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I’m as aware as anyone of the high percentage of words that don’t have known etymologies (boy and dog, for instance), but every once in a while an example strikes me with particular force. Just now it was griot, in the words of the OED “A member of a class of travelling poets, musicians, and entertainers in North and West Africa, whose duties include the recitation of tribal and family histories; an oral folk-historian or village story-teller, a praise-singer.” I was aware that the Mande languages spoken in the area don’t use this word or anything like it (the Bambara word, for example, is jeli), but I was surprised to see the OED’s “uncertain ulterior etym.” Merriam-Webster simply says it’s from French. So I went to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé and found that it went back to 1637 (as guiriot) and that the etymology is, yes, uncertain: “peut-être issu, par l’intermédiaire d’un parler négro-port., du port. criado « domestique ».” Hmm. I don’t much like it, but I guess it’s possible. Why wouldn’t they have adopted a local word for such a characteristic local phenomenon, though?

My friend Vivien Smith has sent me a copy of the book her mother, Nancy Mathews, wrote about her South African childhood, called Dancing on Mara Dust (Vivien wrote a concluding chapter bringing the story up to date). As the jacket copy says, “The book tells of lifestyles that have disappeared, of people and places who are but shadowy memories, interspersed with unique observations of animal life and with snapshots of royalty and famous names from long ago.” Mrs. Mathews grew up in the 1920s and ’30s on a farm in the sparsely settled north of the Transvaal, near the Soutpansberg (‘salt-pan mountain’), and the work and ingenuity necessary to make a go of it there are amazing to someone who grew up decades later in easier circumstances. I enjoyed the loving descriptions of the land and its inhabitants, both human and animal (there’s a splendid description of fish eagles on page 140), but of course I particularly appreciate the use of language: “zithering” is exactly right for the sound of cicadas, but it would never have occurred to me. And I’ve learned some new words, like inspan for ‘to yoke, harness’ (apparently only South African). To add to my pleasure, there are bits of Northern Sotho/Sepedi scattered through the book (and a helpful glossary in the front). I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in South Africa, growing up on farms, or just a good (if sometimes very sad) story.

My inbox has brought me some Chinese-related material, which I will now share with you.

1) Lyn Jeffery at Virtual China has a post in which she discusses an article on “why you can’t move web design for English language sites directly over to Chinese language sites.” A summary:

1. Chinese characters leave too little empty space when compared to English language letters in the same design layout.
2. Chinese characters lack a wavy, up and down 起伏 rhythm.
3. The power return of Chinese characters is a serious limitation for design.
Result: If you’re not careful, Chinese design can easily turn as a rigid as a bar of iron.

Thanks for the link, Mister Morris!

2) Matt (马特) says his site Sinoling is “a collection of Chinese (mostly Mandarin) resources, including ancient poetry and literature; a magnifiable list of Chinese radicals; photos… of signs containing Chinese characters; topical vocab lists; and other Chinese language- and culture-related materials. The site is in English and Simplified Chinese.” He’s also got a word of the day page and an English-Chinese name translator. It all looks very useful if you’re studying Chinese.

3) Finally, John Emerson of Idiocentrism asks: “Do you have any insight on Chinese-language software for internet posting? I’ve been using Unicode HTML and it’s clunky and slow.” If you have such insight, please share it.

I had heard about A Russian Course by Alexander Lipson but had never seen a copy until the excellent Songdog gave me his battered old coursebook. The first chapter starts off:

Как живут ударники?
Ударники живут хорошо.
How do shock-workers live?
Shock-workers live well.

It continues “Where do they work? They work in factories. How do they work? They work with enthusiasm. What do they do in parks? In parks they think about life. About what life? About life in factories. That’s how shock-workers live!” The chapter continues with a discussion of бездельники, or loafers: “How do loafers live? At work they steal pencils. In parks they conduct themselves badly. Yes, comrades. That is how loafers live!” In later chapters there are choruses of male concrete-workers (“Our plant is a concrete plant. Our brigade is a concrete one. Our plant is a concrete plant. And our task is concrete. Concrete, concrete, concrete, concrete…”) and discussions of philosophy (“What is life? What are people? I want to know what life is.”). I suspect I would have learned more in college if I’d had this wacky text, except that its first edition came out in 1974, a couple years after I graduated. And in case you’re thinking it’s amusing but impractical, read what John has to say:

I respond well to linguistic approaches such as the one Lipson pioneered for Russian. Thank Bog I used Lipson’s books for 2 years, I really, really understand the structure of Russian in ways that those who learned from Soviet sponsored texbooks do not. His choice of vocabulary was pretty weird, though. I learned the word for “concrete mixer” before I learned the word for “airplane”, for instance, because one of the dialogues we had to memorize concerned a lazy construction worker. Lo and behold when I got to the USSR I wound up working on a construction site. Full of lazy (and drunk) construction workers. Working on – you guessed it – the betonomeshalka.

And what other textbook will teach you how to say “Comrade director, nobody loves me. Nobody understands me. I’m alone. I’m alone”?

I once sort-of-followed Japanese baseball; I didn’t keep up with it on a weekly basis, but I knew who was doing well and could have named most of the teams in each league. One of my favorite team names was the Yakult Swallows (my favorite name, of course, was the Nippon Ham Fighters); there’s just something appealing about the combination of the lovely word “swallows” with the Cthulhu-like “Yakult.” Now, years later, I have learned from an Ask MetaFilter thread that the team is named for Yakult, “a yogurt-like beverage made by fermenting a mixture of skimmed milk and sugar with a special strain of the bacteria Lactobacillus casei.” And according to a Yakult FAQ, Yakult is derived from the word jahurto, meaning ‘yoghurt’ in Esperanto. How ’bout that! (The accepted word for ‘yogurt’ in Esperanto, however, is apparently jogurto.)

The current item on my WWI reading list is Solzhenitsyn’s November 1916, a thousand-page tome that will probably give me massive biceps by the time I’ve finished lugging it around. People complain about its “long passages providing historical background,” but I eat that stuff up; I’m probably the ideal reader at the moment, since I already know who all the historical characters are. What I’m complaining about is the bizarre set of choices made by the translator, H.T. Willetts, when it comes to rendering place names. The first chapter begins: “Birds don’t like some forests. There were fewer birds in skimpy, stunted Dryagovets than in Golubovshchina, three versts to the rear.” This is a perfectly decent rendering of the original: “Птицы любят не всякий лес. В жиденьком слабеньком Дряговце было их куда меньше и скучней, чем в Голубовщине, три версты в тыл.” What I am here drawing attention to is the rendering of the Russian names as (transliterated) Russian. Normal, you say? Sure, but a few paragraphs later we get: “…allow the Germans to cross the Szara, occupy the Torczyc Heights, and convert the manor house on the hill at Michalowo into a fortress.” The “Szara”? “Torczyc”? What the hell? I checked the Russian, and found “…а немцам дать перейти Щару, занять Торчицкие высотки и обратить в крепость возвышенный фольварк Михалово.” Any sane translator would render the place names as Shchara, Torchits, and Mikhalovo. But the good Mr. Willetts has for some reason lapsed into Polish. From there on, it’s what seems to be a random mix; “Baranowicze” (normally known as Baranovichi, where the Russian HQ had been earlier) and “Stolpce” (Stolbtsy) are followed by “Sablya,” which is followed by “Lake Koldyczew,” which is followed by “Melikhovichi.” Sometimes he yokes the two in the same phrase: “No Stwolowicze [i.e., Stvolovichi], and no Yushkevichi.” What is going on here?

Now, I grant that there are Polish names for all these geographical features in the part of the former Russian Empire that adjoined Poland, just as there are (say) Greek names for many places in Turkey and German ones for places in Eastern Europe. And I grant that Belorussia/Belarus (where these early scenes are set) was once part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). But that was many centuries ago, and during WWI the area was part of the Russian Empire, and the official language was Russian, and the local populace presumably spoke either Russian or Belorussian for the most part, and though there were doubtless Poles as well I’m completely at a loss to understand why a random sprinkling of place names should be given in Polish (which, among other things, makes them harder to look up). Any light that can be shed on this irritating mystery will be much appreciated.

I’ve linked to it before, but I decided it was high time I gave bulbulovo (“bulbul’s online notebook”) its own post and added it to the blogroll—there’s just too much good stuff to ignore. Thursday the “Philologist in making” listed some wonderful books he got at what sounds like a wonderful Bratislava bookstore; earlier he bitched about the poor quality of Slovakian translators while providing his own versions of some colloquial usages from Law and Order (a show I also enjoy) and explained the derivation of the language name Bislama from beach-la-mar, an edible sea slug much traded by the Vanuatu islanders who use the language (and may I add that the inhabitants of Vanuatu must get tired of jokes about their national anthem, “Yumi, Yumi, Yumi,” continuing “…I’ve got love in my tumi”). And check out this post from last week, which not only links to a Swedish site for minority languages but gives his own analysis of the dialect features of “meänkieli (meidän kieli = ‘our language’), also known as Tornedalen Finnish,… a dialect of Finnish spoken in the area around and including the twin-city of Tornio-Haparanda on the Swedish-Finnish border in Lappland.” Keep it up, O Slovak songbird!
Apropos of nothing, by the way, here’s a sign I encountered in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport last time I passed through there; it adorned the location that had apparently been 360° Gourmet Burritos (gourmet burritos??):
“This concept is closed at this time. For service, please visit one of our other concepts in the Marché.”
What I want to know is, are these concepts a priori or a posteriori?

I’m pleased to report that wood s lot turns six today. I’m astonished at Mark’s ability to keep up a steady stream of superb posts over so long a time; his is one of the very few sites I refuse to miss even when I’m having a busy day. He never, ever phones it in, and his coverage is both wide and deep. Hell, I’d go there for the photographs alone, and I’m not ordinarily a big fan of the photographic art. Congratulations, and keep it up!

Here’s a wonderful (and seasonally appropriate) poem he quotes today:

End of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
the roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
that part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their population forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

– Stanley Kunitz

Andrew Leonard has a Salon article called “Choosing Giles over Wade” (you’ll have to look at an ad for a moment before the “continue to article” link appears in the lower right-hand corner) that begins with an amusing description of being “attacked as an imperialist for spelling the name of the Chinese province Sichuan as Szechwan” as a lead-in to the multiplicity of romanizations for Chinese (“Street signs in Taiwan are a mad mix of Wade Giles, and at least three other systems: Postal System Pinyin, Yale and Gwoyeu Romatzyh”) and a very silly excursus on how wonderful it is that Chinese has such a complicated writing system (“It is not just the depth and richness of thousands of years of culture and history that are embedded in the many thousands of intricate ideograms. It is in the very fact that I am not sure which dictionary to reach for, or which method to use for identifying a given character. This is not the place to discourse on such techniques—the point is, there is no right or even sure way to proceed…”) before getting to what is to me the most interesting part:

Anyone interested in the Chinese language, whether an expert or novice, would do well to read the transcript of a lecture that Herbert Giles gave at Columbia University in 1902. It is a fascinating introduction to the Chinese language that at once illustrates both its awesome complexity and its enduring powers of seduction. The occasion of the speech is Columbia’s decision to endow a professorship in Chinese studies, something that Giles considers quite admirable, given the small number of scholars in the field at the time. He even notes that “Twenty-five years ago there was but one professor of Chinese in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and even that one spent his time more in adorning his profession than in imparting his knowledge to classes of eager students.”

I sat bolt upright in my cubicle upon reading that statement. The only person Giles could possibly be referring to would be Wade—the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge, and the original creator of the Romanization system that Giles later modified into its enduring form. I immediately went looking for more information.

Alas, there are still limits to the Internet’s capabilities. David McMullen’s “Chinese studies at Cambridge—wide-ranging scholarship from a doubtful start”, from the Magazine of the Cambridge Society, is not yet available online, and the initially promising “The Formation and Development of Sinology at Cambridge” by Que Weimin of the Department of History, Zhejiang University, turned out to be in Chinese, and I am currently without my dictionaries. But I did find a speech given by Giles’ great grandson, Giles Pickford, in Taiwan in 2005, on the occasion of the founding of a new museum. Pickford observed that Giles had made many enemies in his life, including…. Thomas Wade.

The plot thickens! Thomas Wade may have been a soldier in the infamous Opium Wars, giving heft to any theories of Wade-Giles Romanization as a tool of neocolonialist ideological oppression. But Giles, apparently, was something else. According to Pickford, “Giles was also disliked by the Christian Missionaries whose work he despised. This antagonism was contrary to British Government policy, which saw the work of the missionaries as entirely legitimate and beneficial. Giles disagreed, and made his disagreement very open and public… Giles was also unpopular with the British traders because he opposed the overcrowding of emigrant Chinese on British ships. In 1881 he was presented with a Red Umbrella by the Hsiamen Chinese Chamber of Commerce in recognition of this service to the Chinese people.”

All my adult life, the names Wade and Giles, the first two professors of Chinese at Cambridge, have been linked inseparably in my head, as I am sure is true for countless other students of Chinese. But how many know that the two men were enemies, or that one was opposed to missionary evangelization (also a sin in my book,) or was a powerful advocate for better treatment of Chinese by the British?

I didn’t, and I’m glad to find out. (Thanks go to Language Log’s Ben Zimmer for the link.)

Update (Mar. 2025). I’ve added a link for the Que Weimin article and provided an archived one for the Pickford speech, but The Magazine of the Cambridge Society is still stubbornly offline. Come on, Cantabrigians, get with the 21st century!

Last week’s New Yorker has a Burkhard Bilger article called “The Path of Stones” about the gem industry in Madagascar. I was skimming through it when I hit a reference to “a low-grade sapphire known as geuda” that the Thais learned to turn into genuine-looking sapphire in the ’70s. This word is not in any dictionary, as far as I can tell, so I have no idea how it’s pronounced or where it’s from. This irritates me. Once again, I turn to the assembled multitueds, with confidence in your collective experience of the world. Surely some LH reader has hung out with enough gem dealers to know how they say the word: gooda? gyooda? gee-ooda? If you know the etymology, that’s definitely a plus.