languagehat.com

This report by Patrick Burgoyne is a year old now, but has only recently come to my attention, and I thought I’d see what you people think (I’m sure those of you who know about typefaces have long been familiar with it):

In what is being billed as one of the largest typeface projects in human history, Google and Monotype have collaborated to create a unifying system that spans more than 100 writing systems, 800 languages, and hundreds of thousands of characters. Some of the languages featured have never been digitised before and have only previously existed as inscriptions on stone or on ancient documents.

The name, Noto, comes from Google’s initial brief to Monotype which was ‘no more tofu’. ‘Tofu’ is the nickname used for the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website is unable to display a particular character because there is no font support for that language. Google’s challenge was to create fonts for all of the 800 languages included in the Unicode Consortium standard for software internationalisation, which includes many little-spoken or so-called ‘dead’ languages, thus eradicating ‘tofu’ from our screens. For each language, Noto includes letters in multiple serif and sans serif styles across up to eight weights, as well as numbers, emoji, symbols and musical notation.

The project involved hundreds of researchers, designers, linguists, cultural experts and project managers around the world. To create the Tibetan characters, Monotype worked with Tibetan monks and Buddhist scholars. Fulani speakers from West Africa have been provided with the first digital alphabet in their language, while there is even a version in Ogham, the Old Irish script used between the first and sixth centuries.

Seems like a good idea, and I like the fact that they handle Fulani and Ogham, but I’m sure there are problems with it, because there are problems with everything.

My wife asked me what the name “Pasadena” meant, so of course I looked it up in Gudde’s California Place Names (a wonderful book — see this 2004 post), and the etymology was so interesting I thought I’d pass it along here:

Pasadena (pas ə dē’ nə) [Los Angeles Co.]. The community was founded in 1874 and called Indiana Colony because the original promoters came from Indiana. When the post office was established in 1875, another name had to be chosen, and rarely have pioneer settlers gone to more trouble to select a name for their town than the good people of Indiana Colony. Hiram Reid’s account of the naming (pp. 338 ff.) sounds more convincing than various other stories: Judge B. S. Eaton, in discussing with another stockholder, Calvin Fletcher, the possibility of finding a suitable Spanish name for the proposed post office, recalled a conversation he had had with Manuel Garfias, the patentee of Rancho San Pascual, on part of which the town was situated. When asked why he had chosen so impractical a place for his house, Garfias replied, “Porque es la llave del Rancho.” Fletcher was disappointed, because “yavvey,” the only word he caught, would never do for a place name. Judge Eaton then translated Garfias’s reply as ‘key of the rancho.’ This was at least a cue to a suitable name. Dr. T. B. Elliott, the president of the Indiana Colony, then took up the idea. He wrote to a friend who was a missionary among the Chippewa Indians in the Mississippi Valley for an Indian version of ‘Key of the Ranch,’ or ‘Entrance to the Upper Part of the Valley’, and received in due course these suggestions: Weoquân Pâ sâ de ná ‘Crown of the Valley’; Gish kâ de ná Pâ sâ de ná ‘Peak of the Valley’; Tape Dâegun Pâ sâ de ná ‘Key of the Valley’; Pe quâ de na Pâ sâ de ná ‘Hill of the Valley’. Since Dr. Elliott could not very well propose the name Tapedaegunpasadena or Weoquanpasadena, he quietly dropped the specific part and submitted to the townspeople the pleasing and euphonious name Pasadena. The interpretation that Pasadena alone means ‘crown of the valley’ has persisted until the present day. As for the original Chippewa word, it can be identified with passadina ‘there is a valley’ (Frederick Baraga, Dictionary of the Otchipwe language [Montreal, 1878]).

The Pasadena in Texas is named after the one in California. Don’t ask me why Dr. Elliott wrote to a missionary in the Mississippi Valley for a suitable name for a place in California, because I have no answer for you.

I was looking through my ancient (corrected edition 1961, Third Printing) copy of Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol when my eye hit upon something that must have puzzled me when I first read the book in college, but of course pretty much everything puzzled me then (ah, youth!), so I moved on and forgot it. Now I thought “I’ll bet the internet will solve this for me,” and sure enough it did. From Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship:

The final chapter, 6, re-creates an exchange between the author and his publisher, Laughlin, “in Utah, sitting in the lounge of an Alpine hotel.” Laughlin is badgering Nabokov to tell the reader what Gogol’s books are about: “I have gone through it carefully, and so has my wife, and we have not found the plots.” Nabokov tells the reader that he tacked on a seven-page chronology, with plot summaries, to placate Laughlin. Clearly he thought Laughlin wouldn’t read the addendum, because he inserted this random sentence into the recitation of Gogol’s life: “Browning’s door is preserved in the library of Wellesley College.” [It is.] The Robert Browning “Easter egg”—computer lingo for a hidden joke—survived the 1959 and 1961 reeditions of Nikolai Gogol, but later vanished from the text.

And an excellent joke it is, though hard on the poor puzzled student. (The diligent ctrl-F’er will find it used in sly homage on this критика page.)

Addendum (Mar. 2024). I was remiss in that final reference to “this критика page” in not noting the author, something I always try to do; the linked piece is Peter Lubin’s “Kickshaws and Motley” (first in the Northwestern TRIQUARTERLY Nabokov issue #17 [Winter 1970], pp. 187-209), of which Nabokov wrote (in his introduction to that issue):

The multicolored inklings offered by Mr. Lubin in his “Kickshaws and Motley” are absolutely dazzling. Such things as his “v ugloo” [Russ. for “in the corner”] in the igloo of the globe [a blend of “glow” and “strobe”] are better than anything I have done in that line. Very beautifully he tracks down to their lairs in Eliot three terms queried by a poor little person in Pale Fire. I greatly admire the definition of tmesis (Type I) as a “semantic petticoat slipped on between the naked noun and its clothing epithet,” as well as Lubin’s “proleptic” tmesis illustrated by Shakespeare’s glow-worm beginning “to pale his ineffectual fire.” And the parody of an interview with N. (though a little more exquisitely iridized than my own replies would have been) is sufficiently convincing to catch readers.

Now, that must have been a satisfying encomium. You can read more about Lubin here.

Benjamin Hennig at Geographical posts about a very nice visualization:

The Glottolog database was used in this month’s cartogram to highlight the geographic distribution of language diversity around the world. The main locations of each entry from the database were used to calculate the density (and diversity) of languages in their spatial distribution. The cartogram therefore shows larger areas where there is a relatively higher diversity of languages. This is also reflected in the differently shaded colours overlaid.

The highest language diversity in the world can be found in Africa and Asia, both with more than 2,000 living tongues. At the other end of the geographic spectrum lies Europe with only around 250 living languages and dialects spoken.

Note that the first map has no labels; scroll down for the one with labels (which you can, as they say, click to embiggen).

Working my way through my stack of TLSs, I’ve reached Dec. 11, 2015, and the letters section included this, which naturally caught my attention:

Sir, — Rachel Bowlby, reviewing Bernard Harrison’s What Is Fiction For? (December 4), says it “feels like a bit of critical bungaloo (that’s 1980s Brighton lingo for the assortment of filler materials used by cowboy builders)”.

The word more correctly is bungaroosh, and it predates the 1980s cowboy builders, being a kind of rubble concrete, made out of lime, gravel, sand, flint and brick fragments, that was used in many of Brighton and Hove’s Regency terraces, with subsequent problems for their modern owners.

“Bungaroosh became synonymous with shoddy workmanship”, says Nigel Richardson in Breakfast in Brighton (1998), calling it “a very Brightonian concept. The word sounded dashing but bogus. By reputation it looked the part but fell to bits.”

Strangely, I don’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary.

GRAHAM CHAINEY
35 The Albemarle, Marine Parade,
Brighton.

You can read more about it at the Wikipedia article (which says “The etymology of the word is unknown, but the first part may derive from the colloquial verb ‘to bung’, meaning to put something somewhere hastily or carelessly”) and in this London Damp Company post (“Bungaroosh is almost exclusively found in Brighton, which is something you should be glad of if you live in London or other parts of Britain”).

In my earlier post about Pomyalovsky’s novel Молотов [Molotov], I wrote that I wanted to post about it before it went off the rails; now that I’ve finished it, I’m happy to report that my fears were groundless and that it never did fall apart as his first one did. It’s not a masterpiece, mind you; that would be a lot to ask from an author in his mid-twenties who had only published one other (short) novel. But it’s a huge leap forward, and had he not died (basically of drink) in 1863, who knows how far he might have gone? Carol Flath, in her perceptive piece on Pomyalovsky in Russian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, calls him “a serious, talented, and original writer,” and I agree. Flath says “Molotov represents a new kind of hero in Russian literature, the raznochinets (a nongentry intellectual), who rises from poverty to take his place among the increasing numbers of white-collar workers in mid-nineteenth century Russia,” and among the many jobs he held in his checkered career (at one point he lists them all) is proofreader, which of course endeared him to me. As a matter of fact, his experiences and outlook on life in general endear him to me; he’s the closest thing to me I think I’ve yet encountered in Russian literature.

The defects of the novel are primarily of construction: Pomyalovsky lurches from the Dorogov family to Molotov and back with no clear motive, and he relies too much on coincidence and eavesdropping (a common problem in fiction of that or any era, of course). But the characters are original and well-drawn, the writing is lively if occasionally repetitive (see the excerpts I translated in the previous post for examples), and he toys so cleverly with the conventions of melodrama (and one’s expectations of how a Russian novel will develop) that he made me laugh out loud at one culminating plot point. This novel definitely deserves translation (I don’t usually recommend translators trim the original, but in this case it might be advisable in places where the author gets carried away with his rhetoric), and I hope it gets one; it sheds light on corners of Russian society you don’t get many chances to see, and it has a clever, likeable, and brave heroine.

One question for my Russian readers: he repeatedly uses the adjective зачаделый (“зачаделое, темнообразное лицо,” “она с отвращением и негодованием оттолкнула от себя зачаделый лик,” etc., always modifying лицо or лик), and not only is it not in any dictionaries (even the Словарь русских народных говоров), it doesn’t seem ever to have been used by any other Russian author. I presume it’s derived from чад ‘fumes,’ but it’s not clear to me what he means by it: ‘smoky-looking,’ maybe? All suggestions will be welcome.

Monica Mark reports:

On Monday, BBC World Service launched a Pidgin service, unveiling a website and radio bulletins that will run entirely in the lingua franca spoken across West Africa.

It’s the BBC’s biggest expansion in 40 years, and means the broadcaster will join the ranks of local stations that already reach audiences of millions through speaking Pidgin — a mashup of English, Portuguese, and a bunch of local languages.

“Pidgin is the language spoken among so many people across West and Central Africa and for the first time we will be connecting with the next generation of speakers. Pidgin is the common thread in the region,” BBC editor Bilkisu Labaran said.

There’s a nice little video featuring the presenters talking about how excited they are (“We don land gidigba!” = We’ve finally arrived!) and a selection of pleased tweets (“Una welcome @BBCAfrica , noting better pass dan say person hear tory for him own language. May your town crier reach every village square!”). Here‘s a related BBC story about Pidgin, with some examples, and here‘s the Pidgin news website (lead story at the moment: “Nigeria: Rats chase President Buhari from office/ After over 100 days of medical vacation, President Muhammadu Buhari still dey work from home because dem say rats don spoil im office”). Good for them!

Michael North does a splendid historical investigation at Guernica of Ezra Pound’s famous slogan; as I said at MetaFilter, where I got the link:

At first I thought smugly “Ha, I’m an old Poundian, I know where he got it,” but it turned out I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did (and I didn’t realize it was Hugh Kenner who called attention to it). And of course fais-le de nouveau means “do it again,” not “make it new,” so, as happened so often with Pound’s slapdash scholarship, an error sheds brilliant light. Here’s a nice bit from the essay:

The most significant fact to emerge from this history, though, is also the most obvious: Make It New was not itself new, nor was it ever meant to be. Given the nature of the novelty implied by the slogan, it is appropriate that it is itself the result of historical recycling. This was a fact that Pound himself always tried to keep in the forefront by using the original Chinese characters and letting his own translation tag along as a perpetual footnote. The complex nature of the new—its debt, even as revolution, to the past, and the way in which new works are often just recombinations of traditional elements—is not just confessed by this practice but insisted on. This is what makes the slogan exemplary of the larger modernist project, that by insisting on the new it brings to the surface all the latent difficulties in what seems such a simple and simplifying concept.

I wrote about a similar phenomenon, also involving Pound and ancient Chinese literature, here.

Manchán Magan writes about “the lost language of Ireland’s landscape”:

Do you understand the sentence: the banbh was hiding out in the clochán from the brothall? Or how about: I took the boreen over the bawn and down the congár through the cluain beyond the esker to fetch some dillisk on the cladach.

The language we use to describe landscape, farming and the natural world in Ireland is changing so fast that a person can be aged to within a few decades by their understanding of a single sentence. Your grandfather would likely know what biolar, caonach and bundún mean; while you probably understand bawn, kesh and crubeen, but your children mightn’t understand any of these. They mightn’t even know what a gandal is, or have ever been chased by a furiously hissing one.

The English spoken in Ireland (Hiberno-English) even 40 years ago was so speckled with residual Irish words that it can appear today like another tongue. Each of us holds fond memories of words our grandparents used that are now largely meaningless. Cróinín always held a particular fondness for me – it means the first run of small autumn salmon; and branar, which refers to a stretch of broken lea. Nowadays, even the English word “lea” is understand by few: in Britain it refers to meadow or arable land, while in Ireland it normally describes land that has been ploughed, or grubbed before seeding. As to what “grubbed” means, well, that’s a whole other story.

If you’re wondering, collop is “the old count for the carrying power of land” (“The grazing of one cow or two yearling heifers or six sheep or twelve goats or six geese and a gander was one collop”), and fíbín is “the running of cattle caused by the sting of a gadfly.” It’s a great read, and it quotes PW Joyce, the great-great-uncle of Trevor Joyce, who sent me the link — thanks, Trevor!

A couple of months ago I reported on Nikolai Pomyalovsky’s Мещанское счастье [Bourgeois happiness]; now I’m on the sequel, Молотов [Molotov]. Forewarned by my earlier experience, I decided to post about this one before it went off the rails; now, halfway through, the plot is about to kick in (a father is going to force his daughter to marry a man she doesn’t love and doesn’t want to marry), so I figure it’s time. Pomyalovsky is excellent in his unique way, but plot is not his forte.

What he’s very good at is observing Russians and their society from an unusual angle and writing about it and them convincingly and entertainingly (in this he resembles Pisemsky). The book begins with a description of a large Petersburg apartment building and its inhabitants: the most important and richest people on the middle floors facing the street, the somewhat less important ones on the middle floors facing the courtyard, the poor but honest on the top floor, and the poor and dishonest (with their connections to nearby Haymarket Square) below street level. In one of the better apartments lives the Dorogov family that is the focus of the novel (along with Molotov, of course). There is a long passage explaining in detail how this comfortable bourgeois family took a century to arrive at its current status, having started with a man making bad shoes and a woman making bad pies; his description of the constant striving to squirrel away every spare kopeck and keep the children profitably occupied until they can be married off reminded me strongly of the recent TV series “Victorian Slum House” (which I highly recommend). What is particularly remarkable here is that he neither condemns nor idealizes any of this; he presents this middle stratum of society (minor bureaucrats, lesser administrators, doctors, the occasional artist or writer) as being just as important and interesting as any other, if mostly limited in their views and ambitions. It’s very refreshing after reading so many stories about aristocrats and serfs; Russian culture in general has been hostile to the petty bourgeoisie.

After that, Pomyalovsky focuses in on Nadya, one of the Dorogov daughters (she was mentioned in the earlier novel as a childhood friend of Molotov’s). She spent years at a boarding school for young ladies that is portrayed with a horrified intimacy that suggests the author had a sister or good friend who had done time in such an institution. The hypocrisy and brutality make the reader ache in sympathy (wealthy girls are treated with kid gloves, of course, while the poor are punished by being put in straitjackets and having to spend prolonged periods of time on beds in the “infirmary”); Nadya rejects it all spiritually but has no desire to be treated like the openly rebellious girls, so she keeps her head down, does her tedious classwork, and waits. Here is a passage from this section (the Russian, available at the link above, begins “Не диво, что Надя встала в стороне от этой жизни”):
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