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In Jenny Turner’s long LRB review essay on a couple of books by Stuart Hall (archived), there occurs the following sentence:

And so, too, with the police, and the courts, and schools and churches and social services, as explored in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall.

Does anyone have a sense of what “paddingly” means in the phrase “paddingly Socratic”? The only thing that occurs to me is a typo for “ploddingly,” but that seems unlikely in the LRB, and I am so out of touch with both current UK colloquialisms and current high-Left jargon that I have no useful context for it.

For those who don’t care about high-Left jargon and its discontents, check out William H. Race’s “The Process of Developing a Publishable Paper in Classics: An Illustrative Example and Some Suggestions,” as excerpted at Laudator Temporis Acti; the suggestions seem useful, the first being “Start with primary material and trust your instincts. This is the origin of your original contribution. If you jump too quickly into the secondary literature, it is easy to get lost in a sea of δόξα.”

Our nightly reading these days is Zadie Smith’s The Fraud; in a break from tradition, we’re letting Smith read it to us via audiobook rather than having me do the reading, since her version is supposed to be excellent and I’ve been curious to try this newfangled medium. Last night we got to a passage that I knew I had to post at LH, from ch. 18, “Talking ‘Cant’ in Chesterfield”; “he” is the (historical) author William Harrison Ainsworth:

In the evenings he was supposed to belong to Mrs Touchet, but over dinner continued outlining his first ‘proper novel’ in a great stream of talk. The plan was to take all he’d learned of the Gothic from Mrs Radcliffe and Sir Walter and apply it to a grand old English house. (For a model, Crossley had suggested Cuckfield Park, a gloomy Elizabethan mansion in Sussex.) For William, this new location meant a new aesthetic. No more exotic counts and princes. No more evil monks or scheming Italian Doges. Instead: lords and ladies, highwaymen, gravediggers, Newgate types, and all manner of simple, English, country folk. The highwayman Dick Turpin would make an appearance! And gypsies! It would be called Rookwood – after the fictionalized house at its centre – and was to be a tale of fate and murder, involving a worryingly large cast of characters, drawn from the high world and the low. Once he stayed up all night, writing a scene in which ‘Dick Turpin rode from London to York’, although what this had to do with the family saga he had previously described she could not make out. There was no point in asking rational questions. He was besotted with his project, especially the ‘flash songs’, sung by the criminal and cockney underworld characters and written in the ‘cant’ slang he had picked up somewhere. Where?

‘What do you mean, where?’

‘Well, cant is not the same wherever you go, is it? Cockney flash must be different from Scots flash, for example. And surely Manchester cant is different again.’

‘Eliza Touchet, what a curious pedant you are. Does it matter?’

‘Don’t characters have to speak believably? So we believe in them?’

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Chris Quirk has a nice feature on Samantha Schnee for Dartmouth Alumni Magazine:

More than 20 years ago, Schnee cofounded Words Without Borders (WWB), an online journal that publishes literature translated into English from almost every part of the globe. The journal has published 4,600 writers—including seven who later won the Nobel Prize—in translations into English from 139 different languages. Today, 11 staffers operate the publication with an annual budget of just under $1 million, funded primarily through grants and donations.

WWB builds bridges between writers and readers across languages and cultures, providing English-language readers access to lesser-known works and opportunities for translators. It draws an estimated 750,000 readers annually, half of whom live outside the United States. “It’s a handbook for understanding the world,” says Iranian American author Reza Aslan, who edited WWB’s 2011 anthology of Middle Eastern translations. […]

Schnee learned about the project that would be become WWB when she heard W. W. Norton editor Alane Salierno Mason propose the idea at a 2002 meeting of the organization PEN America. “I ran up to her as soon as she finished speaking and told her that editing WWB was my dream job—it synthesized my interests in literature, language, and culture,” Schnee recalls. She started the following month, and the journal launched in mid-2003.

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From last September comes this Lithuanian National Radio and Television story:

A mysterious tablet with an unknown 13th-14th-century script is on display at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania Museum. No one knows what it means or where it came from. LRT TV journalist Virginijus Savukynas reports.

The plaque was found twenty years ago while exploring Vilnius castles. Archaeologists were using a metal detector to scout the location where some of the earliest wooden structures were located. Expecting to find no more than a simple axe, instead, they discovered something else entirely – a rectangular strip of metal with strange engravings. Such scripts have surfaced in Lithuania for the first time. […]

“We tried to find a logical explanation for the markings: on the sides of the tablet, the beginning and the end were marked with crosses, as if they were marking the beginning and the end of the text,” said Gintautas Striška, head of the Archaeology and Architecture Department at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania Museum in Vilnius. “The text is clearly composed of several lines. The top line seems to be written in two ways – signs and letters, and the bottom line has several more lines with various inscriptions,” he added.

“At the time, we thought that part of the text may have been written in ancient Greek. With the help of linguists, we saw that part of it could be translated as ‘Algirdas Basileus’ – that is, ‘King Algirdas’,” said Striška. After a while, however, the archaeologists abandoned their fruitless search. “The letters only resemble Greek letters, and a person who carved them may have missed something or combined several letters into one, making deciphering the record difficult,” he added. […]

It is also possible that the inscriptions on the plate are engraved in several languages, making it difficult to read. Now, the researchers have turned to visitors and researchers to present their ideas on how to read this 13th-14th-century text.

As Dmitry Pruss, who sent me the story, points out, there’s no link to anything scholarly, and frankly the images look like gibberish to me, but check it out!

I’ve come to love the interactive features the NY Times publishes on its website, and Alex Carp’s piece on endangered languages in New York City is a doozy, and perfect for LH. (There are archived versions here and here, but I’m afraid you only get the text, not the interactive stuff, including the audio clips.) It opens with an outline map of Manhattan with lines pointing to locations where dozens of languages are spoken, then continues:

Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan. “You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be found in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh and India, has become a minority language of Queens.

All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else, says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them. And because most of the world’s languages are on a path to disappear within the next century, there will likely never be this many in any single place again. […]

With Daniel Kaufman, also a linguist, Perlin directs the Endangered Language Alliance, in Manhattan. When E.L.A. was founded, in 2010, Perlin lived in the Chinese Himalayas, where he studied Trung, a language with no standard writing system, dictionary or codified grammar. (His work helped establish all three.) He spent most of his time in the valley where the largest group of remaining speakers lived; the only road in or out was impassable in winter.

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Jennifer Ouellette writes for Ars Technica about a productive element of English vocabulary:

British comedian Michael McIntyre has a standard bit in his standup routines concerning the many (many!) slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk. These include “wellied,” “trousered,” and “ratarsed,” to name a few. McIntyre’s bit rests on his assertion that pretty much any English word can be modified into a so-called “drunkonym,” bolstered by a few handy examples: “I was utterly gazeboed,” or “I am going to get totally and utterly carparked.”

It’s a clever riff that sparked the interest of two German linguists. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg decided to draw on their expertise to test McIntyre’s claim that any word in the English language could be modified to mean “being in a state of high inebriation.” Given their prevalence, “It is highly surprising that drunkonyms are still under-researched from a linguistic perspective,” the authors wrote in their new paper published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. Bonus: the authors included an extensive appendix of 546 English synonyms for “drunk,” drawn from various sources, which makes for entertaining reading.

There is a long tradition of coming up with colorful expressions for drunkenness in the English language, with the Oxford English Dictionary listing a usage as early as 1382: “merry,” meaning “boisterous or cheerful due to alcohol; slight drunk, tipsy.” Another OED entry from 1630 lists “blinde” (as in blind drunk) as a drunkonym. Even Benjamin Franklin got into the act with his 1737 Drinker’s Dictionary, listing 288 words and phrases for denoting drunkenness. By 1975, there were more than 353 synonyms for “drunk” listed in that year’s edition of the Dictionary of American Slang. By 1981, linguist Harry Levine noted 900 terms used as drunkonyms.

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We discussed that odd fruit the pawpaw a decade ago, at which time Bathrobe pointed out that “In Australia a pawpaw is a papaya,” but we didn’t really get into the linguistic aspect, so I’ll take the opportunity of happening on Matthew Meduri’s Belt essay “Consider the Pawpaw,” linked at MetaFilter, to do some of that. As rory says in that MeFi thread, “the UK/Aust./South Pacific pawpaw is what Americans know as the papaya. This American pawpaw is a different fruit.” To add to the confusion, the OED entry (revised 2005) says:

Variant of papaya n., of uncertain origin, apparently originally a shortening (although compare a reported disyllabic form in Otomaco pappai: see etymological note s.v. papaya n.).

Notes
The α forms reflect an earlier pronunciation /pəˈpɔː/ related to the shortening < papaya n. The β forms reflect the shift in stress to word-initial position which is now the current pronunciation.

N.E.D (1904) enters this under papaw and gives the pronunciations (păpǭ·, pǭpǭ·) /pəˈpɔː/ /pɔːˈpɔː/. Webster gives only the pronunciation /pəˈpɔː/ until the 20th cent.

And s.v. papaya (also from 2005):
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Heather Knight and Amy Qin report for the NY Times (archived) on a problem that I wouldn’t have thought of but that’s obvious once pointed out:

In San Francisco, where more than a fifth of residents are of Chinese descent, politicians have long taken a second name in Chinese characters. And any serious candidate knows to order campaign materials in English and in Chinese.

But the city’s leniency for adopted names has frustrated some Chinese American candidates, who say that non-Chinese rivals have gone overboard by using flattering, flowery phrases that at first glance have little to do with their actual names. Some candidates have gained an advantage or engaged in cultural appropriation, the critics say.

No more. For the first time, San Francisco has rejected Chinese names submitted by 22 candidates, in most cases because they could not prove they had used the names for at least two years. The city has asked translators to furnish names that are transliterated, a process that more closely approximates English pronunciations.

That means Michael Isaku Begert, who is running to keep his local judgeship, cannot use 米高義, which means in part “high” and “justice,” a name that suggests he was destined to sit on the bench.

And Daniel Lurie, who is challenging Mayor London Breed, must scrap the name he had been campaigning with for months: 羅瑞德, which means “auspicious” and “virtue.” Mr. Lurie’s new name, 丹尼爾·羅偉, pronounced Daan-nei-ji Lo-wai, is a transliterated version that uses characters closer to the sound of his name in English but are meaningless when strung together. […]

The switch isn’t universally popular. It ends a San Francisco tradition, cherished in some circles, in which Chinese leaders have bestowed names upon their favorite candidates. And it has the potential of resulting in long monikers that are difficult to remember or even cringe-worthy, since the characters that sound like someone’s name may translate into odd phrases in Chinese.

More details at the link (and personally, I think the “cultural appropriation” thing is silly); there’s also a brief excursus into other languages (“Certain towns in Alaska must translate ballots into Yup’ik […] while some counties in Arizona must do so in Navajo and Apache”). Thanks, Dmitry!

Nicole Vulser has a horrifying piece in Le Monde (archived; en français) about what AI is doing to a valuable profession:

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has already claimed its first victims in the publishing world. Literary translators − the most fragile link and the most exposed to the AI tsunami − are witnessing their working conditions worsen by the day and their orders dwindle. As the use of automatic translation programs like DeepL becomes increasingly widespread, the job of a translator is increasingly reduced to post-editing contracts (using a text pre-translated by a machine).

According to Jörn Cambreleng, the director of Atlas, an organization promoting literary translation, this practice is still considered “shameful” among publishers, who never mention AI use on book covers, but also among translators, who accept this type of cheaper contract only due to a lack of other options.

The latest survey on machine translation and post-editing conducted by the French Literary Translators’ Association (ATLF) in December 2022 among 400 people already showed a “strong lack of transparency from publishers” on AI use and “lower compensation” (lower than average translation rates in 68% of cases). […]

ATLF secretary Peggy Rolland is concerned about the arrival of AI and fears a chain reaction of challenges, starting with legal ones. “Translators are authors and must receive royalties on each book sale (usually between 1% and 2%). “However, publishers who use AI want to pay us as self-employed contractors, which is not legal,” Rolland pointed out.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to fight this other than an unlikely multinational legal ban — translators are self-employed (as far as I know) and inherently hard to organize. But it’s a wretched development.

Bathrobe sent me the YouTube clip Vocal Fry: what it is, who does it, and why people hate it! by Dr Geoff Lindsey, saying:

What is fascinating is the way he looks back and finds that creaky voice was once a prominent feature of posh male RP accents, with clips from various people including Sean Connery. So it was acceptable for posh male speakers of RP but is not acceptable for young female North Americans.

The clips are wonderful (there’s a whole segment of them showing that vocal fry, aka creaky voice, is ubiquitous in Finnish, to the point that speaking the language without it sounds unnatural), and I join Bathrobe in finding the video both interesting and enlightening. It’s 27 minutes long, but I promise you won’t be bored. And it definitely sticks the ending!