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Angelo of Sauvage Noble has translated Hamlet’s soliloquy into Proto-Indo-European, as “H₃regs suhnus gʷʰn̥ntosyo” (The Slain King’s Son). It begins:

eg̑oh₂ h₁esoh₂? way! ne h₁esoh₂? h₁r̥h₁yoh₂er:
upo de melyos teh₂ smereses bʰeroh₂
mn̥teyi Hih₁tleh₂ dusmeneses smr̥tos,
kʷoynoybʰos wē toybʰos tl̥neh₂oh₂ h₁r̥meh₂,
h₂enti yeh₂ stisth₂ents peh₂woyh₁m̥?

Or, in what he aptly calls Old High Translationese:

Should I be? Alas! Should I not? I ask myself:
shall I, having been allotted, better suffer in (my) mind
those missiles of ill-disposed fate?
or should I raise arms to those troubles
which, standing against them, I might stop?

Very enjoyable for this Indo-Europeanist manqué!

Tip for easier reading: just ignore the various hs, which represent the laryngeals (nobody knows how to pronounce them anyway): “Eg̑o eso? way! ne eso? r̥yoer…”

Bill Poser at Language Log has an extremely useful post in which he goes “beyond the Ethnologue” (the best quick reference for language families) and cites books that give reliable information about language relationships for Africa, the Americas, Australia (I’m delighted to see Claire Bowern namechecked!), and New Guinea. This is the sort of service the Log should be providing (alongside its vigilant search for snowclones); who better than linguists to point people to accurate information about languages? Perhaps someone will weigh in here on similarly reliable books that cover other areas, for instance East Asia.
Addendum. See now Bill’s follow-up on exactly why Merrit Ruhlen’s approach to classifying languages is worthless.

Safire’s latest “On Language” column is a fairly pointless trudge through various phrases used to describe the current conflict in Iraq; what caught my attention was the end of the first paragraph: “…others who see it as more political than religious call it an insurgency or an internecine (in-ter-NEE-sin) struggle.” (I have added the italics from the printed article, and it strikes me as bizarre in the extreme that the Times doesn’t bother to carry over the italics in the online version, since they are necessary in separating words presented as words from words used in the normal way as referents; if I were Safire, I would force them to remedy this. I note that the Houston Chronicle manages to preserve the italics when they reprint the column.)

It truly surprises me that Safire passed up a chance to expatiate upon the word internecine; he could have written an entire column on that alone. I’ll start by quoting Fowler‘s entry (first edition, of course; there’s no point reading diluted Fowler):

internecine has suffered an odd fate; being mainly a literary or educated man’s word, it is yet neither pronounced in the scholarly way nor allowed its Latin meaning. It should be called ĭnter’nĭsĭn, & is called ĭnternē’sīn; see False quantity. And the sense has had the Kilkenny-cat notion imported into it because mutuality is the idea conveyed by inter- in English; the Latin word meant merely of or to extermination (cf. intereo perish, intercido slay, interimo destroy) without implying that of both parties. The imported notion, however, is what gives the word its only value, since there are plenty of substitutes for it in its true sense—destructive, slaughterous, murderous, bloody, sanguinary, mortal, & so forth. The scholar may therefore use or abstain from the word as he chooses, but it will be vain for him to attempt correcting other people’s conception of the meaning.

The American Heritage Dictionary shares his sensible approach and adds some interesting detail about where exactly the change in meaning came from:

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Last year I posted about an early statement of comparative linguistics by Ibn Quraysh quoted in Lameen Souag’s Jabal al-Lughat; now Lameen cites an even better one in this entry:

Ibn Hazm (994-1064) was a polymathic intellectual of Cordoba, equally well-known for his poetry and his religious commentary. Less well-known are his opinions on Semitic linguistics, which turn out to have been rather impressive. In the quote below, he demonstrates a clearer understanding of the process of historical change than Ibn Quraysh, who seems to have seen the mutual similarities as as resulting as much or more from intermixture than from common ancestry, although both ultimately succumb to the temptation of explaining linguistic family trees in terms of religiously given genealogies. As near as I can translate it off the cuff, he said:

…What we have settled on and determined to be certain is that Syriac and Hebrew and Arabic – that is the language of Mudar and Rabia (ie Arabic as we know it), not the language of Himyar (ie Old South Arabian) – are one language that changed with the migrations of its people, so that it was ground up… For, when a town’s people live near another people, their language changes in a manner clear to anyone who considers the issue, and we find that the masses have changed the pronunciation of Arabic significantly, to the point that it is so distant from the original as to be like a different language, so we find them saying `iinab for `inab (grape), and ‘asTuuT for sawT (whip), and thalathdaa for thalaathatu danaaniir (three dinars), and when a Berber becomes Arabized and wants to say shajarah (tree) he says sajarah, and when a Galician becomes Arabized he replaces `ayn and Haa with haa, so he says muhammad when he means to say muHammad, and such things are frequent. So whoever ponders on Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac will become certain that their difference is of the type we have described, through changes in people’s pronunciation through the passage of time and the difference of countries and the bordering of other nations, and that they are in origin a single language. Having established that, Syriac is the ancestor of both Arabic and Hebrew, and to be more precise, the first to speak this Arabic was Ishmael, upon him be peace, for it is the language of his sons, and Hebrew is the language of Isaac and his sons, and Syriac is without doubt the language of Abraham, blessings upon him peace and upon our prophet and peace.

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Every once in a while someone complains that I don’t have enough hat posts around here, which is the sad truth, so I’m glad that plep has provided me with the opportunity to share with you the National Museum of African Art’s “Hats Off!” page.

Modifying or adorning the body is a means through which African peoples express their collective and individual pride, ideals, aesthetics and identity. Many African cultures throughout the continent have long considered the head the center of one’s being—a source of individual and collective identity, power, intelligence and ability. Adorning the head as part of everyday attire or as a statement, therefore, is especially significant.

You can find more hats by going to The Diversity of African Art and clicking on Costume Accessories and then picking Hats out of the first drop-down menu. And I like the fact that they give local names, e.g. “Cap (shüötu),” though I wish they’d indicate the actual language.

The snowflow
nearly-April releases    melting bright.

Then a darkdown
       needles and shells the pools.

Swepth of suncoursing sky
steeps us in
      salmon-stream
          crop-green
           rhubarb-coloured shrub-tips:

everything waits for the
lilacs, heaped tumbling — and their warm
licorice perfume.

–Margaret Avison

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Mark Liberman at Language Log has been investigating the “chin flick” gesture that Antonin Scalia recently used (and explained as meaning “I could not care less”). His latest post quotes an e-mail from Adam Kendon, “one of the world’s foremost authorities on the topic of gesture”; Kendon, in turn, quotes “Andrea de Jorio, whose La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano from 1832 is rather comprehensive regarding Neapolitan gesture” (I saw a reprint of this book, which is fascinating and enlightening—there should be such books for all cultures) as saying the gesture is a simple negative. This is backed up by “two local Procidanians” (Kendon is on Procida at the moment), but “if you ask someone from the more northerly parts of Italy about this gesture they are likely to say that it means ‘I don’t care’ or ‘It does not bother me’—and they do tend to suggest that it is a rather rude gesture.” In southern Italy and Sicily, the gesture frequently accompanies a backward toss of the head, and Kendon adds the following parenthetical remark:

As to the gesture of negation in which you push the head back, this is still used even today in Southern Italy and Sicily, and is almost certainly very old. It is distributed in those parts of the Mediterranean that were, in antiquity, occupied by Greeks [see Gerhard Rohlfs “Influence des élements autochones sur les langues romanes (Problèmes de gógraphie linguistique). Actes du Colloque International de Civilisations, Littératures et Langues Romanes. Bucherest: Comission nationale roumaine pour l’Unesco, Actes du Colloque international de civilisations. 1959/1960. 240-247 and see also Peter Collett and Alberta Contarello “Gesti di assenso e di dissenso” in Pio Enrico Ricci Bitti, ed. Comunicazione e gestualità. Milan: Franco Agneli, 1987, pp. 69-85]

I myself saw the head-toss used routinely not only in Greece but in Turkey (which of course was Greek before the Battle of Manzikert in 1071) and I believe also in Syria. It’s amazing how persistent such nonverbal signifiers can be.

I finished Fearful Majesty (see this post) on the flight back from California yesterday, and I was thinking of writing about Livonia—the prize for which Ivan fought, and lost, a 25-year war, leaving his country a wreck—but you know what? Livonia isn’t a particularly interesting word; it’s just ‘the land of the Livonians‘ (a Finnic people now largely absorbed into the Latvian population), and the word is of obscure origin. (I might say, though, that the OED’s present first citation of Livonian, from 1652, will surely be antedated, since there was much discussion of Baltic trade routes in Elizabeth’s time. And did you know that Elizabeth the Great and Ivan the Terrible exchanged a number of quite revealing letters? Ivan offered her refuge in case she was overthrown, which in the 1560s must have looked like a serious possibility, considering that, as Bobrick puts it, “in a mere five years two monarchs had gone to the scaffold, England had officially changed its religion twice, had been horribly torn by civil war, and had crowned four heads of state.”)

No, I think I’ll write instead about the name of an island off the Livonian (now Estonian) coast. It’s now called Saaremaa, but the traditional German (and international) name was Oesel (Ösel). The two names would seem to have nothing to do with each other, but Oesel is from Old Norse Ey-sýsla ‘island district’ and Saaremaa is Estonian saar ‘island’ + maa ‘land,’ so they mean exactly the same thing. (The island to the north is Hiiumaa ‘land of giants’ in Estonian and Dagö ‘day island’ in Swedish, the latter supposedly because it’s a day’s sail from Stockholm.)

This is a terrible story with a spark of black humor in it. Mikhail Bakhtin spent the late 1930s working on what some say was his masterwork, a study of the German novel in the 18th century (specifically, the Bildungsroman). I’ll quote the rest of the story from two published books, since there’s a lot of inaccurate material floating around on the internet (for instance, some people set the scene during the Siege of Leningrad, but as far as I can determine Bakhtin was living in the outskirts of Moscow during the war). The first is p. xiii of Michael Holquist’s introduction to the Bakhtin collection Speech Genres and Other Late Essays:

The essay on the Bildungsroman is actually a fragment from one of Bakhtin’s several lost books. In this case, nonpublication cannot be blamed on insensitive censors. Its nonappearance resulted, rather, from effects that grew out of the Second World War, one of the three great historical moments Bakhtin lived through (the other two being the Bolshevik Revolution and the Stalinist purges). Sovetsky pisatel (Soviet Writer), the publishing house that was to bring out Bakhtin’s book The Novel of Education and Its Significance in the History of Realism, was blown up in the early months of the German invasion, with the loss of the manuscript on which he had worked for at least two years (1936-38). Bakhtin retained only certain preparatory materials and a prospectus of the book; due to the paper shortage, he had torn them up page by page during the war to make wrappers for his endless chain of cigarettes. He began smoking pages from the conclusion of the manuscript, so what we have is a small portion of its opening section, primarily about Goethe.

A shorter version is on p. 56 of The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin by Caryl Emerson:

The page proofs for this massive volume perished when a bomb hit the Moscow publishing house where it was in production during World War II—after which Bakhtin, in a story that has become so famous it was repeated, somewhat garbled, in the mid-1990s by the chain-smoking hero of the American film Smoke, “smoked away” four-fifths of his back-up copy, that is, used it for cigarette papers during the lean war years.

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Once again I must thank Mark Woods of wood s lot for introducing me to wonderful poetry, in this case that of Margaret Avison. If I were Canadian I would presumably have known her work long ago, but it’s all too true that things Canadian don’t get their due south of the border; I’m just glad I finally caught on. The first poem Mark quoted was “This Day,” short and unassuming but full of hidden pleasures; then he linked to Eight poems (from Jacket magazine, which I should read on a regular basis), and I was hooked. I read all eight, with increasing excitement and deep pleasure: here was a poet who used the past without imitating it, who felt deeply but let her feelings enrich her poems from within rather than pouring them over it like a sauce, who loved words so much she dared to use them in unfamiliar ways and even make them up, which might put a reader off if the context weren’t so convincing. But enough babbling from me; here’s “Christmas Approaches, Highway 401”:

Seed of snow
  on cement, ditch-rut, rink-steel, salted where
  grass straws thinly scrape against lowering
  daydark in the rise of the earth-crust there
  (and beyond, the scavenging birds
          flitter and skim)
is particle
  unto earth’s thirsting,
  spring rain,
  wellspring.
  Roadwork, earthwork, pits in hillsides,
  desolation, abandoned roadside shacks
  and dwelt in,
  unkilned pottery broken and strawed about,
  minibrick people-palaces,
  coming and going always
  by day all lump and ache
is sown tonight with the beauty
  of light and moving lights, light travelling, light
  shining from beyond farthestness.

Farthestness! But before I could even begin to balk, I heard the word repeated in my ear and realized it was shapely, with a nice Old English feel, and worked perfectly here. And note the way she uses the noun straw in the third line, and then slips in the much rarer verb (a variant of strew) in “unkilned pottery broken and strawed about.” I went on to “The Hid, Here”:

Big birds fly past the window
trailing strings or vines
out in the big blue.

Big trees become designs
of delicate floral tracery
in golden green.

The Milky Way
end over end like a football
lobs, towards that still
unreachable elsewhere
that is hid within bud and nest-stuff and bright air
where the big birds flew
past the now waiting window.

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