languagehat.com

The Log has a guest post by Stephan Stiller going over the much-discussed issue of language vs. dialect, but doing it with a fresh perspective and sparking an unusually interesting comment thread; I particularly enjoyed this, from frequent LH commenter J.W. Brewer:

We are of course all overlooking the fact that the long-term consequences of the Norman invasion of southern China in 1066 had a massive lexical and syntactic effect on the local topolect that other Sinitic varieties were not exposed to, such that it is unsurprising that modern Cantonese would end up more distant from modern Mandarin than Dutch is from Hochdeutsch.

Myself, I have given up on trying to convince the world to stop using the term “dialect” for forms of speech that from a linguistic point of view are clearly separate languages (notably the regional forms of Chinese and Arabic), but it would be nice if people could be brought to realize that whatever you call them, they are not like Boston English versus Atlanta English.

On another common-linguistic-inheritance front, bradshaw of the future has a typical bradshaw post bringing together far-flung descendents of a single Indo-European ancestral form, in this case queer and truss, both from Proto-Indo-European *twerk. I don’t know whether the blog’s proprietor is unaware of the current sense of that combination of sounds or was simply cheekily ignoring it, but I was as impressed by the lack of notice paid to it as Holmes was by the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

Back in 2007 I posted about the start of the New Linguistic Survey of India, “a 10-year, US$100M project to survey 400+ Indian languages”; now they’re about to release a report on their work, and Chitra Padmanabhan has an interview in The Hindu with the project’s founder, Ganesh Devy:

What was the aim of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India?
[…] Primarily we wanted to find out how many living languages India has. We also wanted to see if language could be made into a fulcrum of micro-planning for development in diverse ecological and cultural contexts, especially among fragile coastal, island, forest and hill communities.
Working with tribals on their languages at Bhasha since 1996 helped me realise that there was no need to unduly privilege scripts — even English does not have a unique script of its own. Hence the thought that most other languages are derivative forms of Scheduled languages disappeared from my mind. I started according smaller languages greater respect. […]
In four years we have documented 780 languages. There are 22 Scheduled languages, 480 tribal and nomadic languages, 80 coastal languages, major regional languages not yet in the 8th Schedule (Tulu, Kutchhi, Mewati), and international languages spoken in India. The survey will be published in 50 volumes by Orient Blackswan in over a year’s time.

There’s lots of interesting stuff in there; good for Devy and his Bhasha Research and Publication Centre for sponsoring such an effort. (Thanks, Dinesh!)

Ben Zimmer sent me a link to The Great Language Game [archived], a creation of Lars Yencken, and as I told Ben, it is officially more fun than a barrel of monkeys. You hear an audio clip of a language being spoken, and you have to choose from a number of possible languages that rises from two to (at least) ten; you have three lives (after the third failed identification, game over); and you are not penalized for taking a long time or listening to the clip repeatedly (you get 50 points for each correct answer, no matter what). I coasted for the first six, and then hit my first “uh-oh, I have no idea” clip. One important thing to know is that always sometimes the same clip is used for a given language, so pay attention even if you’re at a loss as to what it is—after having missed Tigrinya the first time, I got it when it came up again because I recognized the clip. Also, it’s slow, at least on my computer; don’t keep hitting the button impatiently, just relax while it does its thing. My final score: 1300. Enjoy!

I could have sworn I’d posted about this back when it was in the news a few years ago, but apparently not, and better late than never:

The Berliner Lautarchiv British & Commonwealth Recordings is a subset of an audio archive made between 1915 and 1938 by German sound pioneer, Wilhelm Doegen. Enlisting the support of numerous academics, Doegen sought to capture the voices of famous people, and languages, music and songs from all over the world. The collection acquired by the British Library in 2008 comprises 821 digital copies of shellac discs held at the Berliner Lautarchiv at the Humboldt Universität. It includes recordings of British prisoners of war and colonial troops held in captivity on German soil between 1915 and 1918 and later recordings made by Doegen in Berlin and on field trips to Ireland and elsewhere. The content of the recordings varies and includes reading passages, word lists, speeches and recitals of songs and folk tales in a variety of languages and dialects.

Maev Kennedy, in a 2009 Grauniad story, discusses the British POW angle:

“It’s interesting that there seems to have been no attempt to capture what you might call officer class voices; it was clearly the regional accents that he wanted,” said Jonathan Robinson, curator of social science at the library. “Among the most interesting is the voice from Bletchington – now so close to London it’s barely perceived as having an accent, but I think people would be startled to realise what how West Country the accent of rural Oxfordshire sounded at that time.”

He is particularly fond of the many Yorkshire voices: “That was how my own grandparents would have sounded – but it certainly isn’t how I sound now.”

Thanks, Jeff!

Update (Nov. 2025). The original link is dead, so I provided an archived version; this is the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin site of the archive.

Nathan Heller has a good piece in Harvard Magazine about Andrew Hoyem’s Arion Press , “a fine-edition publisher in San Francisco. Some of the books it has produced are set by hand, and all are printed in small editions whose volumes sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Following tradition, Hoyem either melts down the type or returns it to its cases after the run is complete, preserving the volumes’ uniqueness.” I have very mixed feelings about this. Intellectually, I can appreciate the fine-art appeal of such editions, and I can imagine admiring the physicality of Hoyem’s edition of John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror“:

In pursuit of that perfection, …[Hoyem] imagined the printed pages as a physical object shaped by the poem’s imagery and cultural vernacular. He decided the pages would be round, rather than rectangular, with an extra-large 18-inch diameter. He printed the lines of the poem like spokes, radiating outward from the center of the page, with generous space between. He stacked the round pages in a custom-made, film-reel-like canister for each copy, in lieu of binding, and, on each canister’s exterior, fitted a convex mirror in which the viewer would see him- or herself. (“I see in this only the chaos / Of your round mirror which organizes everything.”) He commissioned eight artists, including Jim Dine and Willem de Kooning, to respond to the Parmigianino painting, and interpolated these new works among the wheels of text. Ashbery [’49, Litt.D. ’01] contributed a recording he’d made of the poem, and Hoyem included the LP, with the Parmigianino on its cover.

And he got Helen Vendler to do the critical introduction; they’ve been frequent collaborators ever since. But there’s no getting around the fact that these are luxury objects for rich people, and while in the abstract I have no objection to that—why shouldn’t rich people have works of art, and why shouldn’t publishers get some of the dough?—it rankles my populist soul. Oh, and then there’s this: “When Hoyem and Vendler hoped to produce an edition of Emily Dickinson poems, the Harvard University Press, which still holds rights to Dickinson’s oeuvre and exercises them actively, wouldn’t let them be printed even in a small fine-press edition.” The hell with Harvard! At any rate, I like my late-’70s Viking/Penguin paperback of Ashbery’s poem just fine; here’s a nice bit:

[Read more…]

Matthew Wilkens has a fascinating LARB review of what sounds like a fascinating book: Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History, by Matthew L. Jockers. Wilkens starts by discussing a fashionable topic, the “biases of the canon.” I used to be impatient with it when I saw it primarily as a club with which people were attempting to knock great writers out of their well-deserved places of respect, but the more I read early Russian literature, the more I realize how arbitrary the canon is. There’s no good reason for the oblivion into which writers like Narezhny and Veltman have fallen; they would provide much fodder for scholarship and much enjoyment for the ordinary reader. It’s just the luck of the draw. But he takes it in a very interesting direction:

But changing the canon — or even a proliferation of canons, as literary studies has fractured into a collection of increasingly well-defined subfields — takes us only so far. Readers are finite creatures, capable of making their way through only a tiny fraction of the millions of books published over the centuries. The problem, at this sort of scale, has less to do with canonical selection bias than it does with our inevitable ignorance of nearly everything that has ever been written. […] So how can we know the outlines of literary history without reading an impossible number of books?

One answer would be “to change the way we work, to preserve large-scale claims by ending the singular identification of literary study with close reading.” The important word there is “singular”; he’s not saying we should give up on close reading but that we should supplement it with the kind of quantitative studies featured in the book under review. I won’t try to summarize his summary of the book’s strengths and weaknesses, but I agree with him that we’re going to be hearing a lot more about this approach, and I’m guessing it’s going to produce some exciting results. (Thanks, Paul!)

Natalie Schachar at Tablet has one of those oddball translation stories I love, Yiddish-Speaking Wizards and Dragons Invade the Shire in ‘Der Hobit’“:

For one of his first translation projects after his retirement, Barry Goldstein, a former computer programmer, found an empty table at his local Starbucks in Boston and settled in to work on the “Treebeard” chapter from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But Goldstein soon realized that he needed something more sizable to occupy his time: 95,022 words later, he had translated the entire text of The Hobbit, the prequel to the Ring series, into Yiddish. […]
While Goldstein grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home—his father’s roots were in Lithuania, and his mother was born in Kaminets-Podolsk—he never took to the language as a child. In fact, he vividly remembers the time that he escaped through a window in order to cut class at the Jewish school where he learned Yiddish. Years later though, he started taking Yiddish classes and soon found himself as J.R.R. Tolkien’s foremost and only Yiddish-language translator.

Sales are in the low three figures, but you don’t translate into Yiddish to make the big bucks. Also, Schachar links to Yale UP’s New Yiddish Library Series, a worthy project I hadn’t been familiar with (or had forgotten). Thanks, Paul!

The Bibliothèque russe et slave links to scads of works both in the original and in French translation, and I have bookmarked it with alacrity. Many thanks to Erik McDonald, from whose XIX век post I got the link!

As lagniappe, a MetaFilter post with links to brief videos of the “Avez-vous déjà vu?” series. They’re silly and lots of fun, and you don’t need much French to enjoy them. To get you started: Avez-Vous Déjà Vu ..? – Des Moutons Qui Organisent un Pique-Nique.

Having read Vladimir Odoevsky‘s 1834 novella Княжна Мими [Princess Mimi], a monitory tale of the deleterious effects of high-society gossip, I want to quote a passage from the preface (Предисловие), which occurs over halfway through; Odoevsky says that it is extremely difficult to write novels in Russian for a thousand reasons, and “я упомяну о тысяче первой” [I will mention the thousand-and-first]:

This reason—forgive me!—pardon!—verzeihen Sie!—scusate!—forgive me! [in English]—this reason is that our ladies do not speak Russian!

Hear me out, madam: I am neither student nor schoolboy nor publisher, neither A nor B; I belong to no literary school and do not even believe in the existence of Russian literature; I myself rarely speak Russian, and express myself in French almost without errors; I burr my r’s in the purest Parisian fashion; in short, I am a decent, respectable person—and I tell you that it is both shameful and shameless not to speak in Russian! I know that French is already falling out of use, but what evil spirit has put it into your head to replace it not by Russian but by that damned English, which forces you to rack your tongue, clench your teeth, and shove your lower jaw forward? And then farewell, pretty little mouth with rosy, fresh Slavic lips! We would do better without.

You know as well as I do that powerful passions are at work in society—passions that cause people to turn pale, red, or yellow, to sicken and even die; but in the higher strata of the social atmosphere these passions are expressed by a single phrase, a single word, a conventional word that like the alphabet can neither be translated nor invented. The novelist, whose conscience will not allow him to render an Aleutian conversation in the language of society, must know this fashionable alphabet to perfection, must try to seize these conventional words, because (I repeat) it is impossible to invent them: they are born in the heat of fashionable conversation, and the sense attached to them in that moment remains with them forever. But where will you seize such a word in a Russian drawing room? Here all Russian passions, thoughts, mockery, vexation, the smallest movement of the soul is expressed in ready-made words taken from the rich stock of French, which is so artfully used by French novelists and to which they owe (talent aside) the greater part of their success. How rarely are they forced to have recourse to those long descriptions, explanations, preparations, which are a torment to both writer and reader and which are so easily replaced by a few fashionable phrases understood by one and all! Those who know something of the way a novel is constructed will understand the advantages of this circumstance. Ask our poet [Pushkin], one of the few Russian writers who truly knows the Russian language, why he uses the [English] word vulgar in his verses? This word depicts half the character of a man, half his fate; but in order to express it in Russian, you would have to write two pages of explanations—not very comfortable for the writer or pleasant for the reader! There’s one example for you out of a thousand that could be found. And for that reason I beg my readers to take into account all these circumstances and not put the blame on me if my heroes’ conversation is too bookish for some and not grammatical enough for others.

(Russian below the cut.) He goes on in this vein for a while, ending by saying that if people continue to refuse to speak Russian despite his exhortations, “then I… I… from now on I won’t write a single story for them; let them read A, B, and C.”

I’m not quite sure what he means by “an Aleutian conversation”; I’m guessing it refers to any “uncivilized” or unworldly conversation. Radishchev, in his Путешествие из Петербурга в Москву [Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow] (see this post), says he will paint a picture of “this honest company” so that the reader will feel part of it “хотя бы ты на Алеутских островах бобров ловил” [even if you hunt beavers on the Aleutian Islands], and Vladimir Sollogub in his once-famous 1845 novelette Tarantas [The tarantass] says “смотрят на него как на дикаря Алеутских островов” [they look at him as at a wild man of the Aleutian Islands], so it clearly had currency in that context.

[Read more…]

OUPblog has a Very Short Introductions (VSI) series that “combines a small format with authoritative analysis,” and a recent entry is Challenges of the social life of language by John Edwards, a sociolinguist and editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. He lists ten ideas that he thinks people should be more aware of, and most of them, while presenting no surprises to LH readers (“Languages and dialects are not the same thing,” “There are no ‘incorrect’ or ‘illogical’ dialects,” etc.), are well worth publicizing. I did find #3, “Everyone is (at least) bilingual,” strange; while it’s true that “there are no easy measures by which to differentiate bilingual (or multilingual) speakers from their monolingual counterparts,” the tagline summary is just silly. But one statement in #8 “Linguistic prescriptivism and purism arise from the belief that corrections, improvements, or protections are needed to safeguard languages” is not just wrong but dangerously wrong: “Yet every maker of a dictionary must be a prescriptivist.” Not so! Fortunately, the invaluable Kory Stamper, lexicographer sans peur et sans reproche, has a post called “A Compromise: How To Be A Reasonable Prescriptivist” that addresses this very issue:

Here is why we were all in a lather over those articles [by Joan Acocella; see here]: “descriptivist” is not a slur, and neither is “prescriptivist” a title of honor (or vice versa). They are merely terms that describe two approaches to analyzing language use. They are not linguistic matter and anti-matter, and when brought together, they will not destroy the universe in a cataclysm of bombast and “ain’t”s. Good descriptivism involves a measure of prescriptivism, and good prescriptivism involves a measure of descriptivism. What good is a dictionary that enters “irregardless” but neglects to tell you that it’s not accepted as standard English? And how good is a usage and style guide that merely parrots rules with no careful consideration for the historical record of edited prose, or whether this rule does indeed produce clearer, cleaner writing?

There, isn’t that sensible? As is, of course, the entire post; go read it. (I’ll warn you in advance, though, that the comment thread contains the usual contentious know-nothing remarks from the usual sort of pigheaded commenter, in this case going by the nom de guerre “calitri.”)