Michael Montgomery, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina, who edited the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English
Update (Aug. 2023). Professor Montgomery died in 2019.
I’ve mentioned Archipelago magazine before, but that was just to highlight a single item, and besides, it was several years ago. Now that they’ve got their final (and 10th Anniversary) issue online, it’s time to feature them again. There’s poetry and fiction and autobiography and criticism (Laurie Calhoun’s The Irrevocable Consequences of Cruelty, about Elia Kazan’s Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Milos Forman’s Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and an essay by Jeffrey H. Matsuura on Thomas Jefferson and Intellectual Property Law and Helena Cobban’s Amnesty After Atrocity? (which “examines the effectiveness of different ways of dealing with the aftermath of genocide and violence committed during deep intergroup conflicts”) and other things as well—they cast their net wide; the ones that particularly appealed to me were Tracy Robinson’s amazing story Open Your Eyes, Red! (I don’t even care what a story’s about when its language is this vivid: “There was a short, lean, bald son of a whore, born in a trailer near a dirt road in Sooke. Son of a welder whom his mother said was the WBA Welterweight Champion of the world. Through public school he showed alacrity, above-average intelligence, mild dyslexia, and a type of AD/HD, only the teachers gossiped that he was a snoopy, fidgety, slow little bastard who might fell trees if there were any left and if he didn’t wind up dead of some foolish stunt, or in jail…”) and Kevin McFadden’s group of poems titled Anticism!, from which I regretfully choose only “Loan, Glasgow” to present here:
Where I first learned to say things, Ohio, my accent
was the local legal tender: good in Edinburg
as Dublin or London. Then came Glasgow (proper).
One year abroad in broad Glaswegian, the notes
brought from home bouncing everywhere, overdrawn.
Want a wild time? In Glasgow time was tame.
See the town? You had to hear the tune. New loans,
including my name; I began saying Cave-in
if I wanted the right introduction in a pub. The road
was rude, the power sometimes poor. My voice
skim milk in that butterchurn of gutturals, Scots vowels
clotted and spread like cream, I learned to hear
everything twice and nothing the same. Glasgow
still hasn’t left me alone: it’s left me a lane.
(Via wood s lot [03.17.2007].)
1) Chinese Village Struggles to Save Dying Language by David Lague (NY Times, March 18, 2007) discusses the imminent demise of the Manchu language, a situation of which I was not aware. A century ago the Manchu ruled China, and all Imperial documents were drafted in both Manchu and Chinese; now only a few aging villagers remain. A sad story. (Don’t miss the video clip, which has a couple of minutes of conversation and a lullaby, all subtitled.)
2) Philistines, but Less and Less Philistine by John Noble Wilford (NY Times, March 13, 2007) describes archeological discoveries about the Philistines and says that “not only were Philistines cultured, they were also literate when they arrived, presumably from the region of the Aegean Sea, and settled the coast of ancient Palestine around 1200 B. C.”
The discovery is reported in the current issue of The Israel Exploration Journal by two Harvard professors, Frank Moore Cross Jr. and Lawrence E. Stager. Dr. Cross is an authority on ancient Middle Eastern languages and scripts. Dr. Stager, an archaeologist, is director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, a Harvard project.
In the report, the two researchers said the inscriptions “reveal, for the first time, convincing evidence that the early Philistines of Ashkelon were able to read and write in a non-Semitic language, as yet undeciphered.”
I’d be curious to know what the evidence is for this non-Semitic language, if anybody’s familiar with their work.
HeiDeas is having its second anniversary, and hh is celebrating with her Third Annual Simpsons St. Patrick’s Day Linguistic Round Up. One of my favorites, from Principal Charming (1991):
Bart has written his name in 40-foot high letters of dead grass on the school field, in sodium tetrachloride. Skinner is outraged. He says, “The sheer contempt demonstrated by this incident makes me wish I could pull the trusty board of education out of retirement.” His gaze falls wistfully upon a paddle in a case behind glass.
(Category: pun.)
While googling around in a (fruitless) effort to find any information about Jarrold Baedeker, the putative author of so many latter-day “Baedekers” (the mystery was solved by the primitive expedient of consulting an actual copy of a guide, which informed me that the original German edition was copyright Baedeker, the English-language one copyright Jarrold and Sons Ltd), I discovered a history (pdf) by Edward Mendelson (originally published in the Yale Review of Books) of Karl Baedeker and the firm he founded; it was of great interest to me as a frequent user of old Baedeker guides (and a proud owner of the 1905 edition of the Austria-Hungary
Under Fritz Baedeker’s direction, the handbooks’ prose grew more efficient and compressed, and by far the most striking element of the new style was a device that deserves to be recognized in handbooks of rhetoric as “the Baedeker parenthesis.” One of its many functions was to juxtapose, without irony, the poetical and the practical. The best example of a Baedeker parenthesis was written not by Baedeker but by E. M. Forster in imitation of Baedeker. In Where Angels Fear to Tread, while Mrs. Herriton “was not one to detect the hidden charms of Baedeker… Philip could never read ‘The view from the Rocca (small gratuity) is finest at sunset’ without a catching at the heart.” Philip might have been overcome had he read these sentences about the Frankenburg, near Aix, in the 1878 edition of The Rhine:
The pond surrounding the castle was once a large lake, in which, according to tradition, was sunk the magic ring of Fastrada (p. 130), the last wife of Charlemagne. Attracted to this spot by its influence, the monarch is said to have sat here for days, gazing on the lake, and mourning for his lust consort. – (As far as the Gillesbach, near the Frankenburg, ordinary cabfare is charged.)
Baedeker used the parenthesis most often as a rapid indicator of the quality of hotels and restaurants, as in these descriptions of small towns chosen at random from the 1896 Southern Italy: “Pescara (Alb. Rebecchino, near the station, with trattoria, clean; Railway Restaurant, mediocre), a fortified town with 5000 inhab., is situated in an unhealthy plain”; or “Sala Consilina (Alb. Morino, dirty; cab to the town, 50 c.), the seat of a sub-prefect, picturesquely situated on a slope, overlooked by a medieval castle and the wooded summits of the Monte Cavallo.” It was this sort of economy and precision that Bertrand Russell had in mind when he identified Baedeker as one of the two major influences on his prose style. (The other was Milton.)
The essay continues with an anecdote about legal troubles caused the firm by one such parenthesis which (to borrow a standard phrase from a rival guidebook) vaut le détour. (And yes, that Rhine quote says “his lust consort”—a most unfortunate, or fortunate if you prefer, typo.)
Roberto Ugoccioni’s Kalendae program converts between modern and Roman dates. I learned about it at Bill Poser’s Language Log post, where you will also find a discussion of whether Caesar said “Et tu, Brute” or “καὶ σὺ τέκνον” to his old friend Brutus, who was in the process of murdering him, as well as an appeal to social historians to help him (Poser, that is, not Caesar) decide on the extent to which upper-class Romans routinely spoke Greek with each other, a question about which I too am curious.
Update (Feb. 2020). The original link is dead; here’s an archived version.
It has long been a fixture of my mental furnishings that the longest entry in the OED was for the verb set. I don’t know how many times I’ve trotted out this bit of trivia, but I’ll have to try not to do it any more, because I learn from the Revisions page of the OED newsletter that it is no longer true, and has not been for some years: “For many years the verb to set has been cited as the longest entry in the OED. But a recheck shows that it has at last been toppled from this position. The longest entry in the revised matter is represented by the verb to make (published in June 2000).” However, they reassure me that “it is quite possible that set will regain its long-held position at the top of the league of long words when it comes itself to be revised.” If you’re curious, and I know you are, “the longest entries currently in the online Third Edition of the OED are: make (verb – revised), set (verb), run (verb), take (verb), go (verb), pre- (revised), non- (revised), over- (revised), stand (verb), red, and then point (the noun – revised).”
Last month, the proprietor of the excellent language blog bulbulovo began (part 1, part 2) a series of posts about the Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka (SSSJ), “the first comprehensive (a.k.a. ‘large-sized’) dictionary of the Slovak language ever,” whose first volume has just been published. His latest post, though labeled as part of the SSSJ series, is actually a long and fascinating analysis of the history and current state of Standard Slovak, and what that phrase (and the Slovak sort-of-equivalent spisovná slovenčina) can be taken to mean. I’m going to resist the temptation to excerpt huge hunks of it, and just quote a bit dealing with the issue of prescriptivism:
You see, although the long war is finally over and we are finally independent (whatever that’s worth), some linguists still fight for the purity of Slovak not so much for linguistic reasons, but for political ones: borrowings from Czech are therefore shunned altogether, because /insert_history_lesson_here/. Latin roots and words, on the other hand, are OK even if we have perfectly good native words to use in their stead, because Latin does not carry any negative political connotations and is generally considered cool (see Geoffrey Pullum’s “Classicism”). Those same linguists fail to understand that, to use a metaphor, Slovak is no longer a proprietary project. It’s been open-sourced for at least 60 years. It’s a child that has grown up long ago and no longer needs protection. And yet, some still insist it wear a coat when going outside even in May and some others even try to forbid it to stay out after 10pm and date that cute tall kid that just moved in next door. People like that suffer from a dangerous delusion: they believe they can actually control a living thing like a language (and, for that matter, its speakers). To them, codification is not a completed process, but something they can repeat over and over again. Moreover, they detest any behavior they do not approve of and either try to pretend it does not exist, or, worse, claim that any action (words or phrases or usage) not conforming to their expectations is an aberration and should be swiftly and decidedly suppressed. And what’s worse, some people actually buy all of that crap…
[After quoting an absurd statement by professor Ábel Kráľ:] In other words, to hell with the speakers and their silly ideas of communication effectiveness and intelligibility! Who the hell do they think they are? Who died and made them the custodians of Slovak? Screw them, we have a system to maintain! They will eat what we cook and serve them and they will LIKE IT!
My friends, seldom have I heard a more fitting description of prescriptivism and no one has ever summed up the attitude of certain Slovak linguists to their language and her speakers better than this.
I hope this whets your appetite for the whole thing; it’s the best and most impassioned discussion of the concept of “correctness” in language and what’s wrong with it that I’ve read in a long time.
Linguarium aims at the creation of an “on-line version of the first comprehensive Atlas+Catalogue for all world’s languages in Russian,” comparable to Ethnologue. The site is bilingual in English and Russian, with links to various pages, of which one of the most interesting to me is Language maps and map-making. The site is run by Yuri Koryakov, who is also trying to “[get] linguists organized to fill in the many gaps in linguistics coverage in the Russian-language wikipedia, both in biographies of linguists and in content articles,” according to Mark Liberman’s Language Log post (from which I got to the Linguarium project). I wish him the best in both endeavors!
A Vancouver Sun story by Karenn Krangle discusses a worthwhile lexicographical project:
The rewriting of Canada’s historical dictionary begins not with the letter A but with C. For Canuck.
That quintessentially Canadian term, which defines us, makes fun of us, sometimes brings joy to sports fans and has a history older than Confederation, is a starting point for lexicographer Stefan Dollinger, who hopes Canadians will get to know their language a little better.
Dollinger leads a University of B.C. project to revise the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, which lists 10,000 words of significance to Canada, each with its own history.
The 927-page, one-volume dictionary was published in 1967 out of the University of Victoria and hadn’t been updated. But with 40 years of explosive technological change, economic growth and significant shifts in the population, the dictionary has become outdated….
The new edition has a website here. Thanks for the news link, Marja-Leena!
Update (May 2021). The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles website is now here.
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