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A Financial Times story by Bertrand Benoit describes the insensate rage unleashed in language-loving Germans by the humble apostrophe:

For months, self-appointed language guardians have been hyperventilating about a rise in the indiscriminate use of the apostrophe. Those familiar with the old British discussion about apostrophes and greengrocers may be surprised to hear that Germans have their own version, sometimes referred to as the Idiotenapostroph (they are not big on euphemisms).

After all, one could write a three-tome novel in German without resorting to the said punctuation mark. Yet there are instances where it can be used under strict rules. Annoyingly for the purists, nobody seems to care much about these today…

Apostrophes may also work as shortcuts (Ku’damm instead of Kurfürstendamm). Utterly unacceptable are apostrophised plurals (foto’s), Anglicised possessives (Oma’s Strümpfe) and US-flavoured corporate names (Müller’s Wurstwaren or Beck’s lager). Also online are galleries that name and shame delinquents. The Kapostropheum on www.apostroph.de has photographs of store windows, labels, web banners and newspaper ads that desecrate genitives, abuse plurals and mistreat imperatives.

Globalisation is only partly to blame. Complete apostrophe chaos ruled in the German language up to 1901, when the Duden dictionary, the country’s ultimate authority in matters of syntax and orthography, issued a blanket ban. For more than 50 years, the edict restored some sort of order. But the fact that Anglo-Americans had a hand in undermining the Duden’s authority – to the point that the august publisher is now angering purists by sanctioning some borderline uses of the apostrophe – is beyond doubt.

The proof lies in the first issue of the Allied-sponsored Aachener Nachrichten daily, which on January 24 1945 proudly proclaimed: Alliierte Flugzeuge zerschlagen Rundstedt’s Rückzugskolonnen (Allied aircrafts destroy Rundstedt’s retreating columns), thus planting the seed that would yield today’s bountiful crop of Idiotenapostrophe.

I have had to correct the German spelling throughout, capitalizing nouns and clipping a final -e off the singular (the German noun is Apostroph, plural Apostrophe); you’d think they’d have at least checked the alleged URL “www.apostrophe.de” and discovered it didn’t go anywhere. (There is a German word Apostrophe, but it carries the rhetorical meaning of ‘direct address.’) You’d think they’d have mentioned the site Idiotenapostroph, if not Rette’t de’n Apo’stro’ph!, which goes into great detail about form (straight or curved?), gender, morphology, and usage. And for previous LH apostrophic madness, go here.

Update. Margaret Marks links to another site (with pictures) that uses another name for the dreaded phenomenon: Deppenapostroph.
(Thanks for the link, Paul!)

A BBC News story tells the story of a mysterious non-English-speaking burglar (an earlier story said “the authorities have no idea of his name, age, nationality, or even his language”) who turned out to be Hassan Ibrahimi, from “a remote village in the Moroccan mountains.” What particularly struck me (and the correspondent who sent me the story—thanks, Jim!) was this bit: “Having lost everything, he decided to try and leave Morocco and come to France because the Berber language is similar to French.” Berber similar to French? As I told my correspondent, it’s hard to know whether it represents a misunderstanding on the part of a reporter, a translator, or Ibrahimi himself—people do believe some odd things about language!

My recent post on blind translations has inspired a blog dedicated to retranslating the Spanish translation of Lolita into English, blind. It starts:

Lolita Lou, stay my vitals, forgo them strangers. Oh my peccadillo, ah my white. Lo-li-ta: the poon-tardy lollygagger by way of the Jedi, able ho hasty pussy on the terse dented boards: Lo. Li. Ta.

Here Lo, sensual-mental Lo, poor lamental Lo Aucoin, does stab derecho with her metered-oak wintry-chawed stature. Sober and pine for Daddy, and call Satan. Here’s Lo Aucoin leaving applestains on pants, here’s Dolly to scale, here’s Dolores Aucoin firmbaby.

Fun!

Update (June 2024). Clicking on the link now gets “This journal has been deleted and purged.” Why do people do this? If you’re tired of it, just stop doing it, but leave it there for others to enjoy! And no, it’s not in the Internet Archive. Bah.

A while back I posted about Tsotsitaal, a South African township dialect; here‘s Andie Miller’s interview with Athol Fugard, who wrote the novel Tsotsi (along, of course, with the many plays that made him famous), and it has some interesting linguistic discussion:

On the subject of the term tsotsi, Stephen Gray reflects: “I’m interested in how the word has become so familiar since the Oscar. Now it’s known to the whole world.” A Google search yields 12 million results. “But in the late fifties it was a minor cult word that people had difficulty with… Drum [Magazine] saw the potential of the posed zoot suit. You know tsotsi‘s meant to be a corruption of zoot suit… fashionable clothes, Florsheim shoes, white hats that came from gangster movies … By April 1956 there was a character that Drum launched, called Willie Boy, and then Alex le Guma took it up as well, for the first of his beautiful books. So it became a media feature, this juvenile delinquent tsotsi-boy. And now of course we have musicals about Sophiatown, and university presses publish dictionaries of tsotsitaal for academic scrutiny.”…

Tsotsi, the winner of the 2006 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, introduced English-speaking audiences to an unfamiliar subculture and its language, Tsotsitaal, used on the streets of Soweto, a group of townships in Johannesburg, South Africa. The area was segregated (Black only) by the Apartheid government, and its population of some two million is still largely Black and poor. Tsotsitaal is a blend of Afrikaans, English, and African language stocks, and though the current version of it, “isiCamtho,” is now spoken in the townships, it originated in Sophiatown, a multiracial/multicultural Johannesburg suburb which was bulldozed in the early sixties.

She ends the piece with a substantial selection of terms from Louis Molamu’s Tsotsitaal: A dictionary of the language of Sophiatown (2003).

The other day my online pal fev wrote me via gmail asking about this statement in The Economist: “The characters for ‘Africa’ in the Mandarin language mean ‘wrong continent'”—true, or journalistic nonsense? I discovered the word for ‘Africa’ is 非洲 feizhou and went through the laborious process of looking it up in my Mathew’s; as I told fev, the first character is literally a negative that can mean ‘wrong, bad’ as well as simply ‘not’ (its usual meaning in classical Chinese). But Mathews includes this use in a separate subentry ‘used for foreign sounds’; the names of foreign places have always been rendered phonetically without much regard for actual meaning. I was just thinking that wasn’t really a sufficient answer when I got an instant message via gmail from my online pal and occasional commenter xiaolongnu, who happens to be an expert on Chinese, so I asked her. She looked it up in a Big Dictionary (Cihai [辭海 ‘Sea of Words’], if I recall correctly) and told me it’s short for Afeilijiazhou, which is clearly a phonetic rendering (jia being the Mandarin equivalent of what in other dialects is ka). She says “And it gets shortened to ‘fei’ rather than ‘a’ because ‘a’ is such a non-syllable.” Problem solved, thanks to the miracle of the internet and the instantaneous communication it makes possible!

[Addendum. Bill Poser has posted an interesting Language Log entry about the Classical Chinese use of the character 非 ‘not.’]

And xiaolongnu also gave me a link to this wonderful post by Alex Golub and Kate Lingley, “Colonialism in the Pacific Rim Themed Dinner for Eight,” which she thought I might enjoy, and indeed I did: it’s entertaining and educational, and I’m sure delicious too if one had the chance to eat it! Here’s a sample:

Russian Intrusion into Central Asia Vodka Watermelon
Before the Russians could become a credible force in the North Pacific they had to reach it. Throughout the eighteenth century the Czars swept across the steppe until they reached the ocean on the other side. This recipe memorializes the coming of Russian power to central Asia.

1 Large Watermelon
1 bottle of orange flavored vodka (Van Gogh, for instance)

Purchase your watermelon from the local store (remember: hollow and heavy. Hollow and heavy). When your guests arrive tell them you got it in Tashkent. Purchase also your vodka. When at the store you will be tempted to buy shit vodka, because you already know this recipe and know that I’m about to tell you to pour the vodka into the watermelon, and you consider this a much less honorable fate for quality vodka than, say, a decent martini. Nonetheless, you must purchase quality vodka, as the taste will be quite exposed due to the delicacy of the watermelon’s flavor. Grand Marnier is typically used to compliment watermelon, but since you’re already blowing real dough on the vodka, just get one with orange flavoring. Cut the watermelon in half. Open the vodka and pour them shits all up inside the watermelon. Every three or four hours you will add more vodka to increase the deliciousness of the watermelon. It’s gotta soak, see? Shortly before your guests arrive, use a melon ball scooper to scoop out a bunch of watermelon balls (duh.) Then put them all back in the now-dimpled hollow watermelon. Serve to your guests with toothpicks so that their hands don’t get sticky. This can be served in lieu of cocktails, or you may choose to reserve some watermelon juice and make martinis out of the remaining vodka, substituting the juice for vermouth. If you do this, you must take your martini with a twist. Watermelon and olives is gross.

It turns out that German has the same kinds of discussions about gender inclusiveness as English, and you can read something about them in this review by Tracy Wearn of Hildegard Gorny’s “Feministische Sprachkritik”:

Gorny’s article focusses on sexistische Sprachgebrauch, i.e. looking at semantic, structural and patriarchal markers in language use, as opposed to the different ways in which men and women use language. Feminist linguistics doesn’t see language as a gender-neutral mode of communication, but as reflecting social reality… Feminist linguists do not simply want to describe language use but to criticise and modify it.

What particularly strikes me is the Binnen-I (German link), as in RadfahrerInnen ‘bicycle riders,’ where the interior capital I (“Binnen-I”) indicates it’s to be taken as Radfahrer und Radfahrerinnen ‘male and female bicycle riders.’ It’s apparently quite controversial, and I can see why, but it seems like a fairly elegant solution in a language that already strews capital letters around freely.

Incidentally, I forget where I ran across this Binnen-I thing; if you recently wrote me about it or blogged about it, let me know and I’ll be glad to credit you.

Arnold Zwicky at Language Log has a fine, detailed post about the reasons for the absurd “rule” about not starting sentences with and or but, the No Initial Coordinators (NIC) rule. As he says, “A point of usage and style on which Liberman and I and the AHD and the MWDEU stand together with Brians and Garner and Fiske (and dozens of other advice writers) is, truly, not a disputed point. NIC is crap.” He speculates, sensibly in my view, that it originated in attempts by elementary-school teachers to get their kids to stop stringing clauses together in the monotonous fashion that comes naturally to them: “It was cold, and my mom made me put on a coat, and I went outside and I saw two dogs, and they…” He comes to this depressing conclusion:

Once NIC is out there, it will persist. Any fool with a claim to authority and either students or a publisher can get a rule ON the books, but there is absolutely no mechanism for getting rules OFF. People think that rules are important, and they are reluctant to abandon things they were taught as children, especially when those teachings were framed as matters of right and wrong. They will pass those teachings on. They will interpret denials of the validity of such rules—even denials coming from people like Garner and Fiske, who are not at all shy about slinging rules around—as threats to the moral order and will tend to reject them. I’ve had some success convincing some students and friends that some of the rules they were taught are not good rules to live by—but my success depends on their willingness to listen to me and their willingness to question their beliefs, two qualities that are not widespread in the general population.

(Here‘s his first post on the subject, “If they do it too much, they should be told not to do it at all.”)

A nice collection of links about Romansh:

Less than one per cent of the Swiss population speak Romansh. Yet this endangered Latin-based language, spoken in parts of the eastern canton of Graubünden, is still very much alive. To coincide with the parliamentary session in Romansh-speaking Flims from September 18-October 6, swissinfo took a look at the fourth Swiss national language, which is almost as little known inside Switzerland as outside its borders.

Thanks, Paul!

A few years ago I did a post about homophonic translations, where the translator tries to preserve the sound of the original poem; blind translations (from Cipher Journal, which publishes “creative works of art & literature that call attention to the process of translation”) are superficially similar but turn out much better to my mind:

Blind Translations (elsewhere known as homophonic translations) are a fine blend of translation & creativity: the poet-translator can neither speak nor read the poem’s original language but has formed a translation nonetheless. The linguistic materials are laid bare as acrylic in an abstract painting, and the poetic result is at once a rigidly excising form poem and a tribute to Surrealism, an extension of avant-gardist poetic activity spanning many traditions.

I don’t agree with the identification with homophonic translations, since in my experience the latter are done with an awareness of the original text’s meaning and a stronger commitment to keeping the sound; these, at least from the examples they give, use the sound/look of the original as a springboard to inspire a new poem in English, and I think utter ignorance of the meaning is a help to producing good work. Here’s a brief example; the original is by the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, the “translation” by John Bradley:

Yes, you, my angel.
You used to, possibly in a cradle
Slowly but always sooner.
A meadow talking in its sleep.
Barely gone no beetle pulls you.
I ravine your oxygen.
Just please slap me pretty hard.

My Slovenian is nonexistent, but with the help of a dictionary plus general knowledge of Slavic [plus bulbul’s comment—thanks!] I can tell you that the original (below the fold) means ‘You are my angel / mouth sprinkled with chalk / I am a servant of the ceremony. / Untouched [intact/virgin] // White mushrooms on a white field. / In a plain of fire. // I walk on golden dust.’

[Read more…]

And speaking of family names, I love this excerpt from They Call Me Naughty Lola, a collection of “witty and eccentric lonely hearts ads from the London Review of Books ” (reviewed here—thanks, Nick!):

Stroganoff. Boysenberry. Frangipani. Words with their origins in people’s names. If your name has produced its own entry in the OED then I’ll make love to you. If it hasn’t, I probably will anyway, but I’ll only want you for your body. Man of too few distractions, 32.

I dunno, though: the OED says only “said to be from Frangipani, the name of the inventor” (emphasis added); this guy could get his heart broken by an imposter.

Update. The County Clerk has done a thorough investigation of all things frangipani/plumeria-related along with various enjoyable divagations, such as a long description of Septimus Piesse’s odophone. Visit and revel!