, and to develop features of vocabulary and grammar that are perfectly well-understood by other Europeans speaking English as a second language – for example, entrenching the use of structures like “I am coming from Spain,” rather than “I come from Spain”.

There’s a precedent for this kind of language change: the varieties of English spoken around the world in the ex-colonies. Much as standard English has changed its own rules over time (“thou” fell out of vogue quite a while ago, while the grip of “shall” is weakening swiftly), Malaysian English, Indian English, and a multitude of other varieties have developed their own grammars and norms. These varieties aren’t the result of speakers learning British English incompletely—their learning of English is aimed at an entirely different target, and English is often one of their native languages.

I don’t imagine there will be drastic changes, but it’s still interesting to think about. Thanks, Trevor!

I realize it’s just a draft, and may never become a reality (a point made by cliff arroyo in this recent Log thread: “The switch from cyrillic to latin seems to be one of these issues that shows up every few years and gets some press and then disappears”), but this Kazinform report includes a paragraph that baffles me:

The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks (glyphs added to a letter, or basic glyphs) as they suppose that because of rare use, the specific sounds of the Kazakh language can disappear.

Any ideas as to what they might be trying to say?

Alice Bonasio writes for Quartz about an apparent paradox:

Yet at the same time as teens in the UK are turning their back on traditionally valued European languages such as German, French, and Spanish, Britain is experiencing a strong surge of interest in local idioms. There has been an uptake of kids learning languages such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic over the past five years, with 33% more students choosing to studying these languages in 2017 than five years ago.

She says “A recent poll of 15 countries showed a common language is the most important factor in defining a nation’s identity” and talks about the Inuit community of Nunavik, which “has the highest rate of Inuktitut speakers amongst all Inuit groups worldwide,” and the surprising flourishing of Basque:

Only a few decades ago, children caught speaking Basque in northern Spain would have been punished at school. But as of 2017, 54% of the region’s population are Basque speakers (pdf in Spanish), and in 2016 52% of university students opted for being taught in Basque instead of Spanish. […]

“There shouldn’t be a conflict between the local and the global, but I find that children who are not taught other languages struggle to grasp the concept that diversity isn’t a threat,” says Mari Tere Ojanguren, the principal of Lauaxeta ikastola, which is considered one of the best schools in Spain. “A person that only comes in contact with one language cannot truly understand other cultures. By the age of four our children are immersed in three different languages. So they can be in Abu Dhabi or New York, and they can understand that others around them are different, and be at ease.”

Nothing particularly new and surprising, but a nice roundup. (The title ignorantly talks about “a local dialect” instead of a minority language, but that’s on whoever writes titles for Quartz — the writer of a piece is rarely responsible for the title that gets slapped on it.)

I’ve posted about Troubadour Books quite a few times (first almost exactly a decade ago; most recently two weeks ago), and I’m here to report on the results of my latest expedition to take advantage of their sale, which is going on through the weekend, and I urge you to visit if you’re in the area — not only are the books inside very reasonably priced and 35% off, but there are many tables of $1 books outside, and there are so many treasures there I barely made it indoors. Here are some of the items of LH interest:

Catherine the Great: A Short History, by Isabel de Madariaga
Современная русская пунктуация, by Анна Николаевна Наумович
The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union, by Avraham Shifrin
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi
Tolstoy’s ‘War And Peace’: A Study, by R. F. Christian
Major Lyricists of the Northern Sung: 960-1126 A.D., by James J. Y. Liu
Mandarin Chinese: An Introduction, by Mobo C. F. Gao
All Russia Is Burning!: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia, by Cathy A. Frierson
Molotov’s Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History, by Rachel Polonsky

I was particularly excited to find the first (1973) edition of Endymion Wilkinson’s The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide (now Chinese History: A New Manual), because just the day before I had read an encomium to him and his work at the Log, and the Wikipedia article intrigued me so much I was on the lookout. As I said in my comment in response, “Way out of date, I know, and I hope to get a more recent version someday, but I’m only an amateur, so for the moment I’m happy with this!”

Mark Herman has a short post yoking together two very different cultural artifacts involving translators, the movie Arrival (see this LH post from last year) and Arno Schmidt’s 1970 novel Zettels Traum (not “Zettel’s,” as Herman has it [see comments]); I’m going to reproduce the entirety of his discussion of the latter, which I find fascinating, and ask if any of my readers is familiar with the novel:

Bottom’s Dream, despite a title taken from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the use of Bottom’s Dream as a central metaphor, is about German translators of Edgar Allen Poe, not Shakespeare, and, despite its length, the entire book takes place during a 25-hour period. Here is translator John E. Woods’ explanation of the title:

In the classic Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare, “Bottom, the weaver” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is given the name “Zettel,” which is the warp of a fabric. And it is of course Bottom’s dream which is a central metaphor of the novel. Lost again is a pun, for a Zettel is also a small slip of paper, especially one used to jot something down on; Schmidt used thousands of such slips of notepaper to construct his later novels, by arranging them in large homemade file-boxes. Also lost, at least at first for the English speaker, is the fact that in German your Po is your “bottom,” and after all it is a novel about Edgar Allan Poe. As I [have] said … translation is an impossibility.

In the same interview, Woods discusses translating Arno Schmidt in particular:

Arno Schmidt is in one sense just another case of impossibility. The density of his prose is sui generis, even in German, which can be intimidatingly dense. Then there’s the word play, the dance of literary references, the Rabelaisian humor, all packed into what I like to think of as “fairy tales for adults.” So, what does a translator do? He puts on his fool’s cap and plays and dances and hopes he amuses.

In short, for works like Zettel’s Traum, an unfunny translation is an unsuccessful translation.

Thanks, Trevor!

I’ve posted a number of times about the Dictionary of American Regional English (e.g., on its completion and on the Fieldwork Recordings); now, sadly, I must write about the shutdown of the entire project, as reported by one of LH’s favorite lexicographers, Jesse Sheidlower, for the New Yorker. After introducing DARE and describing its many excellences (William Safire called it “the most exciting new linguistic project in the twentieth century”), Sheidlower gets to the bad news:

DARE was primarily supported by grants, especially from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In recent years, small individual donations played an increasing role in the project’s funding. The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to “Z.” The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize. Squeaking by on royalties and individual gifts, and with several editors working on a volunteer basis, the dictionary was able to publish some quarterly updates, but by the beginning of the coming year, it will be necessary to lay off the staff.

Now the hundreds of boxes of files are going into the University of Wisconsin archives, after some last-minute work to insure that the most important records are indexed properly. Editors will try to keep some visibility—continuing to do radio interviews, for example—but this will also be on a mostly volunteer basis.

DARE will probably prove to be the last major dictionary based on personal fieldwork, as more modern techniques take over. By creating an interesting survey and getting people to complete it online, you can get a lot of data. This was the method of the Harvard Dialect Survey, a set of a hundred and twenty-two questions created by the linguist Bert Vaux, who is now at Cambridge University. When the Times created an interactive quiz based on the data, in 2013, its story “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” became its highest-traffic piece of the entire year, despite being published on December 21st—demonstrating just how fascinated people remain about their local speech.

And instead of any method of studying the speech of individuals, the most modern thing of all is corpus analysis: taking billions of words of text—from geotagged posts on Twitter, from online regional newspapers—and running them through elaborate statistical processing. The computational linguist Jack Grieve uses this approach to generate maps revealing truths about language that no one had—or, for that matter, could have—noticed before. This is probably the direction that future research will take; it’s relatively inexpensive and yields fascinating results that dramatically add to our understanding of language. But one can’t help feeling that it’s a shame to take the words out of the mouths of their speakers.

A shame indeed. But at least we have the dictionary itself.

Frequent commenter Y sent me a rare book dealer’s catalog (it’s #24, downloadable as a pdf from here if you’re curious — it’s got all sorts of great stuff, including an I.W.W. union shop sign and the 1920 First American Edition of Lenin’s Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i renegat Kautskii [Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky], “printed in an edition of about 1,000 copies and distributed by Max Maisel … After the death of Maisel the entire stock of his company was sold to a prominent Russian bookdealer Nicholas Martianoff, a former associate and one time secretary of Kerensky. Martianoff considered all radical literature held at Maisel’s shop wothless and sent it to a paper mill in New York”); he thought I’d be interested because it includes a large collection of obscure and very obscure artificial language publications (on pp. 25-32). I very much enjoyed looking through it, and had my curiosity piqued when Y added: “About the artificial languages, I’m sorry that I probably never will see performed Keilty’s ‘Three Short Plays in Prashad’, and nor will anyone else. I looked up him and his language, and it’s a fine oddball San-Francisco-in-the-’70s story.” Naturally, I googled, and I hereby present to you the account of the language, courtesy of the KPFA Pacifica Radio Program Guide for November 1979 (apparently the only source for the story):

On January 27, 1978, James Keilty died. City planner, linguist, author, Utopian, and long-time supporter of KPFA, Mr. Keilty died of cancer a scant ten days after the diagnosis. […]

I first knew James Keilty in the fall of ’49. A friend had given me his address and told me he was someone who really knew San Francisco and would introduce the city to me. He did. He made the city fascinating with his amazing insights. We became fast friends. […] He was a brilliant scholar, spoke several languages fluently, and any number of languages to some degree. In Italian he spoke various dialects. He was writing and translating plays, acting in some, and directing others. […]

He devised a phonetic alphabet with several more sounds represented than the Roman alphabet has, for use in translating Mandarin and Japanese, for example. Then, about 25 years ago, he began to invent a language to go with his alphabet. He translated Rilke into his language, which he called ‘Prashad.’ Then he translated Sophocles. He asked me what classic I felt was the most important in any language. I said, without hesitation, the Tao Teh Ching. He was delighted and immediately decided to translate that into Prashad. He looked at several English versions, but they were so dissimilar that he decided that he must puzzle it out of the Chinese original. First he translated it into English. I hope that can be published someday. One popular version, for example, has a line that goes something like, . . .when the Tao is known, race horses will be used to pull manure carts. In Keilty’s translation, that becomes, “. . .Horses are only used to produce manure.” He assured me that the original said no more nor less than that. Through these translations, the. vocabulary of Prashad had become quite extensive with all the tenses and a sophisticated grammar. So, he began to write the saga of the people who spoke Prashad. It was a consuming, though part-time activity.

When he was about 40, he said he had saved enough and inherited enough to live modestly and do only his own work. I encouraged him to retire and give himself over to his own pursuits on a full time basis. He did, and I’ve no reason to believe that he regretted his act. […] Once in a while he would produce a play. His friends would become actors, and would work very hard to please him. Usually there was only one or two performances. The audiences were often very enthusiastic. Once, he presented three short plays in Prashad using actors who were good linguists and who had actually learned the language in the course of learning their roles.

Prashad has only one word for each thing, not two or more, as in English. In the case of English, two words for the same thing often came about because of combined latin or nordic origins. Gradually, the words took on superlative or pejorative meanings, so that one can say things in English which are either laudatory or insulting without straying from the facts. This lingua-centricity has been central to cultural growth.

But Keilty wanted a language that was naturally honest. The culture he based on his language was Utopian, and his saga of the Prashadsim can be called a Utopian fantasy.

Only one small part of his entire saga has been published, in a science fiction anthology edited by Thomas Disch, The New Improved Sun.

I’ve left out most of the non-language-related stuff, for which you can read the piece in the program (it’s on the left side of p. 7). I’m always fascinated by such obsessives, though I’m glad I don’t have to spend time around them!

Adrienne Raphel reviews Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries for the New Yorker; I’ll quote the start to give you an idea:

One morning in 2001, Kory Stamper, a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster, arrived at work and was given a single word: “take.” She set to work hunting down examples of where the verb form of the word had been used in the wild, from American Literary History to Us Weekly to Craigslist, and organizing these citations by part of speech and usage. Normally, editors will work on several words in a batch. But smaller, more common words are used so often and in so many different ways that a single one can be an incredible headache to revise. As Stamper explains in her recent book, “Word by Word: the Secret Life of Dictionaries,” such words “don’t just have semantically oozy uses that require careful definition, but semantically drippy uses as well. ‘Let’s do dinner’ and ‘let’s do laundry’ are identical syntactically but feature very different semantic meanings of ‘do.’ ” Lexicographers know that when they’ve been assigned a notorious small word—“do,” “run,” “about,” “take”––they’ve arrived.

This was the most ambitious and slippery project Stamper had taken on, and, at times, as she parsed the differences between “take first things first” and “take a shit,” she felt herself “slowly unspooling into idiocy.” It took two weeks to organize the verb form alone into a hundred and seven different senses and sub-senses; after a month, “take” was finally ready for the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. In the world of words, however, spending a month perfecting an entry is nowhere near the extreme. At a conference in 2013, a lexicographer from the Oxford English Dictionary told Stamper that when he revised “run” it took him nine months. Dictionary editors trade word stories the way élite marathoners collect courses. For Emily Brewster, one of Stamper’s colleagues, a career highlight was discovering a previously unrecorded sense for the indefinite article “a”: “used as a function word before a proper noun to distinguish the condition of the referent from a usual, former, or hypothetical condition.” Stamper gives as an example, “With the Angels dispatched in short order, a rested Schilling, a career pitcher 6-1 in the postseason, could start three times if seven games were necessary against the Yankees”: “a rested Schilling” tells us that, in contrast to his current rested state, he is not usually rested, or he had not been rested previously, but now he is. Each lexicographer has stories like this: epiphanies that reflect the evolution of language.

Isn’t that fun? Sounds like a wonderful book. Thanks, Trevor!

I recently ran across the unusual surname Phethean and having no idea of its etymology or even how to pronounce it, I had to do some research. It turns out it’s /ˈfiːðiən/ (FEE-thee-uhn, as in “[I’ll] fee thee an [apple]), and it’s apparently a (very weird) variant of Vivian; Rybakin, my go-to reference for English surnames, gives the other variants Fiddian, Fidgen, Fidgeon, Fithian, Phythian, Videan, and Vivien, and there is actually a dedicated website, Phethean One-Name study, which has a bunch more:

The Phethean One-Name study was established in 2012. I have been researching the PHETHEAN surname for about 20 years. More recently I have been concentrating on tracing the early origins of the surname, including all variants that I am aware of, rather than establishing a definitive family-tree of my own particular spelling of the surname

The registered variants of the name are Fithyan, Phitheon, Phithian, Phythian. Only Phethean, Phythian and Fithyan appear to be represented in England at the present day.

All the variants that I am researching are: Fethion, Fethyan, Fethyon, Fhithyan, Fithan, Fithean, Fitheion, Fitheon, Fithian, Fithion, Fithyan, Fithyon, Fitton, Fytheone, Fythian, Pheathean, Pheathian, Phethean, Phethein, Phetheon, Phethian, Phethion, Phithean, Phitheon, Phithian, Phithion, Phithyan, Phythean, Phytheon, Phythian, Phythion, Phythyan. […]

There are sparse records dating from 1250 – 1450 in various parts of the UK. The definitive spelling Phethean first appears in Tunstall, Staffordshire in 1459 where it was used as a first-name (Phethean of Tunstall) and then is found as a surname (and many derivative spellings) mainly in two locations in Cheshire – Brereton-cum-Smethwick and Warmingham from about 1500-1750. These sites are only about 15 miles from Tunstall but at present I have been unable to link the two locations.

Read more about the history of the name (“The Industrial Revolution lead to migrations of families who were yeoman farmers from the country to the cities. The Phethean line became established in Bolton, Lancashire from the late 1700s”) and frequency (“The surname is rare!”) at the link; I admire the dedication of Mr Stuart Phethean, who created and updates it.