languagehat.com

I’m using the spelling of the holiday given in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, but there are many, many more—Mark Liberman says “a new survey by Language Log labs has found that Hanukkah is second only to Muammar al-Gaddafi in public spelling uncertainty”; if you want to know the horrifying details (and the entropy of the distribution), visit his Language Log post on the subject. And I hope those of my readers who celebrate it are having the best of Christmases.

Frankly, I’m not sure I’ve ever used the phrase on all fours except in its literal sense of ‘on hands and knees,’ but I was vaguely aware that it had a technical/metaphorical meaning, which Orin Kerr explains as follows in a post on the history of the phrase: “One of the legal profession’s stranger expressions is that a case is ‘on all fours’ with another case. It means that the former case raises the same facts and legal principles as the latter and is therefore highly relevant as a precedent.” He cites Michael Quinion’s explanation that “presumably the image is of two animals standing together, both on all four legs, hence in closely similar situations,” but he himself suggests “the visual image is more an animal running alongside the observer than two animals standing next to each other. If an animal is running on all four legs beside you, the thinking might be, it means that it remains close to you and goes where you go.” For much more on the subject, including copious citations, see Mark Liberman’s recent Language Log post, which is where I learned all I know about it.

I have to return the Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution to the library soon, so I was looking through the section “Nationality and Regional Questions,” which I hadn’t yet investigated, and decided to read Martha Brill Olcott’s chapter on “The Revolution in Central Asia” and compare it with the account in my copy of Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, edited by Edward Allworth. I immediately hit a snag. The Companion uses Russianized forms of the names of the locals: Muhammad Tynyshpaev, Halel Dos Muhammedov, Ali Khan Bukeikhanov, Ahmed Baitursunov, Mir Jakup Dulatov. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (who wrote the relevant chapters in the Allworth book) uses forms that I presume are closer to the local-language versions: Muhamedjan Tanishbay-uli, Qalel Dosmahambet-uli, Aliqan Bokeyqan-uli, Aqmet Baytursin-uli, and Mir Jaqib Duwlat-uli, respectively. I can understand both choices, but it’s a shame that people already so marginalized by history are rendered even harder to investigate by such discrepant transliterations.

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has an intriguing post about “a Mauritanian Arabic-based pidgin recorded by the medieval geographer Al-Bakri” that he says “may well be the earliest attested passage in a pidgin, and certainly the earliest Arabic-based pidgin reported.”

The near-absence of morphology, the apparent presence of tense particles, and the simplification of the phonology are all suggestive of a pidgin, and a pidgin is exactly what one would expect given the nature of the trans-Sahara trade. Phonetically, the substitution of ’ for qāf is characteristic of lower Egypt and the Levant, but also of several city dialects in the Maghreb and of Maltese; the substitution of d for j is widespread in upper Egypt, but I know of no modern dialect that has both features.

See his post for the passage in Arabic, in Lameen’s suggested transcription, and in Thomason and Elgibali’s tentative translation (it’s a variation on the old joke about the man and his son trying to ride a camel with the least amount of flak from passersby), and for the frustrating facts of its publication. I hope the manuscript source turns up someday!

A CNN story informs us that Georgia’s Department of Transportation has issued a new official map that’s been sadly simplified:

Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Due West and Po Biddy Crossroads. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too…
Gone are such places as Dewy Rose, Hemp, Experiment, Retreat, Wooster, Sharp Top and Chattoogaville, a spot in far northwestern Georgia that consists of little more than a two-truck volunteer fire department, a few farmhouses and a country store where locals fill up their gas tanks.
“We’re not under obligation to show every single community,” department spokeswoman Karlene Barron said. “While we want to, there’s a balancing act. And the map was getting illegible.”

What you call illegible, I call a linguistic feast, dammit!

I’m reading N. N. Sukhanov’s The Russian Revolution 1917, the only full-length eyewitness account of the 1917 revolutions, and I just got to this on page 62: “Braunstein proposed that directives be given… for district committees to be formed, and for plenipotentiary Commissars to be appointed in each district to restore order and direct the struggle against anarchy and pogroms.” I quote from the OED citation, but I have a gripe against the OED here. Why on earth would they quote that line and not the far more interesting footnote that is appended to it? The footnote reads: “Braunstein, by the way, was the first of us to use this word Commissar, which was later so needlessly misused.” This Braunstein (actually Brounshtein, Михаил Адамович Броунштейн) is an exceedingly minor and utterly forgotten figure, but he apparently introduced an old word equivalent to commissioner into the context in which it developed the only meaning most of us associate with it; you’d think that would be worth a mention, as would the fact that Sukhanov is talking about February/March 1917, which antedates their first citation, 1918 tr. Lenin’s Less. Revolution (title-p.), By Vladimir Oulianow (N. Lenin) President of the Council of People’s Commissars.

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In The Guardian, Simon Armitage discusses his new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

Naturally, to the trained medievalist the poem is perfectly readable in its original form; no translation necessary. And even for the non-specialist, certain lines, such as “Bot Arthure wolde not ete til al were served”, present little problem, especially when placed within the context of the narrative. Conversely, lines such as “Forthi, iwysse, bi zowre wylle, wende me bihoues” are incomprehensible to the general reader. But it is the lines that fall somewhere between those extremes – the majority of lines, in fact – which fascinate the most. They seem to make sense, though not quite. To the untrained eye, it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalisingly near yet frustratingly blurred. To a contemporary poet, one interested in narrative and form, and to a northerner who not only recognises plenty of the poem’s dialect but detects an echo of his own speech rhythms within the original, the urge to blow a little warm breath across that layer of frosting eventually proved irresistible.

I’m not quite sure why he felt he needed to see the original manuscript in the British Library or to witness the actual gralloching of a deer (though I do love the word, which I wrote about here), but the sample at the end of the article is appealing, and I like his daring—he’s not afraid to toss in “never mind being minus his head!”

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Kerim Friedman alerted me to a post at Prince Roy’s Realm about “why Taiwanese (and apparently only Taiwanese) refer to Western cabbage (as opposed to Napa Vally cabbage, or 白菜 bok choy) as 高麗菜 instead of the more orthodox Mandarin usages 洋白菜, 包心菜, or 捲心菜.” There is apparently a popular theory that the word (which a commenter renders as “Gao Li Cai”) derives from the name of Korea, but much more likely to me seems the idea that it’s a borrowing from a Germanic language (cf. English cole, German Kohl); if you have information or ideas about this, by all means share them. (The comment thread is worth your attention as well; Mark Anthony Jones points out that Cato the Elder claimed “every illness… could be cured by eating loads of boiled cabbage. The reason why Romans survived six centuries without the need for doctors, he said, was because of their habit of eating boiled cabbage three times a day!”)

Céline of Naked Translations has a post beginning “Frequent commenter bathrobe has a site on the translations of Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince“; since Bathrobe (who now, to avoid excessive identification with that item of clothing, sometimes signs himself 小王子 ‘the Little Prince’) is also a frequent commenter here, I should really have pointed you before now to his excellent site cjvlang, “an armchair excursion into three fascinating languages of the Orient: Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese (CJV).” Besides the Little Prince section, he discusses days of the week, birds, Harry Potter translations (which has subsections on Those Magical Books and Their Titles, Translation of Puns and Word Play, Names of People and Places, Mistranslations, Names of Shops, serious translation errors, and Names of Owl Species, inter alia), and the writing systems. From the Little Prince section, his page on “the fox’s secret” compares the versions of a short passage of three sentences (“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux”) in 45 Chinese translations, four Vietnamese translations, and 16 Japanese translations (not to mention four English ones). Here are Shī 1991:

這就是我的秘密，一個很簡單的秘密：只有用心靈，一個人才能真正看得明白；單是透過雙眼看不見事情的真像。
Zhè jiù shì wǒ de mìmì, yīge hěn jiǎndān de mìmì: Zhǐ yǒu yòng xīnlíng, yīge rén cái néng zhēnzhèng kàn de míngbái; dān shì tòuguò shuāngyǎn kàn-bu-jiàn shìqíng de zhēnxiàng.
‘This is my secret, a very simple secret: only with the spirit, a person can truly understand; just looking through the two eyes cannot see the true image of things.’

And Mǎ 2006:

现在告诉你我的秘密，一个非常简单的秘密：只有用心去观察，才能看的真切；最根本的东西用眼睛是看不见的。
Xiànzài gàosu nǐ wǒ de mìmì, yīge fēicháng jiǎndān de mìmì: Zhǐ yǒu yòng xīn qù guānchá, cái néng kàn de zhēnqiè; zuì gēnběn de dōngxi yòng yǎnjing shì kàn-bu-jiàn de.
‘Now I will tell you my secret, a very simple secret: Only observing with the heart, can see distinctly; the most basic thing with the eyes cannot see.’

If you like comparing translations, you’ll want to spend some time chez the Blogger Formerly Known as Bathrobe.

The multifarious Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience, dissatisfied with Latin’s “lexical conservatism” and “resistance to fancy,” has dug up “two attempts to make Latin interesting—the first in seventh-century Ireland, the second in High Renaissance Italy.” The Italian stuff is well worth looking at (“the legendary 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii” and “Teofilo Folengo, aka. Merlin Coccaius, a favourite of Rabelais’s”), but the one that caught my fancy was “the work of the mysterious Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, a grammarian of sorts from 7th-century Britain or Ireland”:

His treatises, the Epitomae and Epistolae, are full of odd collocations and deliberate perversions and obfuscations. He has been commonly taken as a parodist, though Vivien Law reads him rather as an arcanist. Words in his text are like gnostic spellwords, little observing Latin morphology—at one point he lists Twelve ‘Latins’, his jargon spewing out in a torrent of letters: assena, semedia, numeria (nim, dun, tor, quir, quan, ses, sen, onx, amin, ple), metrofia (dicantabat, bora, gcno, sade, teer, rfoph, brops, rihph, gal, fkal, clitps, mrmos, fann, ulioa, gabpal, blaqth, merc, pal, gatrb, biun, spadx), lumbrosa, sincolla, belsavia, presina, militana, spela, polema. Elsewhere he deliberates about the declension of ego, and specifically about its vocative case (how do you say “O I”?). He writes of word-scrambling, scinderatio fonorum—as if from Greek φωνη—

Scinderatio autem litterarum superflua est, sed tamen a glifosis sensuque subtilibus recipitur; unde et fona breuia scindi magis commodius est quam longa, ut Cicero dicit: RRR SS PP MM N T EE OO A V I, quod sic soluendum est: Spes Romanorum perit.

Somehow I’m not at all surprised that a speaker of Old Irish, the weirdest language I’ve ever studied, came up with those delightfully mad inventions.

Incidentally, it seems to me that some blogger I read regularly recently discussed the first-person vocative (“O I”), but I can’t remember who it was. Step forth in the comment thread and I will link to you forthwith.

The first-person vocative was recently discussed by Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat, who quotes Eco, who is referring to none other than the mad Irishman quoted above.