languagehat.com

A long and detailed explanation of the history of Unicode with respect to Japanese; it’s subtitled “Guide to a technical and psychological struggle” and is very interesting even if Unicode isn’t your thing. The author begins with a brief pre-Unicode history:

Before the arrival of Unicode on the scene, the Japanese government produced various standard lists of characters for various different purposes. Three government departments (the ministries of industry, culture and justice) have been involved with creating character sets. In order to understand the decisions made by these departments, it is necessary to bear in mind that the Japanese language was dramatically simplified and reorganized after World War 2, and for some decades thereafter the aim of Japanese language standards was to change and simplify the language, not to describe it.

During the 19th century, the number of kanji required for literacy in Japan was perhaps about 4,000. Even at that time, there were many people calling out for a rationalization and pruning of the writing system. In the early 20th century, the Ministry of Education (now the Ministry of Culture) issued a list of common kanji and a new kana system. Newspapers also announced their own plans of restricting kanji to some sensible subset (although these subsets appear very large and baroque by modern standards). However, opposition from traditionalists effectively postponed reform until after World War 2. In 1945, the Yomiuri newspaper announced that the abolition of kanji would now finally be possible, which at the time wasn’t too extreme a position—others were advocating the total abandonment of the Japanese language!

Japanese character sets as we know them, therefore, have arisen from a background of rapid change and strong reformism.

It goes on to many other topics, including this excursus on personal names:

There is one interesting property of Japanese names that, while not directly relevant, sometimes gets thought of as a character set issue. Most Japanese people have a hanko, a seal which has the individual’s name carved on it and works like a signature. To be valid on legal documents, a hanko must have a certain level of complexity and uniqueness. The same variants of the same characters written in the same style still won’t count as a signature; the exact precise glyph (including wear and damage) that appears on the hanko is the one that constitutes the individual’s signature. Therefore, not merely a character and a variant but an actual glyph is recorded for many Japanese people’s names—a unique situation. Luckily, character sets are not concerned with particular glyphs (except possibly Mojikyo) so this issue does not affect us.

They also use those seals in Taiwan; I wish I knew what happened to mine, since it produced a very handsome impression.

(Via MetaFilter and No-sword.)

A provocative rant by Kemal Kurt (translated by Marilya Veteto) on the subject of the validity and reception of writing by immigrants, with particular attention to Germany:

The assertion that literature is only possible in one’s mother tongue loses its validity more and more in this era of mobility and migrations. Immigrants from North Africa, India, Pakistan, from the Caribbean and various African countries write in the language of their country of choice rather than in their mother tongue. They are increasingly becoming accepted as fully-fledged authors and are not infrequently honored with national prizes. On my copy of Adah’s Story by the Nigerian woman writer Buchi Emecheta it says “Best of Young British Novelists 1983.” The Algerian author Tahar Ben Jelloun received the most prestigious literary prize in France, the Prix Goncourt in 1988. This prize was [also] won by Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese writer who has lived in Paris since 1976 and who writes in French and speaks it with a heavy accent. In Great Britain a Nigerian, Ben Okri, received the Booker Prize in 1991, which was awarded in 1992 to Michael Ondaatje from Sri Lanka; in 1981 it was Salman Rushdie. Mahdi Sharifi and Hanif Kureishi have established themselves as authors in France and England. When the Turkish woman writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar won the city of Klagenfurt’s Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1992, it was a surprise for everyone and all but a scandal. The competence of the jury came under question.

While the United States boasts of William Saroyan, Derek Walcott and Amy Tan, Great Britain of Jean Rhys, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie, and France of Samuel Beckett, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Julien Green, Germany has only the prime example of Adelbert von Chamisso. Born and raised the son of a French family of nobility, the young Chamisso fled revolutionary France with his parents for Berlin. Though he spoke German with an accent his whole life, Chamisso is numbered among the most well-known German poets. His fanciful novel The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl—in which the hero sells his shadow and from then on is a societal pariah—is on every school’s reading list. The high symbolic value of the shadow gave rise to various interpretations. In light of the life story of Chamisso, who as an artist and as a French emigrant felt he was pressed into the role of the outsider, it is likely that the loss of a shadow emblematizes the loss of his fatherland and his mother tongue.

[Read more…]

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee at Yarn Harlot has a great post about the hilarity that ensued when she settled down with needles, yarn, and a mitten kit… in Finnish.

I knew the intructions were in Finnish – but I really didn’t see that as a barrier to understanding.

I’m an optimist, I feel pretty good about my intelligence, and as a general rule, if I’m interested in something …I can make it work. Perpetually (and despite failing miserably at things on a regular basis) I’m convinced that if I really try and am really motivated, I will really be able to do something. This means that even though I don’t speak Finnish, have never had a Finnish lesson, don’t speak with Finnish people so can’t have even picked up a word or two, don’t have a Finnish radio station I like to listen to….in effect, have no working knowledge, relationship or ability in this area….

I believed that if I really made an effort. I could read Finnish.

It turns out “The online Finnish translator knows very little…perhaps nothing, about knitting”; “My best try (which is really just making up whatever I want) is very much wrong”; and “I really don’t speak Finnish. Even if I really make an effort.” But she does deduce that “Peukalo is definitely thumb.” Fortunately, she has a loyal crew of commenters, some of whom actually know Finnish, so it looks like there may be a happy ending. (Thanks for the link, Leslie!)

Having pretty much caught up with the New Yorker, I’m making my way through this week’s issue (which has a nice old-fashioned cover by Sempé). I’m not quite sure why I started Jack Turner’s “Green Gold: The new absinthe craze” (not online) except that my default setting is to read whatever’s in front of me, but I became increasingly distressed as I read. Nothing to do with absinthe (in which I have no particular interest); no, it’s a matter (as usual) of language. The first alarm bells went off on the very first page, with the sentence “Near the entrance stood an immense plastic tub of wormwood, absinthe’s distinctive and contentious constituent, which, since the late nineteenth century, was held to cause insanity.” Leaving aside the problematic phrase “absinthe’s distinctive and contentious constituent” (shouldn’t it be “absinthe’s most distinctive and contentious constituent”?), what bothered me was the combination of the phrase “since the late nineteenth century” with the simple past “was held.” This violates what is (to my knowledge) one of the basic rules of English grammar (the real kind, not the ending-sentences-with-prepositions kind): a verb whose action explicitly continues into the present (as with a “since” phrase) requires the perfect tense; in this case, “has been held.” Contrariwise, if there is an explicit indication of a particular time in the past, the perfect tense cannot be used; if the phrase had been “in the late nineteenth century,” it would have to have continued “was held to cause insanity”—”had been held” would be ungrammatical. But you can’t mix and match; one of the most common errors of foreigners speaking English, even when they have a good knowledge of the language, is to say “Yesterday I have gone downtown” or “I lived in this country since 1990.” I presume the author started with one construction, changed his mind, and nobody read the sentence over to make sure it still worked. Bad editing.

I was concerned a couple of pages later when I read “Water was poured over the sugar into the absinthe, causing it to ‘louche,’ or turn a cloudy pale green”—there’s no verb to louche in the OED or in my experience—but googling tells me it’s in common use in the world of absinthe (see, e.g., here and here). False alarm.

But near the top of page 43 the author writes “…after drinking it I wondered for several moments if I would wretch.” There’s just no excuse for that; it’s a grade-school misspelling (of retch ‘try to vomit,’ originally spelled reach and apparently still so pronounced by some in the U.K.) that even the greenest proofreader on my local paper would be expected to catch or lose his job forthwith. To see it in the formerly impeccable pages of the New Yorker is truly disheartening. Shape up, people, or I’m not renewing my subscription!

Addendum. I just got to page 53, where in the course of a Calvin Tomkins puff piece on the Whitney a curator is quoted as referring to “the early twentieth-century.” Remember the Copy Editor’s Revenge? This is where he would have taken the hyphen from in order to fix the modifier he maliciously left unadorned by punctuation. Seriously, New Yorker, shape up. This is unacceptable.

Bill Poser at Language Log has a brief post about problems caused by inadequate translation in court. What particularly struck me was this: “No one really knows how often this leads to miscarriages of justice, in part because it is very difficult to appeal on these grounds because appellate courts normally consider only the written record of the trial, and the written record contains only the English translation of the testimony, not what was actually said.” This strikes me as a serious problem, and it seems to me that trial records should include a taped record of foreign-language testimony so that if there is a complaint about the translation it can be checked. Otherwise, what’s to prevent an ignorant or malicious interpreter from completely distorting, or even inventing, testimony?

Bill is talking about Canada; does anyone know what the situation is elsewhere? I presume it’s no better in most places, because preserving the original would be cumbersome, but if there’s a jurisdiction that does that, I’d love to know.

Addendum. Follow-up by Roger Shuy at the Log, with further details on this problem.

The Burmese Language website looks like a good resource; they have a series of graduated lessons (with audio files) to teach the script and grammar. Unfortunately, in their words, “You need to use the NETSCAPE to view the fonts correctly,” so all I’m seeing is Latin-alphabet symbols, but it’s easy enough to download Netscape if you want to take advantage of it. (Via Plep.)

Dropping by The Tensor, I found a post about a new unit of measurement, the foe; as the Wikipedia entry says, “A foe is a unit of energy equal to 10⁴⁴ joules.” Naturally, my first thought was not “Man, that’s a lot of energy” but “What’s the etymology?” Fortunately, Wikipedia goes on to explain that it’s “an acronym derived from the phrase fifty-one ergs, or 10⁵¹ ergs.” So now you know, and the next time you hear the output of supernovas discussed, you won’t feel out of it.

(I was about to write that there should be a hyphen in “fifty one ergs,” and then I realized “It’s Wikipedia—I can add it myself!” So I did.)

A while back I reported on Mel Gibson’s new movie, Apocalypto, shot in Yucatec Mayan; now Ben Zimmer of Language Log provides an update with links to a video of Mel actually speaking the language as well as to A Grammar of the Yucatecan Mayan Language by David and Alejandra Bolles (a fine site, though frustrating in some ways—why on earth would you deliberately choose not to indicate vowel length or glottalization in a site intended for learners?). I also found a site that allows you to hear Mayans read sample phrases and sentences aloud, which is a real boon.

While I’m over at the Log, let me recommend a Berke Breathed Opus strip reproduced by Mark Liberman (involving an attempt by the chauvinist-pig character Steve to demonstrate his linguistic versatility: “I talk perfect woman”); and while I’m on audio links, here‘s a page where you can hear actual Belgians pronouncing the names of those wonderful beers (Maredsous is more or less mah-red-SOO).

Oh, one other tidbit: Ben says “the joke, such as it is, has Gibson speaking at length in Yucatec Maya, but the subtitles simply say ‘Not… …me.’ (The long-speech-with-short-subtitles gag was already getting tired when Mike Myers did it with Cantonese in Wayne’s World.)” This reminded me of an anecdote I read (by amazing coincidence) just yesterday, involving the very same dialect of Maya, as I was finishing Nelson Reed’s fascinating 1964 book The Caste War of Yucatan (the war began in 1847-48 and tailed off for decades); the author is making a trip to Yucatan in 1959 to round out his research for the book and interview anyone who might have personal knowledge of the events of the early part of the century, and he’s met an old gent named Don Norberto Yeh:

My next question, Did he remember the time of General Bravo [who conquered the independent Maya 1899-1912], brought a long, explosive diatribe (and Maya can be very explosive) which was translated, “The Señor says Yes.”

A more recent example is the Suntory scene in Lost in Translation (discussed here): “Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that.”

Here’s an appropriate follow-up to my last post, which involved a less blatant (in fact, barely noticeable except to copy editors) overlooked typo; this one is more, um, in-your-face. Law.com has the following tale of an invasion of sea sponges:

Spell-checking on his computer is never going to be the same for Santa Cruz solo practitioner Arthur Dudley.
In an opening brief to San Francisco’s 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words “sea sponge” instead of the legal term “sua sponte,” which is Latin for “on its own motion.”
“Spell check did not have sua sponte in it,” said Dudley, who, not noticing the error, shipped the brief to court.
That left the justices reading — and probably laughing at — such classic statements as: “An appropriate instruction limiting the judge’s criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction.”
And: “It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense.”…
Dudley corrected the error in his reply brief, telling the court that a “glitch” caused the weird wording and instructing that “where the phrase ‘sea sponge’ is found, this court should insert the phrase ‘sua sponte.'”
The faux pas has made Dudley the butt of some mild ribbing around Santa Cruz. Local attorneys, he said, have started calling his unique defense the “sea sponge duty to instruct.”

Thanks go to Nick for the link.

From America’s Finest News Source, a story of a good man driven to desperate measures:

Copy Editor’s Revenge Takes Form Of Unhyphenated Word
February 27, 2006 | Issue 42•09

BOSTON—Bruce Huntoon, a copy editor at Pilot magazine, intentionally did not correct the copy of columnist Justin Mann Monday. “I am tired of that insufferable asshole’s mean-spirited jokes,” Huntoon said. “So, when he described the carburetor warmer as a ‘twentieth century’ invention, I decided to leave the copy untouched and let him deal with the consequences of his actions. The fucker.” Huntoon said the unhyphenated compound modifier is the most extreme step he has ever taken, adding that he drafted a resignation notice that he will hand in should his superiors notice the omission.

I must confess that I have been similarly tempted myself, but the high dignity of my calling and the oath we editors are required to take before being issued the red pencil and green eyeshade (“I will allow no error to pass without correction…”) have so far restrained me. (Thanks for the link, Songdog, and I hope the coming week is better than the one you’ve just been through!)