languagehat.com

The LH family (me and my wife) are longtime fans of Adam Gopnik (see, e.g., this early post), and of course I was especially delighted to see him address the issue of language and translation in the New Yorker in “Word Magic.” Alas, due to my incurable procrastination, by the time I get around to the piece I want to tell you about, the issue (May 26) is no longer on the stands, but maybe you can find a copy; you can read the start at the link above, here’s a typically sensible and well-written bit about Whorfianism:

A spectre haunts this book, however. It is the spectre of Benjamin Lee Whorf and the theory of linguistic relativism to which he gave his name. Whorf was an amateur American linguist in the first half of the twentieth century who became obsessed with the idea that the system of tenses in the Hopi language gave the Hopi a different view of present, past, and future. (His understanding of Hopi grammar turns out to have been rudimentary.) Whorfianism came to refer to a larger idea derived from this notion — the idea that our language forces us to see the world a certain way, and that different languages impose different world views on their speakers. It’s a powerful idea in the pop imagination. It sounds right when you say it.

Yet “Whorfian” relativism, at least in its strong forms, is one of those ideas that disappear under any kind of scrutiny. After all, if we were truly prisoners of our language, we shouldn’t be able to use it to see its limits clearly, or to enumerate the concepts that it can’t conceive. The ghost of Whorf haunts every page of the “Dictionary of Untranslatables”[…]

My only serious cavil is about his discussion of the well-worn problem of poetry translation near the end; while nothing he says is wrong, he ignores what I consider an essential point, that there are very different kinds of poetry. Poems that place a lot of weight on images and ideas, like Szymborska (whom he cites favorably), come across better than those that rely to a large extent on sound and rhythm; his “Poetry contains as much wisdom as it does word magic” flings itself across this gap in a heroic effort to bridge it, but I don’t think it works. Anyway, it’s a wonderful read, and I urge you all to find a copy by hook or crook. (Also, the book he’s reviewing sounds fascinating; alas, it costs an arm and a leg.)

Update. Since Christopher Culver writes in a comment below, “What an unfortunate surname,” it is only fitting that I link to Gopnik’s new BBC Magazine piece “The curse of a ridiculous name“:

I have a funny name. I know it. Don’t say it isn’t or try to make me feel better about it. I have a funny name. My children and social networkers tell me that. And you out there have even been tweeting about it: “@BBC POV, Gopnik: what kind of name is that? #weirdnames” […]

It’s not just a funny name. It has become, in the Russia from which it originally hails, an almost obscenely derogatory expression.

A gopnik in Russian, and in Russia, is now a drunken hooligan, a small-time lout, a criminal without even the sinister glamour of courage. When Russian people hear my last name, they can barely conceal a snigger of distaste and disgusted laughter. Those thugs who clashed with Polish fans at Euro 2012? All gopniks – small G. And I’m told that it derives from an acronym for public housing, rather than from our family’s Jewish roots, but no difference.

Read the whole thing — trust me, you won’t regret it.

Further update: Michele Berdy on gopniks.

A while back we had a long and interesting thread about the crackpot linguistic theories of N. Y. Marr, which were officially imposed by Stalin for a couple of decades before he officially denounced them. (Marr himself had the good sense to die in 1934, avoiding all sorts of unpleasantness.) The denouncing was done in the 1950 article “Concerning Marxism in Linguistics,” which begins with the pleasingly succinct Q&A “QUESTION: Is it true that language is a superstructure on the base? ANSWER: No, it is not true.” (There have long been allegations that the article was written not by Stalin but by Marr’s longtime critic Arnold Chikobava; I doubt we will ever know, but it’s silly to suppose Stalin was incapable of writing it.) The effect of the article was immediate and severe: everyone hastily backtracked from the now deprecated theory, and actual linguistic science was back in fashion. But I have long wondered why the Great Helmsman made this particular intervention, and I’ve just come across a plausible suggestion by Geoffrey Hosking in his excellent Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (p. 261):

What motivated this abrupt reversal of policy? On this matter no direct evidence exists, but one may hypothesize that the change was a delayed aspect of the move away from a class-based and internationalist approach to the building of socialism toward a Russian cultural and imperial one. Marr’s doctrine had implied that there might ultimately be an international language of the proletariat, generated by cross-fertilization of existing languages but distinct from any of them. Stalin, however, clearly believed by now that the appropriate international proletarian language was and would remain Russian. World socialism was to be an infinitely extended Russian-Soviet empire, at least until the ultimate triumph over imperialism.

Again, we’ll never know, but it makes sense. (And I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the difficult question of what it means to be Russian as opposed to being the citizen of an empire or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; it’s a worthy successor of his Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, which I quoted almost a decade ago.)

Muturzikin.com has “Linguistic maps of Basque Country, Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania.” The About page says:

Who is Muturzikin ?

I wish to stay anonymous online but ”Muturzikiña” is my real nickname. To make it shorter, call me Mutur. […]

About my aim, my language maps display the ethnic and linguistic complexities in some parts of the world. Each language limit or isogloss transcends geographical borders, where appropriate. I am committed to a different, more enlightening approach to cartography and I seek to preserve the integrity of the area in which the language or dialect is spoken, even where this crosses international borders.

I think that the loss of linguistic diversity entails not only the disappearance of a large number of languages — and the cultural and identity loss that accompanies it — it also entails an important reduction of the genetic information which could help us understand the history of languages and the relationships different linguistic communities had in the past.

Linguistic diversity also shows typological information—that is, what is common or different in the structure of languages—and this kind of information helps us understand the nature and functioning of languages. When a language disappears, we also lose information about how different linguistic communities view reality and the most important to me, how their languages shape it.

Yes, that last bit gets a little Sapir-Whorfy, but who cares? Check out those maps! Good for you, Mutur, whoever you are. (And thanks, Paul!)

An e-mail from a PR guy informed me of a PBS video series of definite LH interest:

“Bongo Bongo” is a new series from PBS Digital Studios that brings to life the dynamic meaning of common words in the English language by examining them through the lenses of history, linguistics, and pop culture. Each week’s episode explores the cultural significance of a new word in an entertaining, fast-paced way to help spread an infectious love of language.

It’s a little too entertaining and fast-paced for this sedate codger, but it is fun, host Ethan Fixell seems to know what he’s talking about, and it may be of interest to lots of you out there; check out the jam episode for a sample.

Completely unrelated, but it’s not worth a post of its own and I have to get it off my chest: I saw a reference to “Trias,” looked it up, and discovered it’s an obsolete (?) equivalent of Triassic; the OED (in a century-old entry) says:

Name for the series of strata lying immediately beneath the Jurassic and above the Permian; so called because divisible, where typically developed (as in Germany), into three groups (Keuper, Muschelkalk, and Bunter Sandstein); represented in Britain by the Upper New Red Sandstone and associated formations.

Which means it’s from Greek τριάς ‘the number three,’ which is a d-stem, which means it should be Triadic, not Triassic! Those damn geologists, all rocks and no classics.

The International Dunhuang Project has an enjoyable post about phrasebooks “popular with travellers on the Silk Routes in the first millennium AD”:

For example, Pelliot chinois 5538 is a scroll with a series of phrases in Sanskrit and Khotanese, on the general theme of pilgrimage. Some of the phrases form conversations, like the following:

And where are you going now?
I am going to China.
What business do you have in China?
I’m going to see the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī.
When are you coming back?
I’m going to China, then I’ll return.

The conversations also cover practical matters:

Do you have any provisions for the road?
I do not like my provisions.
I’ll go with one or two horses.

There are more examples and a short bibliography if you want to learn more.

And while we’re on the subject, Christopher Culver has a post on “Guides to little-known languages from the French publisher L’Harmattan”; if you read French and have any interest in little-known languages, you’ll want to bookmark it: “If you are interested in the Finno-Ugrian or Turkic world, you can enjoy Yves Avril’s Parlons komi or Saodat Doniyorova’s Parlons karakalpak. The best (well, usually the only) guides to West African languages are written in French, and L’Harmattan covers this part of the world with such titles as Parlons baoulé (Ivory Coast), Parlons éwé (Togo) and Parlons mooré (Burkina Faso).” (Book links at Culver’s post.)

A few years ago I posted an interview with the great slangographer Jonathon Green; now here, via BBC News (thanks, Paul!), is a list of “slang words and expressions that encapsulate the age in which they were coined.” They include booze (goes back at least to 1532!), dis (goes back to 1906!), groovy (it “began life meaning conservative (‘stuck in a groove’)”), dosh (which “started life around 1850” and probably comes from “doss, a sleep, bed or lodging house, itself rooted in Latin’s dorsus, the back, on which one rests”), and many others; here’s one that was new to me (unsurprisingly, as I am neither young nor a Londoner):

Nang, meaning first-rate, is an example of slang’s current cutting edge, Multi-ethnic London English (MLE). This mix of Jamaican patois, American hip-hop, Cockney classics and the coinages of youthful Londoners has added much to slang’s vocabulary. Nang, imported from the Caribbean where it means ostentation or style and rooted in Mende nyanga, showing off, is one of the better-known examples.

I love slang, and I love explication of it by people who know what they’re talking about.

Time for another excerpt from Hodgson’s book (see previous posts: I, II):

In his book on Dostoevsky’s philosophy of art, Robert Jackson writes, “Perhaps no other writer, except Gogol, experienced more painfully and explored more deeply than Dostoevsky that quest for form which lies at the center of Russia’s national awakening in the first part of the nineteenth century. A militant restlessness in the face of “complacent” naturalism places Dostoevsky outside the classical tradition of Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, and that therefore, perhaps unwillingly, he stands “somewhere on the threshold of that modern revolution in form” which consists in a “breakdown of form.” Literature was an epistemological tool for Dostoevsky, instead of a daguerreotype plate. He understood Gogol’s “shapeless” Pirogov, a character in “Nevsky Prospect,” to be a metaphor for as yet formless negative traits in the Russian character. He experimented with patently inadequate European forms, not so that he might hit upon a combination of techniques which would “mirror” the familiar Nevsky Prospect but because he felt that Russian literature had yet to give form to the psychological and moral reality of his countrymen. In following Gogol’s lead and exploiting the native baroque traditions which resided in the subculture, Dostoevsky drew on a set of literary forms which were appropriate to the peculiarly unwestern aspects of Russian reality. At the same time, however, he manipulated their innately irreverent tendency as a weapon against the inappropriate European forms which had accrued to legitimate Russian prose during a century of Europeanization. (p. 21)

Incidentally, Hodgson said I could link to his website, puteracy.com, with the proviso that it’s almost a decade old and he hasn’t gotten around to doing the updating he’s been planning (to give you a taste: “literacy’s beginnings signal our first tentative steps out of tribal xenophobia toward global linguistic interaction [a gregarious sociability unique to our species]; spurred by material necessity and fostered by mercantile enterprise, this venturing forth from the ancestral hearth was entirely compatible with the essential human impetus, our innate curiosity”).

Ursula Sims-Williams has a post on the Asian and African studies blog of the British Library announcing that they’ve uploaded more than 15,000 images of Persian manuscripts online. I got the news from Victor Mair’s Log post of a couple days ago, but I’ve been to share it until I could access the British Library blog — I’ve been getting 404 errors. Now that I’ve done so, here it is, but be warned that it may vanish behind the “not found” screen again. Be patient.

Also, Mair points out “one of the most amazing items”:

A leaf from the Saddar (‘100 doors’), a popular compilation of 100 rules for Zoroastrians which range from justifying instant death for sodomy to the treatment of good and evil animals, and the avoidance of different forms of pollution. This copy, dated Samvat 1631 (AD 1575), is in Persian language, but transcribed in Avestan (Old Iranian) script, together with a Gujarati translation. (BL IO Islamic 3043, f 137r)

He adds, “There is a nice discussion (in the comments section) of why the interspersed Gujarati translation is upside down,” and his summary is well worth reading.

This is a great site:

Emily Dickinson Archive makes high-resolution images of Dickinson’s surviving manuscripts available in open access, and provides readers with a website through which they can view images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives. This first phase of the EDA includes images for the corpus of poems identified in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998).

I don’t know what I can add to that; if you’re a Dickinson fan, you’ve wanted something like this for a long time. If I weren’t editing a bear of a job, I’d be spending a lot of time there. (Via MetaFilter, where you will find more links.)

A commenter in this Wordorigins thread cited a wonderful essay in the December 1885 issue of Cornhill Magazine called “Superfine English” (pp. 626-635); it begins:

It is the Nemesis of pedantry to be always wrong. Your true prig of a pedant goes immensely out of his way to be vastly more correct than other people, and succeeds in the end in being vastly more ungrammatical, or vastly more illogical, or both at once. The common pronunciation, the common idiom, the common meaning attached to a word, are not nearly good enough or fine enough for him; he must try to get at the original sound, at the strict construction, at the true sense—and he always manages to blunder upon something far worse than the slight error, if error it be, whioh he attempts to avoid in his superfine correctness. There are people so fastidious that instead of saying ‘camelia,’ the form practically sanctified by usage and by Dumas Fils (for even Dumas Fils can sanctify), they must needs say ‘camella,’ a monstrous hybrid, the true but now somewhat pedantic ‘Latin’ name being really ‘camellia.’ There are people so learned that instead of talking about Alfred the Great, like all the rest of us, they must needs talk about Ælfred, and then pronounce the word as though the first half of it had something or other to do with eels, whereas the true Anglo-Saxon sound thus clumsily expressed is simply and solely the common Alfred. There are people so grammatical that they must needs dispute ‘against’ their opponent instead of disputing with him, in complete ignorance of the fact that the word ‘with’ itself means ‘against’ in the early forms of the English language, and still retains that meaning even now in ‘withstand,’ ‘withhold,’ ‘withdraw,’ and half-a-dozen other familiar expressions. To such good people one is tempted to answer, in the immortal words of Dr. Parr to the inquirer who asked that great scholar whether the right pronunciation was Samaria or Samareia, ‘You may thay Thamareia if you like, but Thamaria ith quite good enough for me.’

There’s a great passage about the etymological fallacy (the connection in which it was adduced at Wordorigins):

And this leads us on to a second habit of the microscopic critic, which I venture to describe as the Etymological Fallacy. Your critic happens to know well some one particular language, let us say Greek or Latin; and so far as the words derived from that language are concerned (and so far only) he insists upon every word being rigidly applied in its strict original etymological meaning. He makes no allowance for the natural and beautiful growth of metaphor, and the transference of signification, which must necessarily affect the usage of all words in the course of time; he is aware that the root of ‘mutual’ in Latin implies reciprocal action, and so he objects to the harmless English colloquial expression ‘Our Mutual Friend,’ which the genius of Dickens has stamped so indelibly upon the English language that all the ink of all the pedants will never suffice to wash out the hall-mark. I use the mixed metaphor quite intentionally, because it exactly expresses the utter hopelessness of the efforts of banded pedantry.

I wonder if that’s the origin of the phrase (in its modern sense)? The whole thing is worth a read; [I just wish I knew who had written it — Punch suggests it was the editor of the magazine, who would have been James Payn at this time].

Update. Apparently the author is Grant Allen; see Jan Freeman’s comment below.