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I don’t normally repost things from Language Log, figuring that most Hat readers also check the Log, but this is so bizarre to me I have to bring it to the attention of those who don’t. Lori Levin writes: “Some of my students say ‘will have had gone’ sounds completely normal to them, and some won’t accept it at all.” Mark Liberman, who posted it, adds some examples from the web:

I’m hoping someone will have had gone through a similar situation and will have some good words of advice for you.
A very large percentage of my viewers reading this will have had gone through an experience where they had to go through sending in mail in rebates to get a substantial discount.
If not for your witty remarks i will have had gone insane

Et cetera. This, for me, is far worse than “I’m done work”; it sounds like some bizarre parody of English verbal constructions. And yet for some substantial number of English speakers, it’s perfectly normal. In the comments to the Log post, linguist Andrew Carnie (aka Aindriú Ó Cearnaigh, Anndra Mac a’ Chearnaigh) says:

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“Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know” (pdf) by Rachael Briggs and Daniel Nolan is the most enjoyable philosophy paper I’ve ever read (which is not saying much, but on the other hand is not saying nothing, since I did take a philosophy class or two in college); it’s only two pages, and I can practically guarantee you won’t regret the time spent. (Only technical vocabulary needed: “iff” = “if and only if.”)
Briggs also writes poetry; here (pdf) is a sonnet cycle in which all the rhymes are identical, which comes off better than one would have thought. (Both pdf links via Anatoly.)

That’s the title—somewhat overstated, but effective at grabbing the reader’s attention—of a recent Guardian essay by Rick Gekoski. He mentions a post by Sarah Crown presenting the “most beautiful” bookshops she knows, then continues:

Such a shop is intended to offer an experience so thoroughgoing it might be described as organic, in which the environment is as booky as the books, and one is comprehensively immersed in the pleasures of being and reading.

Sounds great, but it doesn’t work for me, as it so obviously does for Sarah and her many enthusiastic commenters. This may be because I am a book dealer, and my demands on a bookshop are often specialised, but I am also an avid reader, and I buy a hell of a lot of books. And the kind of (both beautiful and useful) bookshop that has been described is frequently, in my experience, exactly the sort of place that I am disappointed, and frequently exasperated, by. (Though I find more of these in America, I can think of a good few examples in the UK as well.)

The reason for my unease is that what is so lovingly created in such settings is not a bookshop, but an idea of a bookshop. It is a sentimental idea, a kind of pastoral often untouched by serious commercial consideration. The kind of bookshop you might find in a Beatrix Potter book, with browsing rabbits. Why bother choosing a great stock when you can provide a great environment? “This is such a lovely shop,” customers (not!) will swoon over their cup of tea, “I just adore it here!” But the purpose of a bookshop is not to make its patrons sigh with pleasure, but to make them buy books.

I agree with him; there’s nothing wrong with a pleasant environment, but in practice “it is largely my experience that the more beautiful the shop, the less tempting the books.” Give me dusty, narrow aisles hard to navigate because of apparently random piles of books, and I’m a happy man. I can sit in a comfortable chair when I get back home. (Thanks, Paul!)

Also, Sashura sent me a link to a BBC Radio 4 show called Wordaholics (“Comedy panel game all about words, hosted by Gyles Brandreth”); I haven’t actually managed to listen to it yet, but I pass along the link for those who might be interested.

Ramachandra Guha has a fine essay in The Caravan reminiscing about his experiences with the Indian Branch of the Oxford University Press, which started out very well:

A British historian once said that being published by the Oxford University Press was like being married to a duchess—the honour was greater than the pleasure. My experience was otherwise. Not long before I began working in their archives, the OUP had published my first book. As scholarly books go, it was a work of art—set, using hot metal type, in an elegant Baskerville by the legendary PK Ghosh of Eastend Printers, Calcutta. The cover was arresting—a photograph by Sanjeev Saith of a Himalayan oak forest cut up by the designer to represent the ‘unquiet woods’ that the book documented. The prose inside, jargon-ridden and solemnly sociological in its original incarnation, had been rendered moderately serviceable by the intense (and inspired) labours of the book’s editor, a young scholar with a PhD in English literature from the University of Cambridge.

To enter the Bombay office of the OUP in 1993 and 1994 was, for me, like entering an ancient club of which I was a privileged new member. The honour was manifest, but so also the pleasure. In the foyer were displayed the works of the best Indian sociologists and historians—André Béteille’s The Idea of Natural Inequality, Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy, Irfan Habib’s An Atlas of the Mughal Empire. Also on display were the works of OUP authors who were not Indian, among them such colossally influential scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Dworkin and HLA Hart. The gentry and literati of Bombay came to this showroom, and I spent some time there myself. But my main work lay upstairs, where, in a locked cupboard, lay the correspondence between a writer whose life I was writing and a publisher who had once dominated the building in which I now sat. […]

A historian’s happiest days are always in the archives. In the case of this now somewhat elderly historian, the days have accumulated into years. Yet of all these days and years, the weeks in the OUP archive in Bombay may have given me the most joy. The letters I found there were, for my purposes, infinitely rewarding; but the real pleasure (and honour) lay elsewhere, in seeing (and sensing) oneself as being part of a great, continuous, scholarly tradition; a freshly-minted OUP author enters a building that stocks the works of the greatest OUP authors to work on the letters of a long-dead OUP author—all for a book that would one day be published by the OUP itself.

It ends with a sad tale of decline which I will allow you to discover for yourself; in between are some wonderful stories and personalities. I object, however, to his calling himself “somewhat elderly”; the man’s just a tad over fifty, for heaven’s sake. (Thanks, Paul!)

Frequent commenter Paul sent me a link to this review by Elli Fischer and Shai Secunda of what sounds like a fascinating Israeli movie, Footnote. An excerpt:

Sitting in the audience is Scholnik’s father, Professor Eliezer Scholnik (perfectly played by Shlomo Bar-Aba), an excruciatingly pedantic and methodical scholar on the faculty of the same university Talmud department as his son, though he is far less prolific, and for that matter, less popular. The peak of his career was his appearance, decades earlier, in a footnote in J. N. Feinstein’s magnum opus, Introduction to the Text of Tannaitic Literature (a riff on the father of modern, critical talmudic research, J.N. Epstein’s two books, Introduction to the Text of the Mishnah and Introduction to Tannaitic Literature). Close-ups of Bar-Aba’s talented, old-school face-acting (he is first and foremost a stage comic) call attention to the senior Scholnik’s palpable discomfort as he sits slumped in a chair, listening enviously as his son pays homage to the father who set him on his course.

But Paul writes: “I find this unusual: ‘Public disinterest in such pedantry is voiced by the TV host Jacky Levy (also perfectly casted, since he plays himself)….’ To me the past tense of cast is cast.” To me as well, and the dictionaries I’ve consulted only give that form, but googling tells me there is uncertainty about it; to the question What is the past tense of the word cast? the answer given at that site is “The past tense form of ‘cast’ would either be ‘cast’ or ‘casted’, depending on how it is used.” So what say you, Varied Reader? Is “casted” simply an occasional mistake, or an up-and-coming alternative? Does it sound OK to you? Do you use it?

Asya Pereltsvaig of Languages Of The World has a post called “Au revoir, mademoiselle!” that starts with the French government’s announcement that the word “mademoiselle” would no longer be used in official documents but quickly goes in a startling direction:

Surnames in Lithuanian end differently depending on whether it’s a man’s surname, a married woman’s or an unmarried woman’s. Men’s surnames typically end in -us, -as, or -ys, as in Paulauskas, Adamkus, Bimbirys. Their sons would inherit the father’s surname, unchanged. However, neither their wives nor their daughters would bear exactly the same name. Thus, the wife of Paulauskas would be named Paulauskiene, but their daughter would be Paulauskaite. Until she marries, of course, at which point she is more likely than not to take her husband’s surname, once again adjusted to reflect her marital status. Let’s say our daughter of Mr. Paulauskas and Mrs. Paulauskiene marries a man whose surname is Adamkus. Her surname will be changed from Paulauskaite to Adamkiene, and their daughter’s surname would be Adamkute (because, just to make things a bit more complicated, the endings used for surnames of unmarried women are somewhat different, depending on surname).

If I ever knew that, I’d forgotten it. Asya goes on to discuss women having to change their first names on marriage in Macedonia and Hungary (is this true?); a thought-provoking post indeed.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Kuzechkin’s novel (see this post), and I thought I’d pass along some more of the interesting tidbits I’ve been noticing in this very enjoyable book. First I should say that my earlier thoughts about the title and its translation are no longer operative and my doubts about the relevance of Peter Pan were entirely misplaced, since it is referred to explicitly and frequently, first on page 84: “Peter Pan is a story too, but everything in it is just like in real life. It had kids who didn’t grow up, too, but all their discipline was supported by the authority of a boss.” [“Питер Пэн” — тоже сказка, но там все как в жизни. Там тоже были дети, которые не старели, но у них вся дисциплина держалась на авторитете вожака.] And the book’s title is taken from a song (quoted on page 76) by the fictional group Plastika, which has a female singer, hence the feminine forms in “Перестала быть ребенком,/ Но уже не стану взрослой./ Никогда не стану взрослой…” [I’m no longer a child,/ but I’m not going to grow up,/ I’ll never grow up…] So the gender of the adjective is not as important as I thought it was, and the proposed translation “Young 4 Ever” seems fine.

I continue to be struck by the number of English words, both borrowings (эмо-кор ’emo-core,’ айпод ‘iPod,’ фаст-фуд ‘fast food,’ кидалтс ‘kidults‘) and actual words in the Roman alphabet (bodycount, reset, “The cake is a lie”). It reminds me of Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat, English larded with Russian borrowings, except that that was, of course, fictional. I can only imagine how this English-infused youth jargon must strike Russians of older generations. It does make it easy on the English-speaking reader, though!

Here’s a paragraph describing a very different style of Russian:

The foreman, Nikita, enchanted Sanya by his manner of speaking, his entirely correct Russian language, by the fact that he never made long pauses between words, didn’t use superfluous garbage like nu, mmm, or vot, and what’s more, never cursed. And his voice was pleasant: not severe but weighty, not loud but clear.

[Десятник Никита завораживал Саню своей манерой говорить, своим исключительно правильным русским языком, тем, что никогда не делал длинных пауз между словами, не использовал сорных “ну”, “эммм”, “вот”, и тем более никогда не ругался. И голос у него был приятный: не строгий, но веский, не громкий, но четкий.]

On page 87, the protagonist, Max, has fun playing with the word сюрприз [syurpriz] ‘surprise’ (a loan from French, not English, going back at least two hundred years): “Sur-prise. A strange word. Surrealistic prize? Maybe. A surprise is an unexpected gift. A gift you were afraid to believe in. An unreal gift. SURreal. And any gift is a sort of PRIZE.” [“Сюрприз. Сюр-приз. Странное же слово, — подумал Максим. — Сюрреалистический приз? Да, пожалуй. Сюрприз — это нежданный подарок. Подарок, в который ты боялся поверить. Нереальный подарок. СЮРреальный. А любой подарок — это своего рода ПРИЗ”.] And here’s a passage (from page 108) full of interesting linguistic stuff (I’ll bold the words that are in the Roman alphabet in the original):

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Frequent commenter Julia D’Onofrio linked to a delightful video on Facebook, and I’m linking it here because it’s the best illustration I’ve seen of the wonderful and maddening diversity of the Spanish language as spoken across its geographical spread. Everyone from Puerto Ricans to Argentines is mocked, not to mention the thetheando inhabitants of the mother country and the hapless Americans the singers, Juan Andrés and Nicolás Ospina, pretend to be at the outset. So without further ado, I present Qué Difícil Es Hablar El Español. I’m pleased to say I understood most of it even though it’s been forty years since I used my (Argentine) Spanish regularly, and I laughed a great deal.

Update. Studiolum has posted the lyrics, with translation, at río Wang.

For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, here‘s Pico Iyer on “The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence”:

I’m using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment. …

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Back in 2007 I posted about “the dismissive exclamation meh”; now, in a new Boston Globe column, Ben Zimmer reports on an exciting new historical discovery:

Yiddish appears to be the ultimate source. I checked with Ben Sadock, a Yiddish expert in New York, and he turned up a tantalizing early example. In the 1928 edition of his Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary, Alexander Harkavy included the word meh (written in the corresponding Hebrew letters) and glossed it as an interjection meaning “be it as it may” and an adjective meaning “so-so.”

Ben discusses the historical development at greater length (and without the distracting use of Mitt Romney as a news tie-in) at this Log post, where you can see the actual Harkavy entry.

Allan Metcalf at Lingua Franca writes about a publication I may just have to shell out for:

This week something rare, old fashioned, scholarly, and entertaining arrived via the U.S. Postal Service. As usual, I’m postponing other tasks until I have read it cover to cover. It’s a journal you’ve probably never heard of: Comments on Etymology. Rare I call it, because the journal has very few subscribers. And old fashioned, because it’s only on paper. It’s not available on the Internet.
For more than four decades, Comments on Etymology has been one of the least known and most enjoyable scholarly journals in the field of linguistics. And it’s the No. 1 source for the study of American slang. […] What makes the journal so entertaining is, first of all, copious quotations from original sources, and second, lively discussions of the evidence, often leading to revised explanations. That’s because, in the words of Editor Gerald Cohen in a recent issue:
“Comments on Etymology … is a series of working papers, a sort of etymological workshop where ideas can be tested and developed (with valuable feedback provided) before being presented formally to the scholarly community.” […]
It’s a rare publication indeed. You’re unlikely to find Comments on Etymology in your university library or on a colleague’s bookshelf. Cohen explains, “The number of subscribers is very low, primarily because I haven’t publicized the publication and have been content to mail the issues to whoever is interested.” But he adds, “If a few new subscribers come along, they will be very welcome.”

It’s $16 for eight issues a year; if you’re interested, send a check to Gerald Cohen at the address given at the link.

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