languagehat.com

A friend sent me a link to this page entitled “Jewish Women’s Names in an Arab Context: Names from the Geniza of Cairo”; I had known, of course, that Jews, like other people, have tended to absorb names from the society around them, but it was still startling to see a list of names like Amat al-‘Aziz, Diya, and, uh, Sitt al-Qa’ida. Not sure what Esther is doing in there, though… (Thanks, Mike!)

I was flipping through Garner’s Modern American Usage when my eye caught on the surprisingly long entry on Hawaii. Along with sections on Sense (the state or the Big Island?) and Pronunciation (only people actually living there can get away with using a v), there is one called “Spelled Hawai’i” that features the Hawaiian diacritic called the okina (discussed here). His conclusion that “as a diacritical mark in an English context, the mark seems largely out of place” is unexceptionable; what bothers me is his explanation that the mark is “called an okina [/oh-kee-nə/], ‘u’ina [same pronunciation], or hamzah [/ham-zə/ or /hahm-zə/]).” Setting aside the odd use of the Arabic term hamzah in this context (Garner didn’t invent it, as you can tell by googling, but I fail to see how it clarifies anything for anybody) and the fact that the word okina should itself begin with an okina if you’re being accurate, can it possibly be the case that ‘u’ina is pronounced like okina? I want to say “No, that’s silly,” but Garner not only says so, he makes a point of it later (“look at ‘u’ina itself—most speakers would be at a loss how to say it”—speakers of English, I presume he means). Surely he didn’t simply make it up; could he have misunderstood something he read? I await enlightenment from Those Who Know.

I never thought I’d see a correction notice to match this one, but the Feb. 6 New Yorker (yes, I’m falling behind again) contains the following gem from the Guardian (of April 22, 2004, according to this site):

In our profile of Daniel Dennett (pages 20 to 23, Review, April 17), we said he was born in Beirut. In fact, he was born in Boston. His father died in 1947, not 1948. He married in 1962, not 1963. The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett’s students was Dennett’s seminar at Tufts, not Gould’s at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin’s Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a “Darwinian fundamentalist”. Only one chapter in the book, not four, is devoted to taking issue with Gould. The list of Dennett’s books omitted Elbow Room, 1984, and The Intentional Stance, 1987. The marble sculpture, recollected by a friend, that Dennett was working on in 1963 was not a mother and child. It was a man reading a book.

You’ve got to admire a publication that can correct itself with such panache.

I had no intention of writing about Safire again so soon, really I didn’t. I skimmed Sunday’s column with as little attentiveness as possible and moved on to the Ethicist. But two of my readers have drawn my attention to two different passages, and I guess I’ll saddle up and do battle once again.

He begins with his typical roundup of vaguely related terminology, in this case terms allegedly borrowed by bloggers from “the MSM — that’s the superannuated, archaic mainstream media.” These include genuine items like sidebar and spurious ones like this: “Even the reporter’s byline, that coveted assertion of journalistic authorship, has been snatched by the writers derogated as ‘guys in pajamas’ and changed to bye-line, an adios or similar farewell at the end of the blogger’s politely expressed opinion or angry screed.” (Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen or heard the latter term… I thought so. But somebody obviously thinks it’s clever.)

But what my correspondent took particular issue with was this:

A ping is not just the word for a sound anymore. It is also an acronym for “packet Internet gopher,” a program that tests whether a destination is online and can also be the gently noisy notification sent when a blog needs updating or has been updated.

She said:

In the latest “On Language”, Safire informs us that the Internet usage of “ping” is an acronym. It is not. You can read the gory details here [where the guy who created the term says “I named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired by the whole principle of echo-location”].

And if you go there, you will find various of his other misunderstandings mocked, which is a good thing; I can’t do all the mocking myself.

[Read more…]

Lameen Souag of Jabal al-Lughat has a fascinating entry on the use of be as a suppletive form of go, but only in the past participle: you can say I’ve been to Finland or I’ll have been to Finland five times, but not *I’ll be to Finland or *I am to Finland. I’ve used the construction all my life, but never really thought about how it works; Lameen finishes up with this thought-provoking bit of research:

Google does reveal a couple of instances: “I’ll be to bed in a minute”, “I’ll be to work way early”, and perhaps most strikingly, “I’ve been to more than half of the counties, and in the next six weeks, I’ll be to the other half of the counties”. So it seems we have a change in progress. Does this depend on the region? Will it culminate in a complete merger of “go” and “be”? Are there any parallels to this outside English? What do you think?

And while you’re at the mountain of languages, don’t miss his latest post on classical Kanembu and its relation to Kanuri and Arabic:

Most strikingly, since vowel length is non-phonemic in Kanuri, it seems to use vowel length to indicate high tone instead; thus, for example Arabic al-‘aakhirah “the afterlife” has been borrowed as láxíra, and thus gets spelled as لاخِيرَ. As far as I know, this would make it the only Arabic orthography to mark tone.

Mark Liberman of Language Log introduces me to a new word, sketchball. It’s apparently a sort of generalized insult (you can see a variety of attempted definitions at Urban Dictionary, which should never be taken as a serious reference since anyone can put anything they want in it); it’s obviously formed on the model of screwball and its many offspring (goofball, nutball, oddball, sleazeball, slimeball…), but what bothers me about it is that I have no intuitive sense of it. To me, sketchy (from which the noun is built) means simply—in the words of the Tenth Edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate—”of the nature of a sketch, roughly outlined; wanting in completeness, clearness, or substance.” But the Eleventh Edition has a new sense “questionable, iffy: got into a sketchy situation, a sketchy character,” and this has not entered my linguistic consciousness, so that the insult sounds to me like a ball with a drawing outlined on it. Intellectually, I’m resigned to the inevitability of falling further and further behind the colloquial form of my native language, but my gut has yet to accept it; I’m not ready to be the clueless old geezer wondering what in tarnation these young folks are going on about.

Last Sunday’s NY Times book section has a review by Jim Holt of Darrin M. McMahon’s Happiness: A History that begins as follows:

The history of the idea of happiness can be neatly summarized in a series of bumper sticker equations: Happiness=Luck (Homeric), Happiness=Virtue (classical), Happiness=Heaven (medieval), Happiness=Pleasure (Enlightenment) and Happiness=A Warm Puppy (contemporary). Does that look like progress? Darrin McMahon doesn’t think so.
In olden times, McMahon observes in his engaging book, happiness was deemed a transcendent, almost godlike state, attainable only by the few. Today, however, the concept has become democratized, not to say vulgarized (think of that damned ubiquitous smiley face): it is more about feeling good than being good…

Now, maybe I’m missing something obvious (semantics was never my specialty), but what sense does it make to say that the concept of happiness has changed? We don’t say that the concept of silliness has changed because silly (or its earlier form seely) once meant ‘Happy, blissful; fortunate, lucky, well-omened, auspicious’ or ‘Spiritually blessed, enjoying the blessing of God,’ then ‘Innocent, harmless,’ then ‘Deserving of pity, compassion, or sympathy,’ ‘Helpless, defenceless,’ ‘Weak, feeble, frail; insignificant, trifling,’ ‘Unlearned, unsophisticated, simple, rustic, ignorant,’ and finally the modern ‘Lacking in judgement or common sense; foolish, senseless, empty-headed.’ We say that the word has changed meaning, that the semantic space once occupied by seely/silly is now occupied by other words like lucky or harmless while silly has gone on to occupy a different one.
Why is the situation of happy/happiness not parallel? Happy is from hap ‘chance, fortune’ and therefore originally meant ‘lucky, fortunate; favoured by lot, position, or other external circumstance’; the fact that it has shifted over the centuries to the meaning ‘glad, pleased’ says nothing about changing concepts of happiness, only about the changing semantics of the word. And ancient Greek philosophy seems even less relevant; does anyone seriously think that because Aristotle wrote about virtue, your average Greek did not feel what we call “happy” when he unexpectedly came into money or his harvest was abundant or someone else bought the drinks? It seems to me there is serious confusion here about words and meanings. But as I say, I’m no expert in this area, and I welcome the thoughts of others.

Liz at ALTAlk Blog has a brilliant idea:

Announcing the first Carnival of Blog Translation! Tuesday, Feb. 28th, 2006!
On the day of the Carnival, a participant translates one post by another blogger, and posts it on her own blog with a link to the original. She would need to email me, or post in the comments right here, and I’ll compile one big post on the day of the Carnival with links to all the participants.
You can translate any blog entry that was posted in the month of February 2006. It can be your own blog entry, if you like.

See her post for requirements and suggestions, and I hope lots of polyglots will participate.
Liz also wants to publicize the call for translations of “Gonāh” [گناه ‘sin’] by Forough Farrokhzad for a future issue of Composite; if you know Farsi/Persian, give it a try (the text is in the “call” link).

When I entered college back in the fabled year of 1968, like all freshmen I was confronted with the need to buy armloads of course books and experienced severe sticker shock. Well, in the course of cleaning out the garage at my father’s house (and let me tell you, a lot of stuff builds up in 30-plus years) I ran across a yellowing slip of paper, the receipt for one such armload (dated 22 Sep 68). Here are seven items I marked “Civ” (for the college’s two-year series of courses called “History of Civilization,” one of the reasons I chose to attend):
The Scientific Revolution 2.95
Essay on Man 0.50
Eighteenth-Century Philosophy 1.65
The Anatomy of Revolution 1.95
Classic, Romantic, and Modern 1.45
Phaedra (Racine) 0.65
Hunchback of Notre Dame 0.75
Those were new books, not dogeared discards. The most expensive thing on the receipt is my math text, which set me back $11.50 (I’m sure I swallowed hard before adding it to the pile). I know there’s been a fair amount of inflation since then, but I’ll bet the cost of an equivalent stack of books would be a lot more than would be covered by the changing consumer price index.
As for History of Civ (as we called it), it taught me an amazing amount about the world, and I’m grateful to it to this day. Unfortunately, my class was the last to get the benefit of it, because the lefties bullied the administration into dropping it from the curriculum—it was “Eurocentric” and insufficiently “relevant.” I haven’t given the college a dime since I graduated for that very reason. You know what they say about those who forget the past.

Zheng Chenggong (Chinese: 鄭成功) was a military leader whose loyalty to the Ming dynasty led him to fight the new Manchu Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty until his death in 1662; because he recovered Taiwan from Dutch colonial rule, I heard a great deal about him while I was teaching English in Taiwan, and I wondered why he was known in English as Coxinga. It turns out Joel of Far Outliers has wondered too, and in the course of reading (and blogging) Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty by Jonathan Clements he found the answer:

Coxinga … was said to have greatly impressed the bookish Emperor of Intense Warring [the remaining Ming pretender who had retreated to Fuzhou as the Manchus invaded]. Still only a youth of twenty-one, the former Confucian scholar was made assistant controller of the Imperial Clan Court. The childless Emperor also commented that he was disappointed not to have a daughter he could offer to Coxinga in marriage, and bestowed him with a new name. Once Lucky Pine [Fukumatsu], then Big Tree [Da Mu, a nickname from Sen ‘Forest’], the boy was now given the appellation Chenggong, thereby making his new given name Zheng Chenggong translate literally as ‘Serious Achievement’. In a moment of supreme pride for his family, the boy was also conferred with the right to use the surname of the Ming ruling family itself. It amounted to a symbolic adoption, and he was often referred to as Guoxingye, the Imperial Namekeeper. Pronounced Koksenya in the staccato dialect of Fujian, and later transcribed by foreign observers, the title eventually transformed into the ‘Coxinga’ by which he is known to history.

Or, as the Wikipedia article linked above to his name puts it, “Koxinga or Coxinga is the Dutch Romanization of his popular name ‘Lord with the Royal Surname’ (國姓爺).”