languagehat.com

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

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

I had meant to post this when I saw it at Wordorigins.org, but now a correspondent has reminded me, so here it is: last year’s 50 pence coin celebrating the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. I particularly like the fact that it includes the etymology of fifty; surely this is the only coin that features an etymology! (You can see another view of the coin here and read about it at the Wikipedia entry for the 50-pence coin.) Thanks, Glyn!

Having painstakingly correlated the many laments over the imminent demise of the English language, from the 18th century right down to today, I have discovered that there are recurring patterns with ever shorter wavelengths (so to speak) that enable me, after complicated calculations, to say with certainty that English will cease to exist as of March 31, 2058. After that date, those of you who are still around will have to communicate in some language that has been less profligate with its inherited store of meaning. I just thought you’d want to know.

I knew the phrase straw dogs only as the title of the 1971 Sam Peckinpah movie. Now, thanks to Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log, I know the origin, a passage in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs;
the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.

Zimmer continues:

D.C. Lau’s translation of Tao Te Ching (Penguin Classics edition) explains in a footnote that “straw dogs were treated with the greatest deference before they were used as an offering, only to be discarded and trampled upon as soon as they had served their purpose.”

Any Sinologists out there know of other classic and/or interesting passages of Chinese literature that use this phrase? And what is the phrase in Chinese? (And, for extra credit, was the original Chinese phrase used as the title of the Peckinpah movie in Hong Kong or Taiwan—I assume it wasn’t shown in mainland China—or was a new title invented to avoid whatever distractions the original phrase might involve?)

Yawning Bread is an interesting website run by Au Waipang, a Singaporean of Chinese descent, who in his about page explains:

As both my parents were educated in English-language schools (run by Christian missionaries, as most English-language schools were in their day), the family language that I grew up with was English. My parents speak to me in English; all my teenage rows with them were in English.

So, regardless of the Singapore government’s silly notion that one’s mother tongue is determined by one’s race or ethnicity, I have always maintained that my mother tongue is English. I think in English, I dream in English, and as is apparent from this site, I write in English.

I love people who confuse those who think in stereotypes, and this guy is a funny, acerbic writer to boot. I got a kick out of his rant about Chinese who “perceive Singapore as an extension of the Chinese world”; it includes, among much else, a discussion of a “unique habit” of Singaporeans:

We first draw some conclusion about a person’s race before we decide what language to use. A Singaporean would not speak to someone who looks Indian in Chinese. Generally, we would use English to him without a moment’s thought.

In most other places, people use the lingua franca of their country or province regardless of the colour of the person they’re speaking to, unless the person is very evidently a foreigner (e.g. a Caucasian man in Thailand). In Thailand, the Siamese use Thai when addressing people of Punjabi, Chinese or Burmese ancestry. In France, they use French to everyone, whether you’re white, yellow, brown or black.

In China too, if you look Han Chinese (or East Asian), people will mostly speak to you in the provincial language first, e.g. Shanghainese or the Sichuan dialect, and if that fails, they will switch to Putonghua. If you don’t look Han Chinese (e.g. if you’re Egyptian or Uighur), then they will assume you’re not from the locality, and they’ll speak to you in Putonghua from the start. Putonghua is the lingua franca, the link language for communication across ethnic groups.

And a fascinating excursus on the name of an area of Singapore called Geylang:

It’s an old name, predating the arrival of the British in 1819. This means its origin was almost surely from the Orang Laut people who inhabited this island before the empire-builders came ashore.

The Chinese immigrants, of whom a plurality were Hokkien (from the Xiamen region of Fujien province) [1], learnt the name of the area from the original inhabitants and they too pronounced it as “geylang”. In written form, the Chinese found two ideograms, which in the Hokkien pronunication sound like “gay lahng”. Thus, so long as one pronounced the Chinese ideograms using the Hokkien dialect, it came out right.

Then we decided to get rid of Chinese dialects insisting that all Chinese characters should be pronounced the putonghua way. Thus, those same two ideograms had to be pronounced as “ya long” (“yah” + “long”, where the second syllable is a long “oh”).

Meanwhile, Singaporeans continued to know the place as Geylang, and even when we speak Mandarin, we insert the place name into our sentences without mutating its pre-existing pronunciation. It doesn’t have to be a Chinese name to fit into a Chinese sentence, just like how Australians might say, “we’re off to Joondalup”, knowing full well that “joondalup” is from a native language.

The result is that some Singaporeans, otherwise fluent in Mandarin, do not know that Yalong is Geylang, since they never say “Yalong”.

(He has a box showing the characters, but they’re images rather than Unicode, so I can’t reproduce them here.)

I have to correct him on one point. He says:

In Bangkok, the road names Witthayu and Silom mean, respectively “wireless” and “windmill”. But we’d be a fool to get on board a taxi and say, “take me to Windmill Road”, or “take me to Wireless Road”, using the translation of the meaning of the Thai words. We’d say “Silom” or “Witthayu” as close as possible to the way Thais say it. We’d think it useless to have a map in hand that marks the roads as Windmill Road and Wireless Road.

But in fact they do say “Wireless Road” in Bangkok (where I used to live), and it is so marked on English-language maps.

Thanks for the link, Charles!