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Dennis Duncan’s LRB review-essay on Raymond Queneau’s life and career (Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024; archived), formally a review of The Skin of Dreams (Loin de Rueil), translated by Chris Clarke, begins with the language angle:

‘Si tu t’imagines,’ Juliette Gréco sang. ‘If you imagine.’ It was her first time singing in public, on 22 June 1949, at the Boeuf sur le Toit cabaret, the beginning of her seven-decade reign as the first lady of French chanson. Both the venue and the song were selected by Gréco’s unlikely svengali, Jean-Paul Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home on his motorbike. ‘Si tu t’imagines,’ indeed.

But the song isn’t a wish-upon-a-star fantasy. ‘Imagine’, here, is used in its finger-wagging, admonitory sense: you’ve got another think coming if you imagine that … That what? The next line is the song’s best, a sound poetry joke. Over the music-box twinkle, Gréco suddenly glitches, ‘xa va xa va xa’, clicking plosives like the needle skipping on a record, until the line resolves: ‘va durer toujours’. If you want to be boring about it, ‘xa va’ = ‘que ça va’: ‘If you imagine/That this will, that this will, that this/Will last for ever …’ But the poem that Sartre chose, and had set to music, was by Raymond Queneau. And Queneau spells it ‘xa’.

Ten years later, in the summer of 1959, the French edition of Elle magazine reported on a new and virulent linguistic disease sweeping the country. ‘The Zazie phenomenon is ravaging France like an epidemic. In the streets and on the métro, from the mountains to the beaches, we are all “speaking Zazie”.’ That summer, simply everyone was imitating the insouciant, potty-mouthed heroine of Queneau’s latest novel, Zazie dans le métro. ‘Unbearable’, Elle’s columnist mock-harrumphed.

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We’ve had a number of posts on printers’ terms (e.g., Wayzgoose, Printer’s Pie), but this one has leaped to near the top of my list of favorites:

Zwiebelfisch

German

Etymology

Zwiebel (“onion”) +‎ Fisch (“fish”), originally “fish of low quality”, then “low quality, clutter”.

Pronunciation

IPA(key): /ˈt͡sviːbl̩ˌfɪʃ/

Noun

Zwiebelfisch m (strong, genitive Zwiebelfisches or Zwiebelfischs, plural Zwiebelfische)

1. (printing) A character that is by mistake printed in a font different from the rest.
2. misprint

That’s great on so many levels I can only doff my hat in awe. Also, Zwiebel is from Late Latin cēpulla, diminutive of Latin cēpa ‘onion,’ which makes sense but is unexpected. (The Latin word is “A borrowing from an unknown, possibly Anatolian source.”)

Elyse Graham writes for the Princeton Alumni Weekly about the strange fate of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career:

At the start of the 1940s, F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917 was, as the kids say, in his flop era. In the first year of that decade, the total sales for all of Fitzgerald’s books, from This Side of Paradise to The Great Gatsby, were a whopping 72 copies. The amount of scholarly ink spilled on him could fit into a thimble. When Fitzgerald died in December 1940 — of a heart attack, at the age of 44 — the world’s verdict on the author was that he was a tragic figure: a sort of literary sparkler who burned too bright, too young, then fizzled out when his decade did, enjoying great celebrity during the Jazz Age and losing it all in the 1930s when the public had too many worries to care about flappers and champagne.

His early death was all the crueler, critics said, because it came late enough for him to see the collapse of his youthful promise. On his 40th birthday, the New York Post published a profile that depicted him as a washed-up alcoholic who knew his best days were behind him, interesting only as a symbol of the failures of his generation […]

As artists even better than him have done — Mozart is an example — Fitzgerald died in penury. He was living in a girlfriend’s apartment in Los Angeles, drinking too much and scratching up a bare living by writing screenplays. At the time of his fatal heart attack, he was reading an issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Just 30 people came to his funeral. The newspapers covered his death, but the story they told was a tragedy of youthful talent squandered: “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties,” said The New York Times. “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” “Poor Scott,” Ernest Hemingway said of him, and the label stuck. Poor Scott, who died in the worst way an artist can die: too early, but late enough to see himself forgotten.

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Y writes: “From Lameen’s Bluesky I learned of this paper. There was some discussion (or several?) at the blog of the subject of language naming, but this is so extensive and detailed, I thought you might want to have a post on it, rather than just a comment.” I agree, so here’s the post. The paper is “Towards a typology of language names” by Pun Ho Lui; the abstract:

Although language names (i.e. glottonyms) are often mentioned in descriptions of individual languages, the general patterns underlying them are understudied. To narrow the research gap, this study explores four aspects of glottonyms. First, the definition and linguistic properties of endonyms and exonyms are examined. Morphemes meaning ‘our’ and ‘true’ are commonly found in endonyms, while some exonyms have a negative connotation. Second, language markers—items signifying a glottonym—are categorized into lexical and grammatical language markers. Lexical language markers are subsequently classified based on their meanings. Third, glottonyms are classified into 19 types based on their meanings. Some types are further categorized into subtypes. Fourth, the naming motivations of glottonyms are explored, e.g. some glottonyms are used for disambiguating the glottonym meaning from other meanings. Finally, the challenges faced in constructing this typology are discussed.

You can see a more detailed list, with discussion, at Lameen’s post. Here’s a bit I found interesting:

A derogatory exonym may undergo amelioration, i.e. the connotation becomes less negative. Lepcha is derived from the Nepali word(s) lɑ̄pce or lɑ̄pca ‘inarticulate speech’ with a derogatory connotation, but now Lepcha is used without this connotation (Plaisier 2007). There is no known glottonym in which the connotation has undergone pejoration, i.e. the connotations have become (more) negative.

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I recently saw a reference to the Dispilio Tablet, about which I knew nothing, so I thought I’d quote some bits of that Wikipedia article and see if anyone knows more:

The Dispilio tablet is a wooden artefact bearing linear marks, unearthed in 1993 during George Hourmouziadis’s excavations of the Neolithic site of Dispilio in Greece. A single radiocarbon date from the artefact has yielded a radiocarbon age of 6270±38 radiocarbon years, which when calibrated corresponds to the calendar age range of 5324–5079 cal BC (at 95.4% probability). The lakeshore settlement occupied an artificial island near the modern village of Dispilio on Lake Kastoria in Kastoria, Western Macedonia, Greece. […]

The archaeological context of the tablet is not known, as it was found floating on the water that was filling the excavation trench. The tablet itself was partially damaged when it was exposed to the oxygen-rich environment outside of the mud and water in which it was immersed for a long period of time, and so it was placed under conservation. As of 2024, a full academic publication assessing the tablet apparently awaits the completion of conservation work.[citation needed]

Despite the lack of proper context, and the fact that no dedicated scientific paper has ever explained the tablet in detail, various archaeological and unofficial interpretations have surfaced, including the interpretation of the markings as some form of early writing.[citation needed] […]

A large number of sources in popular and social media, and even some scholarly articles, show a wrong image of the tablet, specifically, the modern artistic recreation. This photograph portrays an object which is a modern recreation of how the tablet may have looked like originally. It is an object hanging from the wall in one of the reconstructed house in the open-air museum nearby the archaeological site. The lines on the modern recreation bear little resemblance to the markings on the original artefact.

Sounds like a mess, with plenty of opportunities for ill-informed analysis. I am, of course, inherently skeptical about these things; does anyone think it’s likely to actually represent writing? (Dispilio, incidentally, has final stress: Δισπηλιό; before 1926 it was known as Δουπιάκοι. See this 2002 post for my objections to that sort of renaming.)

The eudæmonist has a splendidly detailed post on what is to me (though not to my wife) an arcane subject:

Dino Buzzati’s short story ‘A Boring Letter’ – included in the recently translated collection The Bewitched Bourgeois – contains part of a knitting pattern for a three-color ‘Peruvian poncho’. The story takes the form of the letter, so the voice of the pattern is thus (hopefully) that of the letter writer, rather than Buzzati’s. The relevant passage is:

So pay attention: You’ll need about two balls of gray (or beige) Shetland wool, another ball of the same wool in black (or tobacco), just over half a ball of the same wool in white (or cream), and number 3 knitting needles. You work in two parts, decreasing one stitch per row for every plain-stitched row. […] For the first part: With the gray wool cast on 262 stitches and knit for ten rows in plain stitch; then, still with the grey wool, knit sixteen rows in purl stitch. […] The twenty-seventh row: * one stitch in white wool, three stitches in gray wool *; repeat from * to * until the end of the row, finishing with one stitch in white wool. The twenty-eighth row: * three stitches in white wool, one stitch in gray wool *, repeat from * to * until the end of the row, finishing with three stitches in white wool. […] The twenty-ninth to the thirty-second rows, in white wool. The thirty-third and thirty-fourth, in grey wool. The thirty-fifth to the thirty-eighth, in black wool. The thirty-ninth and fortieth, in grey wool. The forty-first and forty-second, in white wool. […] Thus you’ll have 226 stitches to a row. The forty-third and forty-fourth rows, in black wool. The forty-fifth… (p. 298)

The omissions leave out the spoilers, of course, but even allowing for the fragmentary nature of the pattern, there is something not quite right here. I will set aside the decrease instructions for the moment (they are odd, but not impossible). What is meant by working in ‘plain stitch’? Generally, plain knitting would refer to stockinette stitch, which is knit on the right side and purled on the wrong side, but that seems a bit odd for starting out, because it would curl up. What is meant by working in ‘purl stitch’? If you purl every row, then you just get garter stitch, but more annoying to knit. It could also mean reverse stockinette, which is purling on the right side and knitting on the wrong side, so some ambiguity remains (and doesn’t solve the mystery of the curling hem).

The row-by-row instructions are unobjectionable. But we can get back to those decrease instructions, because it is odd that thirty-six stitches have been decreased after forty-two rows, when the instructions state that one should decrease one stitch at the end of each ‘plain-stitched’ row. As only ten such rows have (apparently) been worked, this suggests either a relic of the ‘new math’ or some derangement on the part of the letter writer.

Now, Italian is not among the languages in which I have any kind of competence, but in the course of working with knitting patterns, I have had the opportunity to format pattern translations from English into a variety of languages, each of which has their own conventions for how the instructions are presented in terms of vocabulary, abbreviations, level of detail, and designer idiosyncrasy. So although my knowledge of Italian is pretty much nil, it still seemed worthwhile to look up the original […]

Click through for much more arcana, e.g. “‘Knit in two parts’ could also mean ‘worked back and forth’ here, and it is also possible that dritto here is ‘right side’ [of the work] so it could mean one stitch is decreased (although the patterns I’ve seen generally use diminuire/diminuendo rather than calando) at the end of each right-side row […].” I love this kind of thing, even when I have only the foggiest notion of what’s going on.

I ran across a reference to Bourbonnais, Illinois, and wondered how it was pronounced, so I headed to the Wikipedia article, which said “(/bərbəˈneɪ, bərˈboʊnəs/ bər-bə-NAY ,bər-BOH-nəs).” Huh, thought I. Then I scrolled down and found this discouraging tale:

The original French pronunciation of Bourbonnais came to be Anglicized over time to /bərˈboʊnɪs/ bər-BOH-nis. In 1974, a state representative from Bourbonnais introduced a resolution “correcting” the pronunciation of the town’s name to /bɜːrbəˈneɪ/ bur-bə-NAY, closer to the French. In 1976, for the U.S. Bicentennial, the Village Board passed a resolution making “ber-buh-NAY” the official pronunciation.

Why don’t they go all the way and require a uvular fricative for the r? What the hell is wrong with officials, that they can’t just accept the way people say things? I certainly hope there’s a substantial segment of the town’s population that stubbornly hangs on to the pronunciation of their forebears. I personally will make it a point to say /bərˈboʊnɪs/ should I ever have occasion to talk about the place.

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!)