languagehat.com

Lately I’ve been reading about World War One, and I happened on the kind of detailed, specialized site I love: Gallipoli Placenames. If you get confused between Abdel Rahman Bair and Abdul Yere, look no further: the first is “The great northern spur of the Sari Bair range, coming off Hill 971 and stretching its lower slopes as far north as the plain east of Hill 60,” and the second is “Turkish Anzac sector. The northern one of the two hills forming Hill Q.” And Anafarta could really be confusing if their entry didn’t separate it out for you:

(1) The Turkish name for the Suvla front.
(2) There are two villages inland from Suvla Bay called Buyuk (big) Anafarta and Kuchuk (small) Anafarta.
(3) Nickname (‘Anafarta Annie’) of a Turkish long-range artillery gun firing from the hills of the Anafarta Spur.

Now if only someone would produce a glossary or list of abbreviations for the novels of Pat Barker! I’ve just started Regeneration, and every once in a while she throws in an unexplained term like VADs or CCS, and although it only takes me a few seconds’ work with Google to discover that the first stands for Voluntary Aid Detachment and refers to nurses, while the second stands for Casualty Clearing Station (a kind of small mobile field hospital, the WWI equivalent of a MASH unit), not everyone is as expert at ferreting out such things as I (the Acronym Finder gives a daunting 175 hits for CCS), and it would be convenient to have them gathered in one place. (It would be even more convenient to have a glossary in the book itself, of course.)

There’s a great thread over at Crooked Timber that starts with a comparison of the English and German versions of the Kant quote from which the blog title is derived (“Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden”—I’m with Ingrid, the author of the post: I prefer Isaiah Berlin’s memorable English rendering, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”) and proceeds to all sorts of translation anecdotes and arguments, as well as discussion of which language to read works in when you know the original to some extent. My favorite strand of the discussion took off from the remark that “The first translation of The Master and Margarita allegedly translated ‘dentist’ as ‘Dante scholar'”; Anatoly (from whose Avva post I got this link, and who provided some of the best comments) explained that “dantist is not pretentious in Russian, and it doesn’t transmit French overtones if you don’t already know it comes from French. It’s used alongside ‘tooth doctor’ [zubnoi vrach] more or less synonymously; stomatolog is another word with exactly the same meaning in common speech” but said he couldn’t find dantist in the text of the Bulgakov novel, whereupon WorldWideWeber announced he had found it in the rewritten chapters—and linked to Simon Karlinsky’s 1972 NY Times review of Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, which contains a wonderfully splenetic blast at poor Michael Glenny, the translator:

My spot-checking failed to locate any truly spectacular howlers of the sort that made Michael Glenny’s earlier translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novels proverbial among literary scholars (among other gems, he rendered “dentist” as “an expert on Dante,” “saints” as “swine,” “squirrel fur” as “protein,” and, mistaking the Russian word for bathtub, vanna, for a woman’s name, added a new character to Bulgakov’s cast). But I did find one instance of Glenny’s notorious penchant for introducing female anatomy or nudity where there is none in the original: Xenya’s daydream of wearing a locket with a gauzy dress in Chapter Four is expanded into “ethereal in voile with a pendant between her breasts.” This is the same kind of breast fixation with which Glenny had previously saddled both Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn.

(In Glenny’s version of “For the Good Cause” in “Stories and Prose Poems” a “head-and-shoulders portrait of a young woman” is translated as a “bosomy pin-up” and the innocuous description of that portrait grossly and gratuitously sexualized).

The haste with which “August 1914” must have been translated is suggested by the occasionally careless and distorted transcriptions of proper names and place names. “A family that descended from Riurik” (i.e., the dynasty that ruled Russia before the Romanovs) is not very helpfully rendered as “the Riurikovich family” and “Yelena Molokhovetz” the celebrated Julia Child of pre-Revolutionary Russia, for some reason emerges as “Malakhov’s cookbook.”

“August 1914” is admittedly a most difficult text for translation; still, in fairness to the reader, the English version of the novel should have been labeled by the publishers “adapted” or “paraphrased” by Michael Glenny, rather than translated by him. it is hard to think of another recent instance where the old maxim traduttore—traditore would be more apt.

One thing I’m curious about is this comment by Ingrid (the original poster):

[Read more…]

I’m grateful to the volunteers who have helped me out with Finnish, Romanian, and Bulgarian; now I’m in need of someone who knows Swahili well enough to correct a mistaken phrase. As always, write to languagehat AT gmail DOT com, and you’re guaranteed the thanks of a grateful nation editor.
That’s a pretty mingy post, so let me fill it out with a quote from the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Pogo, specifically the strip from Aug. 27, 1949:

Albert the Alligator: What’s all the fuss?
Pogo: Ol’ Doc Seminole Sam, the carpet bag man, is got a bug name of Currier B. Ives what engraves funny stories on the point of a pin.
Porky Porcupine: Since only you can see Mr. Ives or read the jokes, pray read off a bit, Doc.
Doc Seminole: Very well. [squinting at point of pin] It say here: “The maximum inclination of the plane of a navigational planet to the plane of the e[c]liptic is three degrees.” ——Hmmmm! [consternated] Gentlemen, apparently I’ve mixed the pins. This one seems to bear the constitution of a small southern republic in a foreign tongue.
Albert [smiling happily]: Go ahead an’ finish her—she starts out funny.

From an article by Tom Segev, this fascinating report on an ethnic group I didn’t know much about (though I had a brief post about them a couple of years ago):

Sometimes, when Gila Hakimi leaves a note for her husband, she writes it in Rashi script, in Aramaic. That’s only natural: This is the language used by the Hakimis for everyday discourse as well; they speak Aramaic to their eldest son too.

I phoned her in my search for the story furthest removed from the war, but Gila Hakimi said it isn’t all that remote. Anyone who says prayers, opens the Talmud, and in effect anyone who speaks Hebrew speaks Aramaic in one way or another. But as an everyday language of discourse? Yes, says Hakimi. At least several thousand Israelis, who are generally described as “Kurds,” speak Aramaic, in one dialect or another. Unfortunately, more and more people are ceasing to conduct their everyday lives in Aramaic and are forgetting the language. That is why Hakimi created her one-woman show. As far as is known, she is the first Aramaic stand-up comedian. She is extremely successful.

Aramaic is a language with a fascinating and very complex story. The Babylonians and the Persians used it as their official language, and afterward, it was mainly a Jewish language. There is ancient, middle and modern Aramaic. From its inception it was heard in at least two dialect groups, Eastern and Western. In Eastern Middle Aramaic there is a Tadmor and a Nabatean dialect, among others; in Western Middle Aramaic there is a distinction between Christian, Eretz Israel, Galilee and Samaritan dialects. There is Syrian Aramaic, which is generally located between Eastern and Western Aramaic, and in all the dialects, the spoken language is not identical to the written language.

All this is also meant to explain the difficulty of understanding what the “Kurdish” Israelis mean when they say Aramaic; they are not all referring to exactly the same thing, because there are different types of Kurds among them: Some come from Kurdistan in Iraq, some from Iran, Turkey or Syria – some are “ours” and some are not. For example, there is a Web site that perpetuates “Nash Didan” – “our people,” and includes a dictionary, songs and jokes. No, said Hakimi, they (the operators of the Web site) come from Urmia and that’s something else. Her one-woman show is called “Belishna Noshan” – “In our language.”

Hakimi was the principal of the Yeshurun religious state elementary school in Pardes Hannah-Karkur, and when she retired five years ago, she decided to fulfill an old dream and went onstage with a show that revives the folklore of the past with a smile, here and there satirically, and all in Aramaic. The beginning was very modest, without any celebrity mannerisms, but in recent months she finds herself in the center of a major Aramaic awakening: She travels from city to city with her show, and attracts large audiences everywhere. She is told that more and more family celebrations are now being held in Aramaic, and this week she was invited to conduct a course in spoken Aramaic.

She feels as though she has extracted from the members of her ethnic group something that was hidden inside them, and perhaps until now they were embarrassed to reveal it, or neglected it and now are rediscovering it. Something of the kind has been happening for several years to Yiddish speakers, as part of the return to Judaism. Like most of the shows in Yiddish, Hakimi goes for nostalgia. One of her subjects is the traditional status of women, when the prevailing practice was “All glorious is the King’s daughter within the palace.” She levels criticism at modern feminism. We argued about that a little, in Hebrew; I assume that it sounds better in Aramaic.

Thanks for the link, Kobi!

(Note: the linked article includes all sorts of political/historical discussion that is bound to annoy certain LH readers; I hope they will recognize that I am blogging it solely for the linguistic/cultural information and ignore the rest, which I am not in any way endorsing.)

Update. Bulbul has posted some excellent material on the Mandaic variety of Aramaic.

Or so says the Guardian, in a story by Alan Smithers about a decline in the study of French and German: “The four most often spoken languages in the world are, in order, Mandarin, English, Hindustani and Spanish. Spanish is fast rising in importance and there are now more Spanish speakers in the United States than English.” [Emphasis added.] This is one of the most mindbogglingly stupid statements I’ve seen in a professional publication (though I realize that in the case of the Grauniad the word “professional” has to be applied loosely). As Mark Liberman says in the Language Log post where I found the story:

We can’t directly blame the (admittedly often slipshod and credulous) research practices of journalists, because the author of the article, Alan Smithers, is “director of the centre for education and employment research at the University of Buckingham”, and thus not a journalist at all. On the other hand, we can’t be sure that this is just one of the (often careless and even dishonest) talking points of public intellectuals, because the article was edited at the Guardian, and might well have been changed substantially from the text that Prof. Smithers submitted.
It’s that old problem of attributional abduction. My best guess is the one I started with — the Guardian’s entire editorial staff is on vacation, and has delegated its duties to the night office-cleaning crew, who are having a little competition among themselves to see who can slip the most extravagant falsehoods into print.

Oh, if you’re curious about the numbers: “according to the data from the 2000 census, 10.71% of households use Spanish, as opposed to 82.105% who use English.”
Update. See now this Language Log post for further information on both Smithers and the facts of the case.

OK, everybody, I need some specialized knowledge. I’m involved with a book of foreign expressions, and I have the gravest doubts about some of them, which seem to have been taken over from other such books, the original form, if any, having gotten garbled along the way. If anyone knows what the originals of the following might be, I’ll be deeply grateful:

basa basa (Persian)
The Arabic phrase “basa basa” means to ogle, cast amorous glances or make sheeps’ eyes at someone [is it Persian? Arabic? Arabo-Persian?]

quibo (Chinese)
the clear bright eyes of a beautiful woman [qu- is clearly wrong; is it qibo?]

Also, I need some help with Bulgarian, Romanian, and Finnish; if you know any of these languages, please drop me a line at languagehat AT gmail DOT com. Together we can make this an accurate book, unlike the ones described here!

Addendum: I forgot to mention mamihlapinatapai, an alleged Tierra del Fuegan [actually Yaghan (Yagán)—thanks, Jess!] word meaning “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start”; anybody know where The Guinness Book of Records might have gotten this (“most succinct word”)?

Update: Beth at Cassandra Pages brought basa basa to the attention of her amazing father-in-law and reports the results in this post:

[Read more…]

A recent entry from Pepys Diary ended with this sentence: “This day Sir W. Batten tells me that Mr. Newburne (of whom the nick-word came up among us for “Arise Tom Newburne”) is dead of eating Cowcoumbers, of which the other day, I heard another, I think Sir Nich. Crisps son.” The poisonous nature of cucumbers was new to me (and to think my wife has been feeding them to me for years!), but so was the spelling cowcoumbers. Checking with the OED, I found the following etymology:

[In Wyclif’s form cucumer, app. directly from L.; in cocomber, cucumber, etc., a. obs. F.cocombre (in 13th c. coucombre, now concombre) = Pr. cogombre, It. cocomero, early ad. L. cucumer-em (nom. cucumis) cucumber.
The spelling cowcumber prevailed in the 17th and beg. of 18th c.; its associated pronunciation (‘kaʊkʌmbə(r)) was still that recognized by Walker; but Smart 1836 says ‘no well-taught person, except of the old school, now says cow-cumber.. although any other pronunciation.. would have been pedantic some thirty years ago’.]

This kind of change in linguistic fashion is fascinating: who started saying K(Y)OO- instead of COW-, and why, and why did it catch on so quickly and universally? Surely not anti-cow prejudice?

Mark Liberman quotes this sentence (from a review of a couple of horse books), with its whiff of fragrant equine snowclones: “The Blackfoot of the Plains had more than 100 words for the colours of horses, the Kazaks of central Asia 62 for bay shades alone. These are not just numerical curiosities from old horse societies, but signs of a human watchfulness and a deep connectedness to the natural world that was the norm, and is now rare.” Mark says “If you know enough Blackfoot or Kazak to evaluate these claims, or can find a relevant reference, let me know.” I too am curious; anybody know where on the continuum between “silly” and “overstated” this claim falls?

A couple of Japanese-related posts caught my eye:

1) Matt at No-sword has a post about a document that “records the Shōwa Emperor’s decision not to visit the [Yasukuni] shrine because of the class-A criminals there”; he says:

…my attention was caught by the memo’s final phrase:

だから　私あれ以来参拝していない。　それが私の心だ
So, since then, I haven’t worshipped [at Yasukuni]. That is my kokoro.

Kokoro is a tough word to Englishify. To put that more accurately, it doesn’t map to English very neatly. Depending on context, it might be translated as “heart”, “spirit”, “soul”, “feeling”, “mind”, “mood”, “opinion”, “sensibility”, “hope”, “situation”, “meaning”, “plan”, “reason”, “center”, “topic”, and I’m sure there are others, and that’s only if you insist that the translation be a single noun like the source. For example, one of the articles I linked above goes with “feeling”, but this article translates the relevant phrase as “That is from my heart.”

Kind of reminds me of the dustman’s dumpling.

2) Meanwhile, Joel at Far Outliers has a post about what the sci.lang.japan page he links to calls “a relatively recent trend in Japanese slang… to shorten long words into two or three characters plus the inflectional ending i and make new i adjectives”; the adjective that started Joel off was “kimochi warui ‘unpleasant feeling’, which [a visiting Japanese college student] shortened to kimoi.” Since she was trying to render ‘gross, yucky,’ either the word has strengthened in negative connotation since Arthur Rose-Innes rendered kyō wa sukoshi kimochi ga warui as “I don’t feel quite well today” or “don’t feel quite well” is an example of that famous British understatement.

Incidentally, I was wondering exactly how old the Rose-Innes Vocabulary of Common Japanese Words is; my copy is a 1945 reprint of the 1942 first edition of the Yale revision of what is clearly a substantially older book, since the preface by George A. Kennedy says “The Vocabulary compiled by Arthur Rose-Innes is not merely the best of its kind, but practically the only Japanese-English vocabulary suitable for the beginning student… The principal defect of the work lies in the selection of words, many important modern terms, such as ‘airplane’, being lacking, while some of the included terms seem relatively non-essential.” I checked BookFinder.com, but the entries for earlier editions say things like “Yokohama Early edition Hard Cover,” leading me to suspect that the earlier ones were undated. Anybody know anything about the history of this useful little book (or, for that matter, of Mr. Rose-Innes himself)?

Another odd word for your delectation: serow, “any of several goatlike artiodactyl mammals (genus Capricornis) of eastern Asia that are usually rather dark and heavily built and some of which have distinct manes.” Aside from the unusual name (it’s pronounced suh-ROH), what struck me was the etymology, “Lepcha sa-ro long-haired Tibetan goat.” Lepcha is a Tibeto-Burman language of Sikkim, spoken by the Lepcha, for whom, according to the Wikipedia entry, “sex is the main recreation…, beginning at age 10 or 11 and lasting throughout their lives. Adultery is expected and not viewed as a problem.” Ah, happy Lepcha!

As for the serow, according to Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People-Wildlife Relations, by John Knight, the Japanese serow is a “national treasure” and “emblematic animal of Japan,” comparable to the Chinese panda. You learn something every day.

Update (March 2021). The Wikipedia entry no longer includes the “sex is the main recreation…” quote; checking the history of the entry, I find “14:31, January 3, 2013‎ 86.169.53.134 talk‎ 15,854 bytes −787‎ Undid revision 529912198 by JFHJr (talk). The suggestion that sex between children is common or encouraged is offensive, potentially harmful, and untrue. See also Talk comment by Prajwal Kharel.” Doubtless for the best.