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A couple of opportunities, of different sorts:

1) Megan L. Risdal says:

I’ve been working on a research project for a while now with a former professor and we received IRB approval yesterday to launch our survey of language attitudes, grammaticality judgments, and personality factors. So if you’re reading this and you have a few minutes to spare, I’d love for you to take our survey. We are hoping to capture a large, diverse demographic so we’re disseminating our survey far and wide.

Go to the link for her link.

2) The International Translation Center, under the auspices of Cardinal Points (see this LH post), is dedicating its annual contest to Marina Tsvetaeva: “The First Prize is a compass and $300 (US). The shortlisted translations will be published in both Cardinal Points and Стороны Света journals, as well as on the RT-Russiapedia website.” See that last link for submission guidelines, and good luck!

Edward Luttwak has a review of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Iliad that disposes briskly of the ostensible subject (“Mitchell took it on himself to produce and circulate an Iliad that is improperly abridged, indeed mutilated”) but has a number of things to say about the question he is really interested in: why is the Iliad so lastingly popular, considerably more so than its opposite number (“for all its well-remembered adventures and faster pace, the Odyssey has always been outsold – out of 590 Homer papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt at the last count, 454 preserve bits of the Iliad“). I’d like to present here a passage with some fascinating tidbits about availability in unexpected countries:

The only Chinese Homer used to be Donghua Fu’s 1929 version of the Odyssey (Ao-de-sai) published in Changsha in 1929, but that renegade engineer and pioneering Chinese grammarian translated an English text. To translate Homer once is inevitable treason, but twice? Things are far better now that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the study of ancient Greek and Latin at its Institute of Foreign Literature. Luo Niansheng, once its most distinguished classicist, who studied in the United States and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens before the Second World War, died in 1990 while translating the Iliad. His version was completed by Wilson Wong, who learned his Greek at Moscow State University in the 1960s, and who went on to translate the Odyssey as well, in verse form. Until then, China’s only translation from the Greek had been in prose, by the celebrated Yang Xianyi, who with his wife, Gladys Taylor, translated many Chinese classics into English as he lived through the hellish vicissitudes of China from 1940 till his death in 2009, including his and his wife’s separate imprisonment. Wong and Niansheng, who also translated Aeschylus’ tragedies, propelled the first Chinese-Ancient Greek dictionary, published in 2004. By then, another member of the Institute, Zhong Mei Chen, who studied Homeric Greek at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University after a spell at Brigham Young University in Utah, had published poetical new translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The Luo Niansheng/Wilson Wong Iliad is on sale online, with a handsome Zeus on the cover, for just 19.60 yuan, or $3.10 at the skewed exchange rate. By contrast, writing in Al-Ahram’s English edition in 2004, Youssef Rakha complained that Ahmed Etman’s new prose translation of the Iliad into Arabic was ‘unaffordably priced at LE250’ or $41.44, although he acknowledged that Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture was publishing a presumably much cheaper paperback edition of Suleyman al-Boustani’s pioneering 1904 verse translation of both Homers. Etman – a professor of classics at Cairo University and chairman of the Egyptian Society of Graeco-Roman Studies, as well as a talented playwright – was quoted in the article explaining why Homer was not translated into Arabic until 1904, and then by the Maronite Catholic al-Boustani, even though his writings were ubiquitous in the Greek-speaking lands that came under Arab rule in the seventh century: ‘Homer is all mythology,’ Etman says, ‘his numerous divinities alone would have been all too obviously incompatible with the Muslim creed. Early Arab authors were too concerned with religion to consider promoting such mythology, however familiar they might have been with Homer and however much they might have admired him.’

(Thanks, Paul!)

My wife and I have been enjoying a DVD of the delightful British detective series Midsomer Murders (thanks, Eric!), and the episode we watched last night, “Blood Will Out,” taught me a new word, didicoi. It’s apparently a purely U.K. term, because none of my U.S. dictionaries have it, not even the imposing Webster’s Third New International, but the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has it: “didicoi … a Gypsy or other nomadic person. Origin C19: perh. an alt. of Romany dik akei ‘look here’.” The etymology doesn’t look very convincing on the face of it, but after all they do say “perhaps,” and it’s often hard to figure out where such dialect terms come from. At any rate, I was wondering if my non-Yank readers are familiar with it, and if so whether it has a derogatory connotation or is a reasonably neutral term. It’s certainly an enjoyable word to say.

We were listening to the radio this evening and a woman was being interviewed about a doughnut recipe that involved arrowroot. The interviewer asked jovially “So is it the root of the arrow, then?” and they had a good laugh; I, of course, headed for the dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary had a particularly good “word history” sidebar, which I will now pass on to you:

The arrowroot is just one of many plants that the European settlers and explorers discovered in the New World. The Arawak, a people who formerly lived on the Caribbean islands and continue to inhabit certain regions of Guiana, named this plant aru-aru, meaning “meal of meals,” so called because they thought very highly of the starchy, nutritious meal made from the arrowroot. The plant also had medicinal value because its tubers could be used to draw poison from wounds inflicted by poison arrows. The medicinal application of the roots provided the impetus for English speakers to remake aru-aru into arrowroot, first recorded in English in 1696. Folk etymology—the process by which an unfamiliar element in a word is changed to resemble a more familiar word, often one that is semantically associated with the word being refashioned—has triumphed once again, giving us arrowroot instead of the direct borrowing of aru-aru.

So it’s like “sparrowgrass” for asparagus, except that it’s become the normal term. Who’d have guessed?
Update. Ian Preston, in the first comment, links to the relevant section in William C. Sturtevant’s “History and Ethnography of Some West Indian Starches” (in The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals, ed. Peter Ucko and G. Dimbleby, Chicago: Aldine, 1969), which pretty convincingly demolishes the aru-aru theory: “According to Barham, a Jamaica physician writing before 1711, the plant Sloane labelled Canna Indica was called ‘arrow root’ because it was first known as an Indian antidote for poisoned arrow wounds, for which the juice was taken internally and the bruised root was used as a poultice on the wound.” Sturtevant’s conclusion:

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My wife and I are as hooked on Downton Abbey as everyone else (in fact, we just got the DVDs of the first two seasons so we can see the original U.K. versions and watch them whenever we want), so I’ve been interested to see the recent spate of investigations into the language used. Ben Zimmer has a post at Visual Thesaurus listing “lines that seem a bit questionable” and “assessing their accuracy for the time period”; Ben Schmidt at Sapping Attention (“Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America”) has a post with a similar goal but a more comprehensive approach:

So I thought: why not just check every single line in the show for historical accuracy? Idioms are the most colorful examples, but the whole language is always changing. There must be dozens of mistakes no one else is noticing. Google has digitized so much of written language that I don’t have to rely on my ear to find what sounds wrong; a computer can do that far faster and better. So I found some copies of the Downton Abbey scripts online, and fed every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English Language, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.

He finds some “egregious, howling mistakes,” and the detailed discussion is quite fascinating. Finally, Mark Liberman at the Log investigates “Just sayin'”. It’s really very hard to get period dialog right, though that’s no excuse for “logic pills” or “get knotted.”

The Smithsonian has hundreds of the earliest audio recordings ever made, but they have been considered unplayable and nobody knew what was on them. Recently, the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory collaborated to make optical scanners capable of recording the patterns, and some of the results are becoming available. You can get a basic introduction to the situation at the National Museum of American History’s blog: Trilled R’s and the dawn of recorded sound in America, and Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice, and here‘s a YouTube playlist of six Volta Labs recordings; it sends shivers up my spine to hear a voice saying “It’s the eleventh day of March, eighteen hundred and eighty-five” (though the silly-sounding high-pitched trills somewhat ruin the spell). There are many more links at this MetaFilter post, where I learned about the restoration.

Occasional commenter (and gracious hostess) dameragnel has sent me a couple of her favorite off-color Russian expressions; I share them here, along with her remark: “I would love to know if others have heard these and would very much enjoy their comments and additions to the list.” (As they say on Википедия: Внимание! Ненормативная лексика или непристойное изображение!)

1. When things seem to be going from bad to worse:
Как пошло пизде на пропасть, и старцы ебут.
2. As a judgement of a woman; I like this one for its Gogolian syntax:
Ни сиськи, ни письки, ни цвета лица.
3. This one isn’t dirty but interesting in that it is what girls were taught for enticing a man. The instructions are about where to look (the угол, the upper right or the upper left). You can see a version of this in action if you watch Angelina Jolie at a photo op or in an interview:
В угол, на нос, на предмет.

(LH again:) The first includes two of the basic Russian “bad words,” пизда ‘cunt’ and ебать ‘fuck’; one of my favorite expressions involving the first is пизда пизде рознь ‘one cunt isn’t like another,’ used to warn against lumping unlike things together, as a medieval philosopher would say “distinguo.” And the rhythm and tone of the second reminds me of the chorus of Shriekback’s immortal “My Spine (Is the Bassline)“: “No guts! No blood! And no brains at all!”

One of my favorite nonstandard bits of English is the double modal, as exemplified by sentences like “You might should do that.” They are a peripheral part of my dialect thanks to my Ozark ancestors, and while I don’t use them on a daily basis, I delight in tossing them into the mix once in a while; they give me that warm down-home feeling. A few years ago the Log had a post on them (with some followups linked in the “Updates” at the bottom); now they’ve become all the rage in the linguablogosphere (Lingua Franca, Sentence first), thanks to the appearance on the scene of MultiMo, the Database of Multiple Modals, created by Paul Reed and Michael Montgomery of the University of South Carolina. The database “brings together the research and investigations from more than forty years of scholarship, primarily in the Southern United States, Scotland, and Northern England” and “includes almost 2000 examples, nearly all documented MMs, in a manner designed to spur further research using them”; it is accompanied by “a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the published scholarly research” and “a commentary section that provides pertinent comments on MMs from scholars and a variety of other sources either printed or online.” If you want to take part, contact one of the administrators for a username and password. You might could enjoy it.

My wife and I watched a PBS show about raccoons yesterday and were astonished—I had no idea how ubiquitous, resourceful, and rapidly evolving they are, and it seems clear that they’ll wind up taking over the world from us and probably running it better. At any rate, I was pleased that I remembered the Russian word for them, енот [enot, pronounced something like “ye know’t”], and after the show I decided to look up the etymology. Vasmer says “Возм., заимств. через нем. Genettkatze или голл. genetta из франц. genette, исп., порт. ginetta, источником которого является араб. jarnait ‘соболиная кошка’ (i.e., it may be borrowed via German Genettkatze or Dutch genetta from a Romance form deriving from Arabic jarnait). What amused me was the entry in Dahl, who doesn’t usually do much in the way of etymology (Russian below the cut):

small American animal of the bear familly, raccoon, poloskun-bear [medved’-poloskun; poloskun ‘raccoon,’ from poloskat’ ‘rinse,’ poloskat’ ‘splash around, paddle’], Ursus lotor. The first raccoon furs were brought to Saint Petersburg, to the Cabinet [presumably the Kunstkamera], and a Greek named Gennadi was in charge of them; the buyers called them genadievy [“Gennadi’s”], from which the name enot is supposedly derived. But the raccoon civet is called Viverra genetta, and although that’s a completely different creature, isn’t it more to the point to look for a connection here? [Sample sentence:] Raccoon furs are in the most general use among us. In southern Siberia there is a raccoon called locally manal and mangut, which by its description is very similar to the American.

I love that kind of discursive, semi-encyclopedic definition.

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Melissa Wright, a linguist at Birmingham City University, specializes in “the relationship between the phonetic-linguistic details of everyday talk and the interactional structures within which (and through which) that talk is produced”; at her home page, she says of her PD thesis: “I examined the phonetic and interactional organisation of naturally-occurring British and American English conversation. I showed that there are complex and systematic mappings between clicks and interactional structures in talk, a finding which is striking given that clicks have so far been regarded by linguists as functioning only paralinguistically.” Her recent paper “On clicks in English talk-in-interaction” (Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41: 207-229; abstract) has been briefly described in this Scientific American article by Anne Pycha as follows:

Speakers, it turns out, use clicks for a previously overlooked purpose: as a form of verbal punctuation in between thoughts or phrases. Melissa Wright […] recently analyzed click sounds in six large sets of recorded English conversations. She found that speakers used clicks frequently to signal that they were ending one stretch of conversation and shifting to a new one. For example, a speaker might say, “Yeah, that was a great game,” produce a click, then say, “The reason I’m calling is to invite you to dinner tomorrow.”
This pattern, which occurred for both British and American speakers, suggests that clicks have a meaning similar to saying “anyway” or “so.” That is, clicks provide us with a phonetic resource to organize conversations and communicate our intentions to listeners. This finding had previously eluded linguists, whose research often focuses on words and sentences in isolation. Wright was able to uncover the new pattern because she analyzed clicks in the context of complete conversations, suggesting that this method could be important for making new discoveries about the nature of language.

I don’t know if the “new discoveries about the nature of language” thing is from Wright’s paper or added by Pycha to spice things up; it raised my eyebrows, but not as much as the succeeding paragraph about, yes, the origin of language, for which see this exasperated 2003 LH post. (Thanks, Paul!)