languagehat.com

I don’t normally repost stuff from Language Log, but this xkcd is so good I can’t resist. Mark Liberman’s commentary is also important enough to share:

Unfortunately, a plurality of linguists (and the vast majority of psycholinguists) share (at least in their published work) the false belief that an accurate understanding of speech production and perception can be found by using recordings of subjects reading lists of de-contextualized sentences in a laboratory setting. (Though even there, speakers venture far from dictionary pronunciation fields…) Sociolinguists have of course championed the idea that you need to learn from patterns across a variety of speech styles and genres, including especially informal conversation — but the penetration of that idea across sub-disciplines has been surprisingly weak.

And the comments are worth reading; I particularly liked Bob H’s:

A few years ago I was on the line at an ice-cream stand behind an Italian tourist couple, who spoke English fairly well. They placed their order and the vendor asked [zæˈɾɪʔ]. They were completely stumped.

(The vendor was saying “Is that it?”)

Mauro Oubel sent me the WordTips post The Language That Each City Wants to Learn the Most; sure, it’s fluffy clickbait, and there aren’t many surprises (people everywhere sure do want to study English!), but there are some interesting tidbits:

Meanwhile, in Canberra, Australia, locals are learning Japanese the most. At the beginning of the 21st century, around one in 10 Australian school students were studying Japanese. Japanese comes top in Singapore, too, where one in two adults have watched anime, a popular Japanese animation style. […] In 13 other cities, Japanese comes top, one of the most in-demand languages by U.S. employers. Honolulu in Hawaii is one such city where locals may be learning the language to better communicate with the city’s large Japanese-American community or because it is part of their heritage. […]

London continues the trend of Spanish being the most learned language, with 29.25% of locals learning the language on Conversation Exchange. Spain is the UK’s number one vacation destination, so perhaps locals of the UK capital are leveling up their lingo for their next holiday.

Unrelated, but I recently discovered the term occhiolism, “The awareness of the small scope of one’s own perspective and the way it limits one’s ability to fully understand the world”:

Coined by American author and neologist John Koenig, creator of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, from Italian occhiolino (“little eye”), the name given by inventor Galileo to a prototype microscope in the early 1600s.

I’m not normally a fan of invented words, but I like this one, which represents a concept important to me. Good for Koenig!

A correspondent sent me a pair of soccer-related language stories:

1) Stuart James in The Athletic (NY Times; archived [scroll down past “Manage privacy preferences” popup]) explains that tens of millions of people in South Korea use the expression “Leeds Days” to describe their heyday:

As crazy as it sounds, those two words — “Leeds Days” — are ingrained in the Korean language, all over Instagram and YouTube, and referenced by people who in the vast majority of cases have no interest in football, let alone any knowledge of a club based in Yorkshire, on the other side of the world, or the blond-haired English striker who is inadvertently responsible for the phrase. […]

Sungmo Lee, a football reporter from South Korea, smiles. “In Korea, ‘Leeds Days’ means in your prime, the best ever time,” he says. “It came from the player from Leeds, Alan Smith. He was very good at Leeds but he was not that good at Manchester United, so from that time people started to use that expression. And now it’s used in other areas as well. Even people who don’t know anything about Leeds, they know this expression.” […]

Park In-wook smiles. “Obviously older generations have no idea what that expression means. But quite a lot of people who don’t even watch football, know.” Presumably, though, they won’t know the origin of it? “No,” Park In-wook replies, laughing. “They would have no idea about ‘Leeds’ – it’s just some foreign word to them.”

The Korean phrase is “Lijeu Sijeol” or rijeu sijeol (리즈 시절). There’s lots more, including images, at the link.

2) Liam Kirkaldy, “The unlikely story of how ‘Dundee United’ became an insult in Nigeria” (archived):
[Read more…]

A post by Ben Brumfield says:

Recently, both OpenAI and Google released new multi-modal large language models, where were immediately touted for their ability to transcribe documents. Also last week, I transcribed this document from the Library of Virginia’s collection from the Virginia Revolutionary Conventions. […] How do historians discussing this issue find these documents? Traditionally, they had to be transcribed by humans, which is how I stumbled on this document. Traditional HTR tools like Transkribus’s English Eagle transformer model–and by “traditional”, I mean transformer technology from 18 months ago–produce output like this. It’s not great – the strikethroughs cause some recognition problems, and the insertions really scramble the reading order of the text. […] With the release of ChatGPT4o, we can attempt HTR via a large language model instead of a transformer. I uploaded the document and asked ChatGPT to transcribe it, using TEI to represent the strike-throughs and insertions. […] The Transkribus output is obviously raw, and in need of correction. It looks tentative when you read it in isolation. The ChatGPT output looks much more plausible, and–in my opinion–that plausibility is treacherous.

Interesting stuff, and the images at the link explain his point. Thanks, Leslie!

Wyatt Mason (a favorite of our late compadre jamessal) has a review essay in the latest Harper’s (archived) that focuses on Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu, which has come out in a new edition (see this LH post on a previous one) but goes in various interesting directions. Here’s the start:

Translation is an irresistible subject that better writers would do better to resist. It’s too easy to rhapsodize over, theorize onto, sentimentalize at (pick your preposition). There are very few excellent books on the practice that meaningfully address its rich complexity. My favorite heftier entry is The Craft and Context of Translation, edited by William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck, published in 1961 by the University of Texas Press. The anthology grew out of a symposium on translation held in Austin in 1959, and it features essays by Arrowsmith, Shattuck, Richard Howard, Kenneth Rexroth, and D. S. Carne-Ross.

In his essay, Carne-Ross, who has no Wikipedia page but warrants a bronze statue in the cultural commons, kicks things off by planting a flag, offering up the term transposition as another conception of what translators might do. In his view, transposition is an activity that walks midway between the literal crib—which would seek for every word its exact-ish equivalent in another language, syntax and style in the destination language be damned, subsumed beneath the so-called allegiance to accuracy—and a practice that attends less to the particulars of definition than to the quiddity of the original. Transposition, for Carne-Ross,

occurs when the language of the matter to be translated stands close enough to the language of the translator—in age, idiom, cultural habits and so on—for him to be able to follow the letter with a fair hope of keeping faith with the spirit.

Carne-Ross’s metaphorical phrase “stands close enough” offers an essential, physical conception of the translator’s work: it’s an act of reportage.

I have (somewhere) a copy of The Craft and Context of Translation, which is indeed a fine collection, and D. S. Carne-Ross has long been a familiar name to me — so much so that I was shocked by that “who has no Wikipedia page.” Sure enough, he doesn’t, and there’s not much information on him online, though I did find this rogueclassicism post quoting the Boston Globe obit at length. LibraryThing knows only three books by him, and only a handful of members own them. Ubi sunt… At any rate, Mason talks about Carne-Ross for quite a while, including this snappy quote:

During the war I heard an Italian woman give a long, circumstantial and very dramatic account of an air-raid which had taken place a few days before, and it struck me at the time that this was the raw material out of which the ancient dramatists fashioned the convention of the messenger’s speech. The Anglo-Saxon, in similar circumstances, doesn’t make a speech; he simply swears and tries to put the fire out.

He eventually gets to Weinberger, about whom he has much to say, and you won’t go wrong by reading the whole thing, which is by no means hagiographic (“I couldn’t accuse it of chinoiserie, as Weinberger does of a few of the translations of Wang Wei, but it does at times bring with it a whiff of Deep Thoughts”).

I recently watched Jean Renoir’s 1938 movie La Marseillaise; sandwiched as it is between his masterpieces La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), it inevitably suffers by comparison, but it is a lively and enjoyable view of the French Revolution from below, avoiding the grand spectacles the public expected (the storming of the Bastille is referred to but not shown, and men like Marat and Robespierre are only names bandied about) and therefore a flop when it came out. The most linguistically interesting thing about it is the strong and authentic Marseille accents brandished by the main actors (who are shown making their way north to Paris, spreading not only revolutionary ideas but the titular song), but I confess what drove me to post was the discovery that one of the actresses sported the remarkable name of Nadia Sibirskaïa. Needless to say, I wanted to know more, and when I looked her up I discovered she wasn’t Russian at all — she was born Germaine Lebas, and given a Russian alias by her boyfriend David Kaplan, an émigré from Estonia, who himself took the name Dimitri Kirsanoff, apparently because “the artistic world was strongly attracted by Russian culture at the time.” I wonder if it helped her get roles? It certainly makes her stand out among names like Lefebvre and Larive.

I was reading along rather desultorily in Brigid von Preussen’s LRB review (archived) of Tristram Hunt’s biography of Josiah Wedgwood when I got to a passage on Wedgwood’s use of clay sent back from Australia in the late 1780s to create a medallion which he described as “Hope encouraging Art and Labour under the influence of Peace, to pursue the employment necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement” (you can see an image at the link). Von Preussen goes on to say: “Back at Sydney Cove, Governor Arthur Phillip was delighted to receive his copies of Wedgwood’s medallion, which ‘showed the world that our Welsh clay is capable of receiving an Eligant impression’.” That snapped me to attention: Welsh?! Then I realized, of course, that the colony Phillip was governor of was New South Wales… but was “Welsh” really used like that? The OED entry, revised in 2011, was full of interesting things (1.b. Having the status of a slave or slaves. Obsolete. rare. Only in Old English; 2.b. depreciative. Designating the lineage of a Welsh person, considered to be exaggerated and excessively lengthy. Chiefly in proverbial phrases. Frequently in Welsh pedigree. Obsolete; 4. Welsh coal. Obsolete. rare: 1905 Have you got that ‘Welsh’ trimmed? Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine January 26/2), but there was no hint of any use for NSW. So is this a nonce, perhaps jokey, usage by the governor or is the adjective occasionally used that way, flying below the radar of the OED?

I might add that the OED’s etymology is extraordinarily long, including sentences like:

In the Middle Ages, the Welsh territories consisted of several former kingdoms, subsequently ruled by princes (see prince n. II.6 and the etymological note at that entry); in the 13th cent., Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Gwynedd, established overlordship over all remaining independent parts of Wales and was acknowledged as Prince of Wales by Henry III in 1267 (Treaty of Montgomery).

Michael Lysander Angerer’s “Hebban olla vogala: An Eleventh-Century Link Between Dutch and English Literary History” (Neophilologus, 22 May 2024; Open access) describes an interesting translingual situation:

Abstract

The short eleventh-century lyric Hebban olla vogala is considered the earliest literary text in Dutch. Yet it only survives as a badly faded pen trial, written in England by a monk from the Low Countries. As a result, the exact reading of the text and even the language it was written in remain uncertain. Now, multispectral imaging of the manuscript has made it possible to provide an improved reconstruction of the text. An analysis of this new reading suggests that the scribe deliberately used the similarity between dialects of late Old English and Old Dutch to produce a rhyming verse text that was intelligible in both languages. As a multilingual and translingual poem, Hebban olla vogala must therefore be situated in English as well as Dutch literary history. The scribe’s other pen trials in the same manuscript demonstrate an interest in different Latin verse forms, indicating that Hebban olla vogala may also be a literary experiment. In exploiting the mutual intelligibility of Old Dutch and Old English, the poem points to an easily overlooked current of influence on late Old English and early Middle English literature. While this is hard to trace due to the similarities between the two languages, Dutch emerges as another potential influence, alongside Anglo-Norman French, on the development of rhyming verse in English after the Norman Conquest. In this way, Hebban olla vogala can be seen not only as a monument of Dutch literary history, but also as a testament to its interaction with English literature.

I got this from a Facebook post where a commenter took issue with the conclusions of the article, but I can’t find it now. At any rate, if you’re wondering about the title, “Hebban olla uogala nestas hagunnan” means ‘all the birds have begun nests.’

Another gem from Laudator Temporis Acti:

Augustine, Sermons 167.4 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 910; tr. Edmund Hill):

There is a well-known Punic proverb, which I will of course quote to you in Latin, because you don’t all know Punic. It’s an old Punic proverb: “Pestilence is begging for a penny; give it two, and let it take itself off.”

Proverbium notum est punicum, quod quidem latine vobis dicam, quia punice non omnes nostis. Punicum enim proverbium est antiquum: Nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da, et ducat se.

Cf. Ps-Augustine, Sermons 111.6 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 39, col. 1966):

pestilentia ante ostium venit et nummum quaerit; duos illi da, et ducat se.

W. Wehle, “Punisches Sprichwort bei Augustin,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 17 (1862) 638, emends Augustine, Sermons 167.4 as follows:

unum nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da et ducet se.

Veselin Čajkanovič, “Ein punisches Sprichwort bei Augustin,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 13.10 (October, 1910) 436-437, argues in favor of Wehle’s emendation.

H.J. Rose, “The Folklore of Saint Augustine,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 133 (Lent Term, 1926) 5-21 (at 11, footnote omitted):

[O]n one occasion he borrows a Punic proverb, which I confess I cannot explain, and would be obliged if anyone could tell me exactly what it means. He translates it, nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da et ducat se.

Click through for Michael G. Cox’s attempt to reconstruct the proverb; I like and agree with Rose’s “which I confess I cannot explain, and would be obliged if anyone could tell me exactly what it means.”

From Terrible Maps, “People’s reaction when you try speaking their language”: Facebook, X-Twitter, Reddit. I can’t say they’re wrong; I myself have had exactly that reaction from Russians (“why would you put yourself through this?”). Thanks, Songdog!