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An occasional feature here at LH is Family Names With Surprising Etymologies (e.g., Janeway), and today’s is Pancoast. When my nonagenarian mother-in-law mentioned that somebody she’d known seventy years ago was called that, I thought she might be misremembering, but no, it turns out there is such a name, and furthermore, it’s a chopped-down form of Pentecost! Man, I love etymology.

Totally unrelated, but in honor of an exchange between John Emerson and Aidan Kehoe in this thread, here’s a good Penny Arcade. (Thanks, Songdog!)

Lameen at Jabal al-Lughat has come across a language textbook that sounds like a satirist’s invention, but it’s apparently all too real:

I’m researching Chadic imperatives at the moment, so I opened Angass Manual – written by H. D. Foulkes, Captain (late R. F. A.), Political Officer, Nigeria in 1915) to the appropriate section, and found it to consist solely of the following advice:

The Imperative is of the same form as the rest of the verbal forms, only uttered with the necessary tone of authority.

[…]I particularly like how he explains that Angass grammar is really simple:

“The language is so simple in construction that I am hoping a study of it may help in elucidating the groundwork of more elaborated Negro languages.”

This is the best bit:

“The only difficulty – but it is a very real one – in the colloquial is the apparently capricious employment of a large number of particles, the use of which, though immaterial from a grammatical point of view, is, however, necessary in practice, for without them the sentence certainly loses its flavour, and seemingly some of its sense, in that an ordinary man cannot understand a phrase unless it is enunciated exactly in the way he is accustomed to hearing it, and the omission or transposition of a word bothers him considerably.”

Truly, the mind boggles. We’ve come a long way, baby! (I presume “Angass” is the language Ethnologue calls Ngas.)

1) I’m excited about this [“Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day“]. I may have to read it in hardcover. (Great, another thousand-page hardcover after November 1916—it will either strengthen me or kill me.)

2) There’s an interesting AskMetaFilter thread about slang migrating westward across the Atlantic: “Are there any British / Australian / New Zealand or wherever phrases and words that have become commonly used by people in North America recently? Do Brooklynites ever exclaim ‘Crikey!’ or ‘Bloody Hell!’?” A surprising number of Americans do seem to use bits of slang picked up from The Office or Harry Potter; as I say in my comment, “I always have to temper my irritation at Yanks tossing around Brit slang they picked up from watching TV with the reflection that it’s just language change at work and I don’t want to turn into a fuddy-duddy before my time.”

3) A MetaFilter post linked to Street Use (featuring “the ways in which people modify and re-create technology”), which links to this wonderful Russian site, where not only can you see things like hangers made from insulators, but if you click on the audio icon at the bottom of the page you get a page with a transcript of someone (often the creator) talking about the object and how it came to be made, and if you click on the icon on that page you hear the voice itself (RealAudio, I’m afraid). It’s great to hear these people reminiscing about the conditions under which they or their relatives came up with these creative solutions to Soviet shortages.

4) One of my linguistic heroes, Franz Bopp, gets extensive coverage at Varieties of Unreligious Experience: “It was for his brutal rigour that Bopp was admired ever since: the science he brought to perfection still survives, though many of his conclusions have been revised.” I think the dryasdust stuff is overstated (in historical linguistics, quiet rigor is infinitely preferable to excitable speculation), and I could have done without the final paean to the linguistic genius of Joseph Stalin, but it’s all forgivable beside the unexpected pleasure of seeing Opa Franz celebrated here in the 21st century.

See back formation and morphological reanalysis in their full glory at this hilarious post (it would be worthless without the picture!) by Mark Liberman at Language Log. And while we’re at it, has anybody ever heard/used “an ahundred” (from the second part of the post)?

The Arabic Papyrology Database allows you to search Arabic documents on papyrus, parchment and paper from the 7th up the 16th century A.D. – there are now 414 (out of ca. 2,000) at your disposal. Use this database to locate relevant historical data, investigate linguistic peculiarities, find references and more. [The APD is for] papyrologists, historians, philologists, editors, professors, students: Specialists in Arabic studies, Islamic studies, history of the Middle East upt to the 10th/16th c., Islamic law, linguisits, historians in general – just anyone dealing with Arabic documents. Try it out!

Firefox only, so far; sorry, IE users. (Via wood s lot.)

In the “Talk of the Town” section of last week’s New Yorker, there’s a story about an incident in which rich person Steve Wynn decided to sell a Picasso to rich person Steven Cohen for $139 million, but in the course of showing off his prize possession to a bunch of other rich people he accidentally put his elbow through the painting and decided to keep it after all. This being a language blog, I don’t have to try to express exactly how I feel about these rich people and their art deals, but I do want to comment on one phrase in the story, which I have put in bold: “Mary Boies ordered a six-litre bottle of Bordeaux, and when it was empty she had everyone sign the label, to commemorate the calamitous afternoon.” Now, there is a well-established system of nomenclature for wine bottles, and the correct term for a six-liter* bottle of Bordeaux is imperial (image). I find it baffling that when the rare occasion arises for talking about such a bottle you would scorn the chance to use a wonderful word like imperial (not quite as imposing as methuselah, the word for a six-liter bottle of Burgundy or champagne, but splendid enough). I’m guessing that the rich person ordering the bottle did not use the mot juste (“Bring us your biggest bottle of Petrus!” is more likely), but it saddens me that the magazine did not choose lexicographic precision over the mathematical variety.

*Why on earth is the New Yorker using the British spelling of liter? Nothing against British spellings, but they do not belong in New York publications.

Last year I posted about Glagolitic in Unicode; now I’m happy to report that Avva has created a gizmo that converts Cyrillic text into “true Cyrillic,” or Glagolitic, in image form. He says you can copy the result into a blog post, but when I try to post the Glagolitic equivalent of истинная кириллица ‘true Cyrillic,’ I get: “The image “http://avorobey.dreamhosters.com/scripts/glagol.pl?text=[long string of code]” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors”; perhaps someone can explain to this neanderthal how to make it work.

Language Log has been on a tear for some time now about the increasingly ridiculous insistence on the part of the NY Times on a figleaf of dashes to avoid the horrid appearance of words which it is virtually inconceivable any of their readers have not encountered; here is the most recent extended discussion, and here for your convenience is a full listing of all “Language Log postings on taboo vocabulary.” It has rarely seemed so ridiculous as in Deborah Solomon’s interview with Harry G. Frankfurt, author of a bestselling book whose title the Times gives as “On Bull—.” Needless to say, the actual title is On Bullshit; you can read a description (and the first chapter) at the publisher’s site, which also has a link to images of the covers of a number of translations (oddly, it’s simply Bullshit in German; I’d be interested in the verdict of people who know Hebrew and Japanese on the titles used for those languages). The entire interview focuses on the book, the word, and the concept, and by my count the fig-hidden term “bull—” appears eight times in a very short talk. It’s almost as if Ms. Solomon was deliberately highlighting the absurdity of the policy; if so, good for her. The Times routinely commits worse sins against language, but you’d think they’d want to avoid looking not only dumb but laughably out of it.

Brigid Brophy doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, but Bernard Hoepffner (who’s been working for a decade on a French translation of her In Transit that he can’t get publishers interested in) has an interesting discussion of the problems of translating a novel full of multilingual puns—a novel, to make things worse, whose narrator is of indeterminate gender:

This creates different problems in English and in French, and it is of little importance to try to work out in which language the constraint is more difficult to overcome (e.g. personal pronouns in both languages, possessive pronouns in English, adjectives and participles in French); it is sufficient to know that when writing the book, the author, if faced with a particular problem which seems impossible to solve, can always choose an alternative formulation (decide to remove a word, a sentence, a paragraph, scrap the whole book even); this solution is not available to the translator, who must translate each sentence as it was written, more or less each word, but unfortunately not as it was written (Pierre Ménard was not a translator)… To take just one example, the adjectives applied to the narrator, innocuous enough in English, are gendered in French. To take a single instance, in the sentence «The problem was the more acute because I was alone in a concourse of people» «I was alone» would normally be translated by «j’étais seul» or «j’étais seule» depending on the gender; this being impossible, another construction had to be found: «Ma solitude au milieu d’une foule de gens ne faisait qu’aviver le problème», which would retranslate back into English as «My solitude in a concourse of people made the problem more acute.» A different sentence although not a mistranslation. Numerous examples show that, in the case of a translation of In Transit, the French text will rarely be, through the simple test of back-translation, a strictly faithful translation of the English original. A count of the adjectives used in the translation would certainly indicate that a great number of them (at any rate a greater percentage than is normally found in a text written in French) do not change according to gender (propre, aimable, etc.). In most cases, the passé composé was also ruled out as the auxiliary être requires a past participle with an «e» if the subject is a woman, or, if the verb is constructed with avoir, the object (if the object is the narrator) cannot not be placed before the verb («Il a regardé Patricia», «Patricia, quand il l’a regardée»).

He says “In Transit has been a frequent companion; in the same way that, in nineteenth-century novels, it was through the Bible that the children of the poor were taught to read and write, I somehow learned to read English «in transit».” Even if I’m not enthusiastic about the idea of reading the actual book, I enjoyed reading about his difficulties in wrestling with it. (Via wood s lot.)

Through the magic of Technorati, I’ve become aware of two blogs I want to bring to your attention, and through the kindness of a correspondent a news story only tangentially related to language, but what the hell. First the blogs:

Transient Languages & Cultures “covers many different projects and groups all with the common theme of endangered languages and culture”; it’s hosted at the University of Sydney and has been going since June. The latest post, by Jane Simpson (it’s a multi-author blog), is about an online course in Pitjantjatjara:

It’s been very hard for ordinary city-dwelling Australians (i.e. most of us) to learn Indigenous Australian languages. Most universities don’t teach them, and getting to Alice Springs for courses at the Institute for Aboriginal Development is out of most people’s reach. Summer schools, such as the Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay ones mentioned in a previous post are rare. So it had to come, and it has, but in a rather unusual way. The first public online course in an Australian Indigenous language is run out of a demountable building in Alice Springs by the Ngapartji Ngapartji group…

All Mouth and Trousers has a more limited ambit: “Dedicated to preserving and promoting the great Northern English phrase ‘All mouth and trousers’ against barbarism and neglect.” It has only one post so far, and for all I know it may never have another, but that one is enough to make it immortal in my eyes; he says his mission “requires defending this venerable phrase against the more recent Southern perversion ‘all mouth and no trousers'” and goes on to quote Michael Quinion (“This strange expression comes from the north of England and is used, mainly by women in my experience, as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of a certain kind of pushy, over-confident male”) and rail against “promulgators of the Metropolitan vulgarisation.” Such extreme devotion to authentic local usage deserves our honor and respect.

Finally, Seth Borenstein of the AP reports “Grammar-based peptide fights bacteria”:

Using grammar rules alongside test tubes, biologists may have found a promising new way to fight nasty bacteria, including drug-resistant microbes and anthrax.

Studying a potent type of bacteria-fighters found in nature, called antimicrobial peptides, biologists found that they seemed to follow rules of order and placement that are similar to simple grammar laws. Using those new grammar-like rules for how these antimicrobial peptides work, scientists created 40 new artificial bacteria-fighters…

So study that grammar, kids, if you want to fight disease! (A hat tip to Songdog for sending me the story.)

Update. Mark Liberman has blogged this story at Language Log; please proceed thither for actual scholarly discussion. It turns out the paper is Christopher Loose, Kyle Jensen, Isidore Rigoutsos and Gregory Stephanopoulos, A linguistic model for the rational design of antimicrobial peptides, Nature 443, 867-869 (19 October 2006).

Further update (Dec. 2019). My “for all I know it may never have another” was too pessimistic; that delightful blog went on for some years, its final post (with a comment by JC!) was on February 17, 2012. And it’s still there — no need to use the Wayback Machine for this one.