My referrer log has come through again (why did I stop checking it for so long?), and I’ve discovered yet another superb blog: Russian Dinosaur, “A blog mostly about Russian literature and translation issues, as retailed by a small stuffed dinosaur.” The auctorial dinosaur teaches Russian literature, and judging by the lively prose, the insights into the material, and the fact that it “can never resist an obscure, neglected author” (from its post on Mamin-Sibiriak ), its students are lucky to have it. The most recent post is “about three men in three different boats, in three different poems,” the poets being Lermontov, Tyutchev, and Baratynsky, all of whom I love and don’t dip into nearly as often as I should. The first poem, Lermontov’s Парус (“The Sail”), is one of the most famous in Russian literature, and if you’ve read any Russian poetry at all you will recognize it (“Белеет парус одинокой…”); the others were unfamiliar to me, and the connections he draws and the things he points out enhance my appreciation of all of them. A couple of philological points: the Tyutchev poem, Сон на море, includes the word сонм [sonm], which now means ‘huge throng, multitude’ but historically and etymologically means ‘assembly’; you can read a nice compact etymology in Russian here—it comes from the prefix *sъn- ‘with, together’ + *jęti ‘take, bring,’ which exists today only in compounds (e.g., взять). The Old Russian word was съньмъ (related to Czech Church Slavic sinim, Old Czech snem, and Slovak snem), and the interesting thing is that the modern nominative form сонм is generalized from the oblique cases, because by Havlík’s law, in the sequence съньмъ the second syllable is strong and the Russian form should be snem (which would now be snyom) as in Czech and Slovak.
The other point of philological interest is the title of the Baratynsky poem, Пироскаф. This sounds like it should have something to do with feasts (Russian пир), but in fact is an archaic word for ‘steamship’ and is the Russian equivalent of pyroscaphe, from Greek roots meaning ‘fire’ and ‘boat’ (compare pyromaniac and bathyscaphe). The word doesn’t seem to have caught on in English (it’s not in the first edition of the OED), but it was briefly popular in other languages in the early nineteenth century, apparently because of the ship of that name built by Jouffroy d’Abbans in 1783. In his Steamboats: A History of the Early Adventure (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), Ralph T. Ward writes of Jouffroy: “He named the boat Pyroscaphe (fire boat). In the early days of steamboating steam vessels were often called fire boats because of the ‘fire engine’ used aboard them and the fires roaring in the boilers and the clouds of smoke and burning sparks which they produced.”
RUSSIAN DINOSAUR.
DIALECT BLOG.
Another blog new to me, this time courtesy of a mention in Sentence First: Ben Trawick-Smith’s Dialect Blog. Ben is an actor with a serious interest in linguistics; on his FAQ page he says “I became interested in dialects as an actor, then this interest become an obsession all its own. … I have spent over a decade studying dialects intensely. And any time there is a gap in my knowledge, I try to be forthright about this.” He writes about a wide range of subjects; the top few posts on the front page right now are Glide Deletion in the American South, “Dude:” Thoughts on an American Word, Singing in Dialect, and Is the glottal stop bad for you?. In the last, he says with appropriate sternness:
And this is where, methinks, the legacy of class rears its ugly head. Glottal stopping is associated with accents—Cockney, African American Vernacular English, the Bronx—that are stigmatized. I have no doubt that generations of diction coaches and voice professionals were taught that the sound was “ugly” for this very reason. And while few will admit as such, you can still find people, such as prescriptivist language blogger Benjamin Chew, who will openly state the thinking behind this:
If one wishes to be a speaker of elegant English, then one has to avoid glottal stops. The so-called language professionals may disagree and start waxing eloquent about linguistic diversity. I am all for healthy diversity, NOT unhealthy ones, not one that allows incorrect and poor English to run rampant.
One can almost smell the whiff of Twinings wafting from the Edwardian drawing room, can’t one?
One can indeed. I recommend bookmarking and checking regularly.
BOOK CULTURE REVIVES ON MUTANABBI STREET.
A heartening story out of Iraq, by Peter Graff of Reuters:
“We have a saying: Cairo writes. Beirut prints. Baghdad reads,” says Abdul-Wahab Mizher al-Radi, proprietor of the House of Scientific Books, one of countless bookshops crammed along Baghdad’s Mutanabi Street.
Reading books, buying books and discussing books are the defining pleasures of being a Baghdad intellectual, and for generations the life of the mind has orbited around this lane, the booksellers’ market of the Iraqi capital.
Four years ago, in a blow felt deeply by Iraq’s intelligentsia, a car bomb killed 26 people here. Now, the street is again open, guarded and seemingly safe, and jammed every Friday with students, professors and professionals…
Thanks, Eric!
A REVIEW OF FARNSWORTH.
I wrote briefly about Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric here; C. Max Magee of The Millions asked me to expatiate upon it chez lui, and I have done so. You will find a fair number of examples cited there, and I must say I enjoy the title he gave my review.
INGOT.
The etymology of ingot is not absolutely clear; Etymonline echoes the OED with its concise “probably from in– ‘in’ + O.E. goten, pp. of geotan ‘to pour.'” But it seems to be a native Germanic form, and the -t has always been pronounced… except that Spenser writes (The Faerie Queene 2.7.5):
And round about him lay on euery side
Great heapes of gold, that neuer could be spent:
Of which some were rude owre, not purifide
Of Mulcibers deuouring element;
Some others were new driuen, and distent
Into great Ingoes, and to wedges square…
Some editions have “Ingowes” rather than “Ingoes,” but only heavily modernized nineteenth-century versions have the modern spelling. Could it be that he was borrowing a French version? The French is lingot, with an initial article having melded into the word (itself borrowed into Spanish as lingote), but perhaps he got hold of the pre-melded form. Or maybe he just didn’t know how everyone else pronounced it.
A RETURN TO KONGLISH.
Jerome Rothenberg invented ethnopoetics, both word and concept, and his wonderful anthology Technicians of the Sacred
Born in Truro (Cornwall, U. K.) in 1942, he studied Medieval and Modern Languages at The Queen’s College, in the University of Oxford, from 1960 until 1969. In 1969 he joined the monastic Community of Taizé (France), to which he made a Life Commitment at Easter 1974. He came to Korea in May 1980, and since then he has continued to live in Seoul with other Brothers from Taizé. Over that time he has both taught medieval and renaissance English literature and culture at Sogang University and become one of our principal translators of modern Korean literature into English, most notably through his well known translations of the poems and fiction of Ko Un. Naturalized as a Korean citizen in 1994 with the Korean name An Sonjae, he is now emeritus professor at Sogang University, chair-professor at Dankook University, and President of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch.
He writes about “the nature of the foreignness of Korean literature, and the resulting test for the translator,” and has a lot to say; I’ll excerpt one paragraph from the second part:
AHNENKULT.
Another find from my referrer log: Ahnenkult (‘ancestor worship/cult’). The About page says, “This blog is concerned with history, both human and natural, and race in its various senses. Ortu Kan is an Asiatic in the second decade of his life, temporarily in the West but not of it. His people’s language is Altaic (sensu Miller).” Language is not mentioned as a topic, but it comes up frequently, for instance here (Nietzsche: “It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the concept of the subject is least developed) look otherwise “into the world,” and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germanic peoples and the Muslims: the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions”) and here:
Mongols apparently think that certain ethnic traits are innate, not learnt. For example, language! The pure Halh dialect is something so subtle that no one can learn to imitate it very well. The Buryats who have long lost their own dialect would also tell me that when one is old one can no longer control one’s tongue, but finds oneself intuitively slipping back to the Buryat pronunciation. A Chinese erliiz [half-breed], when old, would often pronounce Mongolian badly with a subtle Chinese flavour, so it was claimed.
But whether they involve language or not, many of the posts are fascinating; did you know, for instance, about the Kalmyks at the fall of Paris in 1814? The blog has been going since last May; I hope it continues for a good long time.
Update (Jan. 2024). Well, it lasted another couple of years; the last post was on Jan. 14, 2013, and by mid-2014 the domain had been abandoned.
REAL GRAMMAR.
Every once in a while I remember to check my referrer log and am rewarded by discovering an interesting blog I hadn’t been aware of; such is the case with Barrie England’s Real Grammar. England is “a former British diplomat and an occasional teacher of English to foreign students,” and he has not only a properly descriptive approach to language but a lively way of expressing it; from this post: “Don’t be fooled by these people [The Academy of Contemporary English]. They are not the experts they claim to be. Left to them, English would become a bland and ineffective tool for expressing thought and emotion instead of the vigorous and infinitely varied medium it always has been.” His FAQ begins:
1. What is grammar?
A question perhaps not asked as frequently as it should be. Grammar is all sorts of things to all sorts of people, but if you don’t define it before you start discussing it, then you can expect trouble. Linguists use it to describe how a language allows smaller units of meaning to make words (morphology) and how it allows words to make sentences (syntax). Adult native speakers use their language grammatically most of the time. Many people think that a sentence such as ‘We was robbed’ is ungrammatical because, they say (if they know the relevant grammatical terms), the first person plural of the past tense of ‘be’ is ‘was’. They’re right, but only up to a point. That is certainly the case in the variety of the language called Standard English. It is not the case in some non-standard dialects where we find that ‘was’ is used for all persons and numbers.
And the section “What is correct English?” concludes: “The failure to appreciate that English comes in so many varieties, and can be used for so many different purposes, is at the heart of much unnecessary argument about the language. We should extol, and not malign, its diversity.” Well said, and I’m glad that some foreign students are being taught by someone as sensible as that.
Update (April 2022). Sadly, the blog stopped being updated at the end of 2012 (last post) and stopped being hosted shortly thereafter.
DIALECTS OF NEW JERSEY.
Dave Wilton writes:
A great video on the changing dialects of New Jersey, or at least great in terms of how journalists usually cover linguistic issues. As a native New Jerseyan, this one struck home for me. And bonus points for mention of the Woodstown rodeo. (People generally don’t associate rodeos with New Jersey, but the state has one.)
Any New Jerseyans out there to give further feedback?
SYNTACTIC YOGA.
David Prager Branner and Yuan-Yuan Meng have written a paper called “‘Syntactic Yoga’ in Chinese-English Lexicography” that Zackary Sholem Berger thought I would find interesting, and so I do. Here’s the abstract:
This paper argues that Chinese-English dictionaries should include more thorough part-of-speech notations. Chinese part of speech is recognized to be highly fluid and requires the learner to master what we call ‘syntactic yoga’: the contortion or exchange of one part of speech into another. It is suggested that this pedagogical technique can be applied to great effect in the construction of dictionary entries.
They say “the fact that it is hard to identify Chinese parts of speech does not mean that it is impossible, nor that it is therefore somehow unnecessary,” and conclude:
The need for marking parts of speech in a Chinese-English dictionary is two-fold: From the point of view of Chinese usage, since part of speech can certainly vary in Chinese, part of speech notations are necessary to ensure that the Chinese usage being described is correct. From the point of view of English renderings, since English translations and definitions inevitably vary as Chinese usage varies, part of speech notations for the Chinese are also necessary to distinguish among English translations for varying Chinese usages.
Makes sense to me.
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