languagehat.com

I’m reading Fearful Majesty, a biography of Ivan IV “the Terrible” by Benson Bobrick, and I just ran across this bit of information:

Upon his return to Moscow on December 12 [1546], Ivan [announced] that he intended “to study the coronation formula of his ancestors,” specifically that of Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh and, in emulation of that prince, to be crowned Grand Prince and “Tsar,” meaning Emperor. Etymologically, the word “tsar” derived from caesar,but had entered Church Slavic through the Greek as a translation of basileus, meaning “emperor.” However, from the days of the Mongol conquest, Russians had applied it not only to the Byzantine emperor but to the Tartar khans. At the Moscow court only Tartar descendents of Genghis Khan who had also been rulers in their own right were honored by the name.

I imagine John Emerson knew the Tatar khans were called “tsar,” but I sure didn’t.

The Scottish poet, artist, and pacifist Ian Hamilton Finlay has died at 80:

Ian Hamilton Finlay was born in the Bahamas of Scottish parents in 1925. He was called up in 1944, and served in the Army for three years. When demobilised in 1947 he attended Glasgow College of Art, though he considered himself then primarily to be a writer — and indeed throughout his career referred to himself as a poet rather than an artist. After college he lived in Perthshire, making a precarious living by writing: he published a volume of poems, The Dancers Inherit the Party, and had several scripts broadcast by the BBC.

In 1966 he made what was to prove the most momentous decision of his life, by moving with his wife into a property at Stonypath in rural Lanarkshire, with extensive grounds which would eventually come to be known as Little Sparta. Here he began to work on the garden which became central to his life’s work.

The transition from writer to visual artist was gradual. As a poet, Finlay had become dissatisfied with, as he saw it, the failure of verse on the page to reflect its meaning in purely visual terms. Then by chance he found a book of Brazilian writings which exemplified “concrete poetry”, in which the look of the text on the page was as important as, if not more important than, the bare significance of the words. Many of his subsequent works have taken the form of brief poetic texts beautifully lettered, printed or cut into stone tablets, alongside sculptural pieces in which the words, if any, are used for their visual associations and evocative effect.

You can see some gorgeous photos of Little Sparta by Philip Hunter here, and there’s a nice MetaFilter thread on him from last year, which I closed with what is now an even more appropriate Finlay quote, “a little poem inscribed on a rock set into the earth”:

WAVE
  ave

An appreciation by Brian Kim Stefans contains a wonderful “translation” of a Lorine Niedecker poem into Scots. Niedecker:

She now lay deaf to death.

She could have grown a good rutabaga
in the burial ground
  and how she’d have loved these woods.

One of her pallbearers said I
  like a damfool followed a deer
wanted to see her jump a fence
  [never’d seen a deer jump a fence]

pretty thing
  the way she runs.

And Finlay:

Noo lyin deef tae daith…

Och, think on aa the rhubarb
she micht hae grawn there
on her lair
  an hoo she wud
hae lood sic wids.

The wan o her pallbearers saye
  I, silly eedjit
gaed aff ahint a deer
never’d seen a deer

Loup over a fence — O
  aw
    the braw
      wee dear…

Via wood s lot.

Update (May 2023). I have added (in brackets) a line Stefans inadvertently omitted from the original, and fixed some punctuation and spacing. At some point after 1956 Niedecker added the word “dead” at the start, and this is considered the title in her Collected. I also note that (according to a 1994 article in Chapman) “Niedecker was not entirely happy with the translations.”

World Language Phyla/Family Mapping, created by Dr. Stephen Huffman (creator also of the Unknown Language Identification page), shows samples of truly beautiful language maps (the complete maps are large pdf files).

Dr. Huffman has classified the languages of the Ethnologue into broader groupings following Merritt Ruhlen’s A Guide to the World’s Languages (published 1987, 1991 by Stanford University Press), and has produced a series of maps of language phyla and families using this classified data and GMI’s World Language Mapping System and Seamless Digital Chart of the World geographic datas sets. PDF versions of the maps [are] available for download, as are Dr. Huffman’s data and ArcGIS project files.
For additional discussion of both language classification , see Dr. Huffman’s paper describing this work: Mapping The Genetic Relationships of the World’s Languages (pdf).

Thanks, Laurent!

Having finished a long detour into American history, I’m back to Russia and finally reading James Billington’s classic The Icon and the Axe. On page 86 Billington reports that vodka “appears to have reached Russia by way of a Genoese settlement on the Black Sea, whence it was brought north a century later by refugees fleeing the Mongol conquest of the Crimea.” He continues:

It was fateful for Russian morals that this deceptively innocuous-looking beverage gradually replaced the crude forms of mead and beer which had previously been the principal alcoholic fare of Muscovy. The tax on vodka became a major source of princely income and gave the civil authority a vested interest in the intoxication of its citizens. It is both sad and comical to find the transposed English phrase Gimi drenki okoviten (“Give me drink aqua vitae”: that is, vodka) in one of the early manuscript dictionaries of Russian.

(As you can see, my laptop and I made it to Santa Barbara. It’s not as warm as I expected, but it’s sunny.)

I don’t know why, but this Irish Times article by Carl O’Brien was quite surprising to me:

From Acholi to Zulu, Ireland a land of over 167 languages

More than 167 languages are being used in Ireland, according to research conducted by academics at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
The list of languages, ranging from Acholi – spoken in Uganda and Sudan – to Zulu, was based on research with translation firms, schools and the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner.
Anne Gallagher, director of the language centre at NUI Maynooth and president of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics, said they expected a high number of languages but were surprised at the results.
“When you ask most Irish people how many languages are used here, they expect the figure to be around 30 or 40. I expected between 100 and 130 languages. But I don’t think anyone expected 167,” she said. The languages are used by 160 nationalities. Regional dialects were excluded…
A conference on the new languages of Ireland at NUI Maynooth yesterday heard that the lack of translation services was a serious issue for thousands of migrants based here.
Mary Phelan, a lecturer at Dublin City University’s school of applied language and intercultural studies, said there was a “huge” demand for interpreters by State authorities, but little focus on the standards of translation.
In areas such as the courts, Garda stations or health services, the consequences could be serious. “People offering their services don’t always see a need for training because authorities are not looking for standards,” Ms Phelan said.

I knew in part of my mind that Ireland had very much joined modern Europe, but in another part of my mind it was a quaint land where people spoke a little Irish and a lot of English. Wake up, Hat, it’s the twenty-first century! (And thanks for the link, Trevor.)

Or, the practical importance of punctuation, at PartiallyClips.
(Thanks, Songdog!)
Incidentally, I’m flying to California tomorrow, and for the first time I’m taking my laptop (having observed that others seem to do it without incident, and reassured by the answers to my AskMeFi question), so hopefully there will be at most a day’s hiatus. But you never know, so I thought I’d mention it.

From the Spring 1998 issue of Redefining Literacy, an article by M. T. Clanchy called “What medieval philosophers understood by ‘words'”; I found this particularly interesting:

Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142), one of the first professors (‘masters’ is the medieval term) in the university of Paris, used the Biblical belief that Adam had named the animals to distinguish between the natural and the cognitive sciences:

No word (vox – ‘voice’) signifies a reality in nature; it is a construct of men. The Supreme Architect has committed the construction of language (vocum impositionem – the ‘imposition of voices’) to us, but He has reserved the nature of realities to His own disposition… So it does not seem to be due to nature, but to the custom and situation of men that division by words (divisio vocis) pertains.
(Dialectica, ed. L. M. de Rijk, second edition, 1970, p. 576, lines 34-37, p. 577, lines 13-15).

The secrets of nature are God’s business, Abelard is arguing, whereas cognitive science pertains ‘to us’ because ‘division by words’ is man-made. ‘We’ are therefore entitled to interpret texts as we think best. As the greatest logician of his day, Abelard claimed to be the master of language because logic was the science of words.

Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org.

A LiveScience report by Robert Roy Britt describes research done by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek:

Like teenagers, babies don’t much care what their parents say.

Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study finds.

And they do it quickly.

The infants were able to learn two new words in five minutes with just five presentations for each word and object, said study leader Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University. Importantly, the babies paired a new word to the object they liked best, regardless of what object the speaker referred to.

“The baby naturally assumes that the word you’re speaking goes with the object that they think is interesting, not the object that you show an interest in,” Hirsh-Pasek said…

“Ten-month-olds simply ‘glue’ a label onto the most interesting object they see,” said Shannon Pruden, a Temple doctoral student in psychology and lead author of a report on the findings in the March/April issue of the journal Child Development.

Later, around 18 months, children learn to use the speaker’s interest—such as where the eyes gaze—as a guide to learning, the researchers say.

Still, Hirsh-Pasek thinks there is a lesson for parents and educators of children at all ages: “Sometimes we fail to take notice of what our learners are doing and what they’re interested in,” she said. “We all learn best when things are meaningful.”

Thanks to Songdog for this extremely interesting news.

And thanks to John Emerson of Idiocentrism for sending me a depressing article about how Chinese parents will have to start picking babies’ names from a government-approved list. I realize some European countries also restrict parents’ choices, and I don’t like it there either. Governments exist (or should exist, if they have any excuse at all) to serve us, not vice versa.

Joel of Far Outliers has interrupted his appalling series on the sufferings of Indians trying to escape Japanese-occupied Burma in 1941-42 to favor us with a delightful triptych of stories about obscure Japanese words, phrases, and customs. I’ll quote the first:

塩盛り shiomori ‘salt pile’ – The other night, as we were leaving our favorite local fish restaurant in Ashikaga, my recently arrived Minnesota in-laws noticed what looked like a small pile of snow beside the door as we left. It turned out to be salt, and there was a matching salt pile on the other side of the entranceway, so I went back in and asked the very friendly and talkative sushi chef (who trained 3 years in San Francisco and 1 on Maui) what the story was. There were no customers at the sushi bar at that moment, so he came outside in the chilly wind and told us the story. The salt has two functions. The most commonly recognized one is to purify the premises by keeping evil spirits out. But the more interesting one is to attract customers in. The latter function apparently goes back to the days when goods traveled by oxcart. The idea was to tempt the oxen to stop and lick the salt, whereupon the traveler might also decide to stop for food or rest. The salt piles were called 塩盛り shiomori ‘salt helpings’, a term which is otherwise chiefly found in restaurant menus for assorted salty dishes.

Isn’t that great?

Yesterday’s wood s lot [03.21.2006] presents a poem by Wilfred Owen, a sonnet titled “1914”:

War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art’s ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love’s wine’s thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.

It fascinates me because it shows so clearly the exhaustion of the poetic language of the nineteenth century. Owen is capable of powerful writing, but trapped as he is in the need to fit his feelings into the ta-tump-tee-tump, ABBA mold of his chosen form, he selects worn-out words like “rending” and creaky formulations like “rich with all increase” and inversions like “Is over all the width of Europe whirled” and “Now begin famines.” In between you can hear the faint voice of something new trying to get out: “Verse wails,” and “Love’s wine’s thin.” But he couldn’t break out of the box the Victorians had bequeathed him. This poem shows as clearly as anything I can think of the vital necessity of Pound’s revolution in verse, that allowed him to write, in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

That’s how you write poetry about World War One.

While we’re on the subject of war poetry, there’s some powerful Vietnam-era writing in this MetaFilter thread and its links.