languagehat.com

Sounds Familiar? is a new site created by the British Library; according to a Guardian story by John Crace:

Made up of recordings from the 1950s Survey of English Dialects and the 1999 Millennium Memory Bank, Sounds Familiar incorporates more than 600 audio-clips to create a unique sound map of spoken English, past and present. “Some of the oldest recordings are of men and women who were in their 80s in the 1950s,” says Jonnie Robinson, curator of english accents and dialects at the British Library, “so it’s like hearing an echo from the past. We also have a real mix of cultures, regions and generations, which allow us to chart the variations and changes in vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar through time.”…

Language doesn’t always change in the way we might think. Not so long ago some academics argued that estuary English (or non-standard southern English, as linguistics experts prefer to call it) was, thanks to TV shows such as EastEnders, slowly taking over the whole country and that some northern accents – particularly Glaswegian – were being diluted. But Robinson points out that this latest version of the imperialist south has turned out to be a false alarm.

“There is no doubt the London dialect we have come to call estuary has spread out across the south-east,” he says, “but research has shown that northern accents and dialects have withstood its spread. Language is a great deal more robust than we imagine.”…

There are interesting observations about population change, cultural perceptions, and the reasons for the Great Vowel Shift, as well as this sentence: “Academics have noticed that many young women in Yorkshire have changed their vowel sounds in certain words; instead of Cooca Coola, they now say Cerka Curla – simply because they imagine the new accent to be posher.” Cooca Coola? Cerka Curla?? Yes, I realize the r’s are not pronounced, but still, those are some weird pronunciations.

I like the concluding quote (from Clive Upton) very much: “We’re not in the business of preservation. The only language that doesn’t change at all is a dead one.”

There’s also a BBC News article by Joe Campbell; all links are courtesy of Benjamin Zimmer of Language Log—thanks, Ben!

I keep forgetting to mention an incident that happened the other day while my wife and I were waiting in the waiting room (in the immortal words of the Buzzcocks). It was a tiny waiting room, with two chairs across from us and three on our side (one of them strategically placed beneath the receptionist’s window so that it was unusable), and when two women entered and sat opposite us it was impossible not to overhear their conversation. One of them was eighty (she gave her birthdate to the receptionist), the other perhaps in her forties—they were on good terms but didn’t seem to be close friends or relatives (the younger woman said “my husband” rather than mention him by name). There were some striking moments, as when the octogenarian said “They give you last rites in the machine that kills you” (and no, I don’t know what she was talking about), but the one of Languagehat relevance came a little later, when the younger woman was telling a story and the older one interrupted: “You made a mistake.” The younger woman looked puzzled. “You said ‘all them boys.’ It should be those: ‘all those boys.'” “All those boys,” the other repeated obediently, with an air of gratitude, and continued her story.

It was the perfect distillation of prescriptivism, the pure essence. This was not a parent or teacher correcting a child, preparing him or her for the demands of society, nor was it an editor fixing up a bit of wayward prose; there was no rational excuse for it, no clarification of an ambiguous reference or anything else that might fall under the “communication” rubric trotted out by the mavens as they insist on their shibboleths. This was two adults talking as equals, communication was perfect, a story was being told, and yet this woman felt the need to interrupt the storyteller with what from any rational standpoint was a completely gratuitous “correction.” And yet neither party felt it as such; the older woman clearly expected her interlocutor to accept the rebuke without demur, and she was not disappointed. If I could understand exactly what was happening there on both ends, I would have a better handle on what usage griping is all about. But I don’t.

While I’m here, let me apologize for the outage this morning; my domain had expired (warnings were sent to a defunct e-mail address, it’s a long story), and I had some anxious moments before gandi.net, my domain name provider, fixed things, excellent fellows that they are. I was terrified some internet vulture was sitting around just waiting to scoop up my helpless domain and I’d never get it back; I had to contemplate the horrible prospect of Life Without Languagehat. It made me realize how much a part of my life you are, Gentle Readers, in your capacities as charming players of conversational badminton as well as providers of nuggets of elusive fact—and I seek those nuggets as eagerly as my cat Pushkin seeks lost corks and artificial mice, I claw at Google and reference works as assiduously as he claws at the gap under the refrigerator (where such things so often wind up), and I am as grateful to those of you who provide them as Pushkin is to my wife when she fetches the broom, sweeps the handle under the fridge, and pulls out the ardently desired playthings. And if in aught I have given offense, I do heartily repent me. I seem to have lost at least one internet pal of whom I was inordinately fond, owing to some pronunciamento I don’t even remember pronouncing, and I’ve had enough friends and acquaintances drift away in the course of my life not to want to lose more. I grew up arguing with brothers and friends, and self-assured ideamongering is the stuff of lively conversation to me, to be enjoyed as sportier folk enjoy a good game of handball; I tend to forget that when the ball bounces wrong, people can get hurt. If bluff and bluster be a fault, God help the wicked! No, my good readers; banish Kos, banish Wonkette, banish Instapundit: but for sweet Languagehat, kind Languagehat, true Languagehat, valiant Languagehat, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Languagehat, banish not him your company!

A new anthology called The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, edited by Peter Cole, looks to be well worth investigating. Marjorie Perloff’s Bookforum review begins:

In the middle of the tenth century, a young Moroccan Jewish poet named Dunash ben Labrat arrived in the Andalusian city of Cordoba, then ruled by the blue-eyed caliph of Spanish-Basque descent ‘Abd al-Rahmaan III. Dunash had studied in Baghdad, then considered the most spectacular city in the world, with the head of the Babylonian Jewish academy of Sura, Sa’adia ben Yosef al-Fayuumi, a man of great learning, who taught him, among other things, a keen appreciation of Arabic and its notion of fasaaha (radiance, clarity), as well as its importance for the understanding of Hebrew Scripture. Tenth-century Cordoba was a second Baghdad: a sophisticated city, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in relative harmony and Arabic was the dominant language. “By the mid–tenth century,” writes Peter Cole, “Jews, Christians, North-African Berber Muslims, and Christian converts were competing with the Arabs themselves for mastery of that most beautiful of languages, which became both the lingua franca of al-Andalus and the currency of high culture.” Indeed, conditions for the Jews were so favorable that the conversion rate was low: They spoke Arabic, adopted native dress, and worked side by side with their Muslim neighbors. Dunash, settling in Cordoba and adapting the inflections of Arabic poetry to his native Hebrew, declared, “Let Scripture be your Eden . . . and the Arabs’ books your paradise grove.”

She goes on to say that the book “represents poetic scholarship at its best” and quotes a number of short tzvi poems (the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic ghazal). The Princeton UP web page for the book generously provides links not only to the table of contents and introduction but to pdf files of the Hebrew texts (Muslim Spain, Christian Spain & Provence). Thanks for the link, Trevor!

This is a very funny (four-minute) video in which the Norwegians mock the Danish language. In English. Thanks, Kári!

One thing that annoys me in reading Durrell is the invariable insertion of u after q even when the q represents Arabic qāf. This is not unique to him—it exists in many books written about the Middle East before, say, the ’60s—but he’s particularly thoroughgoing about it; for instance, the OED entry for qasida ‘an Arabic or Persian panegyric or elegiac poem or ode’ has a bunch of citations, ranging from 1819 to 1971, but only one with the qu- spelling:

1958 L. DURRELL Balthazar iv. 82 He was delighted to hear some music and listened with emotion to the wild quasidas that the old man sang.

Another example from Balthazar (on the penultimate page, p. 242 of my Dutton edition): “I was terribly upset when Balthazar told me that he had fallen down those stairs at the central Quism and killed himself” (qism ‘part, section’ being an Egyptian term for a police station). I simply don’t understand the rationale. If you want to provide a folksy anglicized version, why not use k? The vast majority of your readers won’t know the difference between Arabic qāf and kāf, and wouldn’t be able to pronounce the qāf correctly anyway, so why not write “kasida” and “kism”? If you want to be scientific and use the q, why on earth toss in that pointless u, which adds only the certainty of mispronunciation?

While I’m at it, there’s an interesting word in a description of the Alexandria harbor in the first chapter of Clea (yes, I’ve reached the last book of the Quartet; the quote is from p. 34 of the Dutton edition): “Framed by the coloured domes there lay feluccas and lateen-rig giassas, wine-caiques, schooners, and brigantines of every shape and size, from all over the Levant.” When I couldn’t find giassa in the OED or Webster’s Third International, I started to worry, but the internet came through again—the Project Gutenberg text of R. Talbot Kelly’s Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt (1916) contains this very illuminating sentence: “These native boats are of several kinds, from the small ‘felucca,’ or open boat used for ferry or pleasure purposes, to the large ‘giassa,’ or cargo boat of the river.” But it will surprise no one to learn that I’m still curious about the word itself. It looks Italian, but it’s not in the Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana or my own dictionaries; it looks like it should be pronounced /jasa/, but Egyptian Arabic does not use the /j/ sound. Any information will be much appreciated.

Update (Jan. 2022). See now the comment below by ktschwarz, who found this OED entry, unrevised since 1933:

gaiassa, n.
Pronunciation: /ɡʌɪˈasə/
Forms: Also 1800s caiash.
Etymology: < Arabic ḳayyāsa.

A high-stemmed vessel with lateen sails used on the Nile for carrying freight.

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has a couple of posts reviewing الأمازيغية – آراء وأمثال (تيبازة نموذجا) [Tamazight: Views and Proverbs (the Example of Tipasa)], by Mohamed Arezki Ferad; as he says, it “is unlikely to come to most English-speakers’ attention,” so he’s rendering a public service in giving us an idea of its contents. The first post is a general review, the second focuses on “a collection of more than 150 Tamazight proverbs from the Tipasa area (specifically the village of Bou-Smail).” Tamazight is the language of the Amazigh, the Berbers of Algeria (if I have that right), and the author “argues that Algeria’s Amazigh identity is undeniable, is relevant to the whole country and not just the minority that speak Tamazight, and complements rather than contradicts Algeria’s Arab identity.” Lameen translates a section that provides a moving reminiscence of how things used to be a couple of decades ago:

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Cursor Mundi 25464: “Nu ask i noþer gra ne grene, Ne stede scrud, ne lorem scene.”

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Curabitur magna. Ut imperdiet sem at diam. Nulla sit amet lorem eu purus pulvinar sagittis. Nunc est. Curabitur elit justo, mollis eu, semper dictum, molestie ut, sapien. Sed venenatis viverra arcu. Suspendisse potenti. Pellentesque enim diam, laoreet id, pretium fringilla, eleifend sit amet, nunc. Aliquam porta interdum ipsum. Nam nisl dui, congue vitae, gravida condimentum, egestas vitae, arcu.

In justo massa, eleifend et, bibendum mollis, feugiat in, est. Suspendisse potenti. In a pede. Mauris blandit vestibulum nulla. Phasellus in arcu. Etiam elementum mi at sapien. Pellentesque vel pede. Fusce ipsum. Vivamus vitae metus vel turpis ultrices volutpat. Nunc elit. Phasellus purus mi, viverra in, elementum ut, volutpat id, nisi. Maecenas mi ipsum, convallis sit amet, tempor non, congue vitae, tellus. Duis est. Morbi tempor mattis eros. Pellentesque a dolor.

Addendum. Related posts at Language Log (Grammatical Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Leohtenen hired at North Orizen Junior Tech), Avva (Anatoly has realized that his true homeland is the USSR and is renouncing Israeli citizenship), Varieties of Unreligious Experience (Yiddish in Shakespeare).

Mark Liberman at Language Log has a post discussing political blogs in France. He makes a number of interesting observations; here’s the meat of the post:

The first thing that struck me about this phenomenon was that no one is paying any heed to the decision of La Commission générale de terminologie et de néologie at the French Ministry of Culture, back in the spring of 2005, that the proper French word for blog ought to be “bloc-notes” (i.e. “writing tablet”), or “bloc” for those in a hurry. In all the newspapers, as well as in the blogs themselves, the blogs are just “blogs”.

To an outsider, it seems typique that the French government has an official neologism commission, rostered with an all-star cast of academicians, university presidents and the like, and supported by 18 specialized sub-commissions to do the real work. The neologism commission itself is one of the many activities of the délégation générale à la langue française (DGLF), which “élabore la politique linguistique du Gouvernement en liaison avec les autres départements ministériels” (“elaborates the language policy of the government in liaison with the other ministerial departments”), and acts as an “organe de réflexion, d’évaluation et d’action” (an “organ of reflection, of evaluation and of action”)…

The second thing that struck me about these new political weblogs is how small their readership is, by American standards. The blog of Michel Onfray is the most popular of those hosted at Le Nouvel Observateur, (blogs.nouvelobs.com), which an article in Le Monde calls “la plus spectaculaire car la plus massive et la plus prestigieuse” (“the most spectacular because the most massive and the most prestigious”). Onfray’s name was featured in large type on special news-kiosk posters everywhere I looked. But according to the article in Le Monde, Onfray gets less than half the traffic that Language Log does, and thus less than 5% of the traffic at Instapundit, and less than 1% of the traffic at Daily Kos.

(See his post for the many links he’s attached to those paragraphs.)

I’m struck by the same things he is: “bloc-notes”?! Donnez-moi un break. No wonder everybody ignores the commission. And 3,000 visitors a day is massive et prestigieuse? Le tout Paris is a small place.

A Times article by Dalya Alberge discusses the sad state of movie subtitling:

Films are being lost in translation because subtitling is increasingly being done in countries such as India and Malaysia to cut costs.
British subtitlers say that the original dialogue in some films is being distorted so badly by bad translations that they do not make sense.
They cite examples such as My Super Ex-Girlfriend, starring Uma Thurman, whose line, “We have a zero-tolerance policy for [sexual harassment]” was translated for Taiwanese audiences as, “We hold the highest standards for sexual harassment”. In The Princess Diaries 2, which stars Ann Hathaway, a reference to Sir David Attenborough during a discussion on insects was subtitled for Chinese speakers as Sherlock Holmes…
Britain’s subtitlers, who are compiling a list of errors, say that their job is not straightforward translation, but involves editing and rephrasing dialogue succinctly and with flair. They say that the domestic industry is in crisis, claiming that film studios are putting pressure on them to accept lower rates of pay or leave the industry altogether.

The article has further horrid examples, like a film where the line “Jim is a Vietnam vet” became “Jim is veterinarian from Vietnam.” Shame on you, movie industry cheapskates! (And thanks for the link, Pat!)

Still reading Durrell (and now almost done with Balthazar), I ran across the word parquet used in the French sense of ‘prosecutor’s office’ and decided to look it up in the OED. Much to my surprise, it turns out to be a French diminutive of parc ‘park’; neither the OED nor the French dictionaries I’ve consulted explain the semantic transition. So of course I had to look up park, where I found a far more complicated etymology than I had expected (I’ve pruned some of the more remote twigs of information):

< Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French, French parc large enclosed area of land or woodland where one keeps and raises animals for the hunt (1160-74), enclosed place planted with fruit trees, orchard (c1220-78), mobile enclosure where one keeps livestock when they sleep in the fields, area thus enclosed (1269), large enclosed area of land or woodland maintained for the decoration of a castle or country house, or for pleasure or recreation, etc. (1337), fortified camp (end of the 15th cent. …), collection of vehicles which an army makes use of (1823 …), prob. < post-classical Latin parricus fence (8th cent. in Ripuar. Laws as parracus, but prob. earlier: see below), pen for animals (9th cent.), park, enclosure (12th cent. in a British source; from 13th cent. as parrocus), prob. < an unattested *parra pole, rod (cf. Spanish parra artificially supported vine, Catalan parra (type of) vine, Portuguese parra grapevine leaf; perh. ult. related to the base of Old French barre BAR n.¹) + –icus -IC suffix. Cf. post-classical Latin parcus park, enclosure (freq. from 9th cent. in British sources), fence (12th cent. in a British source), pen for animals (freq. from 13th cent. in British sources), Old Occitan, Occitan pargue, parc, Italian parco …, Spanish parque …, Portuguese parque …, German Park (from early 17th cent. in travel writings, after English and French; 15th cent. in Middle High German in sense ‘compound, enclosure’; < French). Cf. PARC n.

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