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Mark Liberman at Language Log has posted about a couple of Nabokov’s interviews (which are not like anybody else’s); he finished up with this quote:

This exchange with Alvin Toffler appeared in Playboy for January, 1964. Great trouble was taken on both sides to achieve the illusion of a spontaneous conversation. Actually, my contribution as printed conforms meticulously to the answers, every word of which I had written in longhand before having them typed for submission to Toffler when he came to Montreux in mid-March, 1963. The present text takes into account the order of my interviewer’s questions as well as the fact that a couple of consecutive pages of my typescript were apparently lost in transit. Egreto perambis doribus!

Neither Mark nor I has any idea what the jocular polymath might have meant by that last bit of pseudo-Latin, nor (as far as I can tell by googling) does anybody else on the internet, so I’m throwing the floor open to suggestions. Egrets given to the perambulating Dorians??

A while back I posted about the English word Shanghainese; now I’m reporting on a site where you can learn the actual language. It’s run by Shanghainese students at the University of Chicago, and they won my heart right on the front page by quoting Max Weinreich (though without naming him, tsk): “A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot.” The Background page would be worth a post all on its own; along with gorgeous photos, it’s got history:

The name 上海 (Shanghai) first appeared in 1077 AD on the store name of a winery in what is today the Nanshi district of Shanghai. Its name literally meaning ‘on the sea’… The term Wu (吴, variant characters: 吳 or 呉) comes from the historic Kingdom of Wu (吴国) first united by Wu Taibo (吴太伯) as Gouwu (句吴) with its capital just 80km from present day Shanghai during the Autumn and Spring period… Wu today descends from the languages spoken in Eastern Chu and the Wu and Yue kingdoms, along with northern and Han influences later on.

That’s followed by a nice “Map of Chinese topolects” and a discussion of why the so-called “dialects” of Chinese are considered separate languages by most non-Chinese linguists (“topolects” is a neutral term coined to avoid the controversy) and an “Overview of the phonology and grammar”:

Wu dialects have preserved the full Middle Chinese set of voiced initials that do not exist in Mandarin and Cantonese… Like all Wu dialects, Shanghainese has 3-way consonant differentiation (voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated), for a large total of 30 consonants (Mandarin has 24, Cantonese 17). No other Chinese topolect has preserved the entire set of Middle Chinese initials. Wu has however been less faithful in its finals, having truncated most diphthongs and triphthongs still found in Cantonese and Mandarin into monophthongs (pure vowels), for a total of 14 pure vowels. This characteristic makes Shanghainese syllables quick and direct; the average Shanghainese syllable is 30% shorter than Mandarin…

And there’s a section on “Cultural identity, conflicts with Putonghua, status, and bans”—all on the one page!

But that’s just the appetizer; the meat of the site is the set of lessons, beginning with consonants and moving on to vowels and tones; there’s an admirably clear account of how tone patterns work: “A polysyllabic Shanghainese word (including its postpositions particles) in general can take on one of 3 pitch accent patterns….” A number of sections are “still in the workings,” but hopefully they’ll keep adding to the site, making it the invaluable resource it deserves to be. Well done, U of Chi students!

(Via Plep.)

This wonderful page at the Virtual Hilltribe Museum (an extremely worthy site, created by the tribes themselves) presents a matrix of names and stereotypes of the hill tribes of Thailand:

It can be confusing. In addition to the names that each tribe has for themselves, and the names of the tribes in English and Thai, each tribe also has its own name for every other tribe (these terms are called autonyms and exonyms, respectively). It can be very, very confusing. Below we have assembled a matrix of what each of the seven main ethnic groups of the area call each of the seven ethnic groups. If you are counting, that’s 49 different names. Phew!

In this website we try to use a romanization of the name that the tribe calls itself. The exception for that is the Karen, because it already has a standardized English name, and the name which is uses to refer to itself is very difficult to spell in English.

We have also included the traditional opinions or stereotypes that each tribe has towards the others and themselves. We haven’t listed these to assign any sort of value judgment or superiority/inferiority among the different ethnic groups, but, instead, to show how complicated the relationships between the various ethnic groups in Northern Thailand are.

So the Karen call the Lisu Kae Lisaw and the Lisu call the Karen Ya-geu-leu; furthermore, “Lisus have always gotten along with Karens because they have never tried to take advantage of each other.” I can’t tell you how much I love this stuff, and I wish somebody would replicate the matrix for other areas of the world. (Nigeria would be an excellent start.)

I found it at MetaFilter, by the way.

A post by aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org highlights a word the OED is apparently planning to include—not a new word at all, but an old one that’s missing a couple of centuries of documentation. From the OED’s Appeals list:

tipitiwitchet, tippitiwitchet, etc. (US, = Venus fly-trap):
   interdate 1763-1940

Aldi also turned up a site called “Tippitiwitchet explained: from Aphrodite’s Mousetrap, a biography of Venus’s flytrap with facsimiles of John Ellis’s original pamphlet and manuscripts, by E. Charles Nelson and Daniel L. McKinley,” which has a long discussion of the possible origin of the word (first used in print, apparently, by John Bartram, a remarkable botanist and writer whose Observations are online here):

My foray in search of the roots of the word Tipitiwitchet is first into what Eric Partridge calls ‘slang and unconventional English’. A few terms seem particularly enlightening, not all of them slang. ‘Tippet’ is a fur collar, in ordinary English, and Marlowe’s ‘Hempen tippet’, a hangman’s rope, is a poetic embellishment. Farmer has ‘Tippet’ alone meaning a hangman’s rope, with further play on the word in the phrase ‘to turn tippet’. A ‘Twitch’ is a noose for recalcitrant horses. ‘Twitchers’ are either pincers or tight boots; and, of course, ‘Twitchety’ is nervous, fidgety, jerky. Additional uses of ‘Twitch’ and variants of ‘Tippet’ and ‘Tippity’ in the Scottish dialect are recorded. All these terms, coupled with Ellis’s overworked idea of a trap for mammals, to be mentioned later, parallel the term ‘Snatch-box’ that Partridge records as used for vulva in popular parlance. Some aspect of the ‘Toothed Vagina’ may be relevant, as can be traced out in Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature.

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This all started because while editing an article in MS Word for a veterinary journal, I noticed that the spellchecker did not recognize the word scrapie. That’s odd, I thought—it’s a reasonably common word that I (who am not given to browsing books about the diseases of livestock) have run across any number of times in my reading career. Why wouldn’t it be in the spellchecker’s dictionary? As is my wont, I went directly to the OED, where it was defined as “A subacute, invariably fatal, disease of sheep and goats, characterized by degeneration of the central nervous system, leading to uncoordinated gait and itching.” So far, so good. But the first citation was from 1910! Surely such a homely word referring to such a common rural phenomenon must have been around for centuries, and in fact the 1910 citation (from Vet. Jrnl. LXVI. 711) implies it’s not an innovation: “Shepherds and farmers.. class more than one disease with totally different symptoms under the head of Scrapy.” How can it not be attested before that?

So I thought I’d check to see how far back the comparable French word was attested, only to discover it wasn’t in any of my bilingual dictionaries. It’s not in my Russian ones either, but the Yandex online dictionary has it, and the translation they give is скрепи [skrepi], clearly borrowed from English. Do sheep not get this disease outside Merrie England? And did sheep there not develop it until the nineteenth century?

This is my favorite kind of discussion of translation—not a theoretical treatise filled with jargon, but a nuts-and-bolts analysis of particular issues that come up in the course of particular translations. And it’s by the wonderful J.M. Coetzee, so it’s well written as well as meaty. I’ll just quote a couple of tidbits to whet your appetite:

Dialogue comes with its own set of problems, particularly when it is very informal and incorporates regional usages, contemporary fashions and allusions, or slang. My dialogue is rarely of this kind. For the most part its character is formal, even if its rhythms are more abrupt than the rhythms of narrative prose. So hitting the right register ought not to be a problem for the translator.

Where my dialogue is aberrant is when it comes from the mouths of children or of characters for whom English is not a first language. In general, it is best for such speech to be translated not word for word but by speech typical of children in the language translated into (hereafter called the target language), or by the speech of a foreigner making typical foreign slips…

When Professor Curren’s mind wanders to the West’s classical past, should the translator treat these moments as allusions and footnote them? Since such allusions are often glancing and casual, how can he be sure he has picked them all up? Is a passing reference to a photograph of Sophie Schliemann worth a long footnote on Troy, Homer’s Iliad, and the excavation of what he thought was Agamemnon’s tomb by Heinrich Schliemann?

The phrase amor matris [‘love of (one’s) mother/mother’s love’] crosses the professor’s mind. For the benefit of a reader without Latin, the famous ambiguity of the phrase can be explained in a quick footnote; but how does one evoke the atmosphere of rote learning in classrooms going back six centuries in the West?

In Boyhood, the young hero is obsessed with cricket. The ball-throwing machine that he constructs for batting practice in the backyard is easy enough to picture as long as one has an idea of the relation of batsman to bowler in cricket. For the Korean reader, is cricket worth a long elucidatory note, or should the machine be left unexplained as a cultural puzzle?…

Would mastery of the theory of translation make one a better translator? There is a legitimate branch of aesthetics called the theory of literature. But I doubt very much that there is or can be such a thing as a theory of translation—not one, at any rate, from which practitioners of translation will have much to learn.

Translation seems to me a craft in a way that cabinet-making is a craft. There is no substantial theory of cabinet-making, and no philosophy of cabinet-making except the ideal of being a good cabinet-maker, plus a handful of precepts relating to tools and to types of wood…

There’s a wonderful examination of “the atemporal tendency of the present participle” and the problems it causes in the translation of a passage from Waiting for the Barbarians. If you enjoy such things, you’ll want to read the whole essay. (Via wood s lot [01.29.2006].)

A follow-up to this post: the exciting conclusion (pp. 190ff.) to Dixon’s discussion of Jalnguy (“mother-in-law language”).

I had intended that my Jalnguy questioning should fall into two parts. The first was now as complete as I could get it that trip—going through everyday language words and asking their Jalnguy equivalents. I took a day off to go down to the motel at Mission Beach to prepare for the second stage.
A six-by-four-inch card was made out for each Jalnguy verb, and on it were listed all the everyday-style verbs for which it had been given as correspondent. Since there was a many-to-one relation between everyday and mother-in-law vocabularies, I expected to finish up with a fair number of Guwal forms on each Jalnguy card. A couple had just one—Jalnguy yirrgunjinyu had only occurred as equivalent of Guwal miyandanyu “laugh”—but most had four, five or six Guwal verbs for the one Jalnguy item.
The jubumban card was fairly typical. This Jalnguy verb had been given by Chloe, and by George and Ginnie, as the equivalent of bijin “hit with a rounded object”, jilwan “kick with the foot or shove with the knee”, dudan “mash food with a stone”, dalinyu “deliver a blow to something on the ground, for example, fall on”. One Jalnguy verb and four Guwal equivalents…

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I’m catching up with teju cole, whom I recommended earlier and who I belatedly remembered is going to pull down the pillars of his blog at the end of the month, and I’ve just hit a remarkable (they’re all remarkable) entry called “amnesiac.” It begins with a quote from Tomas Tranströmer:

One can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: ‘Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.’

It goes on to describe the “fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” and the bustling slave market they created, which thrived “in spite of a British ban on the trade (in 1808) and a British naval presence in Nigerian waters,” and tells us that “This history is missing from Lagos. There is no monument to the great wound. There is no day of remembrance, no museums.” And then he describes a visit to “the famous CMS bookshop on Lagos Island”:

The interior of the shop is vaguely familiar, from my visits here as a schoolboy, when this was the leading bookseller in the city. We came here when there was something we couldn’t find at the University Bookshop in Akoka or at the Abiola Bookshop in Yaba. But today it is a depressing sight. The books available for sale are few in number and restricted to few categories. Many volumes are dusty or curled at the edges. There are primary and secondary school textbooks and there are assorted volumes on computer programming, on accounting and on law. The largest section of all is devoted to “inspirational” and Christian books. A woman walks in and brusquely asks the attendant where she can find bibles. She is directed to a well-stocked section, the only section of the shop in which there is more than one customer. The titles of the books are reiterations: how to make money quickly by adopting certain simple principles, how to discover God’s plan for your life, how to live a healthy, wealthy and victorious life according to the precepts of the pentecostal church.

The shelf given to general fiction is pitiful. Other than a few tattered copies of plays by Shakespeare and Soyinka (and why are they tattered?), all that is available is a handful of recently published novels: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come. Both of these are first novels by young Nigerian women based in the US and they are here because they have an energetic young Nigerian publisher behind them. There is also a single copy of Dan Brown’s ubiquitous book. And I see a stack of books by James Hadley Chase, a minor imitator of Ian Fleming’s, who was inexplicably popular in Nigeria when I was growing up and apparently still is. But where are the Nigeria-based Nigerian writers? Where is the selection of international literary fiction? The reader I had seen on the danfo had surely not bought her book here. Poets, too, are notable by their absence.

The listless air of the bookshop is tiring. There is an information desk at the back of the shop. I go there with the idea that I might ask some questions. But the woman standing behind the high desk is slumped over, like a large mammal felled by a single shot. But she’s not dead, only sleeping, same as the other woman I saw at the museum. A standing fan slowly shakes its large head from left to right to left. It covers her in breezes. What I am looking for, what Tranströmer described as a moving spot of sun, is somewhere in this city. But it is not here. Here, one must forget about yesterday: it never happened.

Why is history uncontested here? There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices? I step out of the shop into the midday glare. All around me the unaware forest of flickering faces is visible. The area boys are still hard at work but I imagine they’ll soon break for lunch. The past is not even past.

I don’t want to end on that depressing note, so I’ll quote from a later entry, jazz:

But the following week, a friend took me to a relatively new shop on Awolowo Road in Ikoyi. And there I finally found myself at home, joyous, inspired. The shop is called the Jazzhole/Glendora. The owner is Kunle Tejuosho, and he is one of a small but tenacious breed of Nigerian cultural innovators. It is a combination music and book shop. The presentation is outstanding, as well done as any Waterstones or Borders. There was a broad selection of jazz, pan-African and other international music near the capacious entrance, and rows and rows of books for the general reader towards the back. The shop was tastefully lit, with a cool and quiet interior. Here, I thought to myself, was that “moving spot of sun” I had so hungrily sought. I saw music by Ali Farka Toure, by Salif Keita. There were books by Ian McEwan, Philip Roth and, yes, Michael Ondaatje. The prices were high. Not higher than they would be in an American or British shop, but certainly beyond the reach of most Nigerians. And yet, the Jazzhole is vital. Knowing that there is such a place, in the absence of good libraries or other vendors, makes all the difference to those who must have such sustenance. And better at those high prices than not at all.

And whatever you do, don’t miss dust. A whole novel in a blog entry.

Update (August 2020). Alas, the Wayback Machine has no record of any of those entries (though it did have a capture of the front page of the blog, which I substituted for the first link). I really hate the practice of deliberately disappearing one’s own blog — time and entropy do enough such work. If you want to write it, write it and leave it. If you don’t want it around, don’t write it. Bah.

This is a follow-up to this post, with further excerpts from R.M.W. Dixon’s Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker:

I’d only begun to work systematically on Jalnguy in the last few weeks in the field, and didn’t realize the full significance of it until I came to mull over the data back in London.
The many-to-one correspondence between Guwal [everyday language] and Jalnguy [“mother-in-law” language] vocabularies was a key to the semantic structure of Dyirbal. If one Jalnguy word was given as the equivalent for a number of distinct Guwal terms, it meant that the Guwal words were seen, by speakers of the language, to be related. For nouns, it revealed the botanical and zoological classifications which the Aborigines perceived. For instance, bayi marbu “louse”, bayi nunggan “larger louse”, bayi daynyjar “tick”, and bayi mindiliny “larger tick” were all grouped together under a single Jalnguy term, bayi dimaniny.

It could be even more revealing with verbs. The everyday style has four different words for kinds of spearing, and also such verbs as nyuban “poke a stick into the ground (testing for the presence of yams or snails, say)”, nyirran “poke something sharp into something (for example, poke a fork into meat to see if it is cooked)”, gidan “poke a stick into a hollow log, to dislodge a bandicoot”. All seven of these Guwal verbs are rendered by just one word in Jalnguy: nyirrindan “pierce”.

Sometimes Jalnguy grouped together verbs in a most surprising fashion. For instance, gundumman was given as Jalnguy equivalent of julman “squeeze, for example, squeeze a boil, knead flour”, and also of bugaman “chase, run down, as in catch a runaway steer”. What did these two verbs have in common? It was only when I had a chance to discuss it with Chloe that she explained gundumman means “bring together”. Hands come together in julman, while bugaman describes a pursuer coming into contact with what he is chasing…

[Dixon returns to North Queensland to do further work with Chloe.] I started going through all the nouns, verbs and adjectives in my accumulated vocabulary lists, asking how to say each one in the mother-in-law style. Bayi midin “ring-tail possum” was bayi jibuny in Jalnguy. Balan mawa “shrimp” came out as balan dunguy. The information given by Chloe, and later George, correlated well with what they had told me three years earlier. Jalnguy had not been actively used since about 1930, but it was clear that it was being remembered quite accurately…

Now it was time to get back to the serious business of gathering the Jalnguy words… Chloe decided she wanted some mates to help her think through some of the hardest words, so one day we went up to Murray Upper and assembled a sort of committee on Jalnguy, outside Jimmy Murray’s hut at Warrami… All sorts of things fell into place that day. For many verbs I’d originally been given a one-word English gloss. Nudin was “cut”, and so was gunban—and so was banyin—I was told. But they didn’t all have the same Jalnguy equivalent. Nudin and gunban were both jalnggan, but banyin was bubaman in Jalnguy; all the committee agreed on that.

Now bubaman I already knew as the correspondent of the everyday style verb baygun “shake or wave something, or bash something on something else, for example, pick up a goanna by its tail and bash its head on a tree to stun it.” The concept seemed to be “put something in motion, holding on to it” (and it might or might not impact on something else).

Further detail was needed. Nudin, I discovered, means “cut deeply, sever”, while gunban is “cut to medium depth, cut a piece out”. Fine, both are further specifications of the general Jalnguy verb jalnggan “cut”. Now for banyin. Every language has a few words like this, which describe an important everyday activity but which seem a bit bizarre to people from a different cultural background. Banyin means “get a stone tomahawk and bring it down on a rotten log so that the blade is embedded in the log, then pick up both tomahawk and log by the handle of the tomahawk and bash the log against a tree so that the log splits open and the ripe grubs inside it can be extracted and eaten”. It involves a tomahawk, which is the major implement for cutting or chopping. But the criterial action is seen to be the bashing of the log against a tree to split it; this can be inferred from the fact that the Jalnguy correspondent is bubaman “shake, wave or bash” rather than jalnggan “cut”.

The definition of banyin is the longest string of words expressing a single meaning I can remember ever seeing.

Looking up something else, I happened to notice that English has two words lemma: lemma ‘auxiliary proposition; glossed word or phrase’ and lemma ‘the lower of the two bracts enclosing the flower in the spikelet of grasses.’ Not particularly noteworthy in itself; what struck me was the etymologies: the former is from Greek lēmma (with long e) ‘thing taken, assumption,’ from lambanein ‘to take’ (compare the perfect passive eilēmmai), the latter from Greek lemma ‘husk,’ from lepein ‘to peel.’ Etymologically, they’re completely unrelated. Kind of neat.