languagehat.com

I just heard a radio news announcer say “In Beijing… uh, Beizhing…” My wife gets nervous when I swear at the radio, so I’ll say it here: there is no /zh/ sound in Mandarin Chinese! Why on earth do people insist on looking at a pinyin j, which is pronounced pretty much exactly like an English j, and reading it as if it were French? Stop it, all of you, just stop it!
This has been a public service announcement, brought to you by Hatters for Better Language Use.

The Interactive Irish Lessons site has a series of lessons based on Mícheál Ó Siadhail’s excellent book Learning Irish; you can read about Ó Siadhail (a fine poet as well as linguist) here and in this LH thread. I may as well point out that Ó Siadhail is pronounced as if it were written O’Shiel, which it often is in Ulster; according to this site, elsewhere “it is usually anglicized as Shields, Sheils, Shiels or Sheilds.” (Via Plep [Nov. 4].)

OK, there’s not actually an exclamation mark after the name of Mel Gibson’s new movie, but it sounds so apocalyptic! that way. As you may have heard, it will be filmed in “a Mayan dialect”; now Ben Zimmer reveals that the language in question is Yucatec Maya (Wikipedia article, brief introduction: “My favorite Spanish loan word is chinga’an, which means broken and came about from the Spanish overlords saying ‘chinga’ when something broke”). Go to Ben’s post for a good analysis of the linguistic situation; go here for some interesting speculation on the possible apocalyptic content of the film. I’m just going to point out that Gibson’s “translation” of the Greek word ἀποκαλύπτω as “new beginning” (I assume it’s Gibson’s) is ridiculous. As you can see from the Liddell-Scott link, it’s a verb meaning ‘uncover; disclose, reveal’; the last book of the New Testament is called Αποκάλυψις Ιωάννου ‘John’s revelation,’ and the over-the-top nature of the things he revealed about the future (beasts with ten horns and seven heads, blood to the height of the horses’ girdles, etc.) gave rise to the modern meaning of apocalyptic, which I expect will be fully exemplified in the sanguinary Mr. Gibson’s film.

How did I miss this? This is what I get for skipping the book review section. Some months ago HarperCollins published Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler, and John Derbyshire’s review makes it sound like a must-read:

Nicholas Ostler is a professional linguist and currently chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. His loving fascination with languages is plain on every page of Empires of the Word, and in the many careful transcriptions — each with a brief pronunciation guide and a translation — of passages from Nahuatl, Chinese, Akkadian, and a host of other tongues. Ostler actually has a feel for languages that, he has convinced me, goes into something beyond the merely subjective…

[Read more…]

I’m afraid my delay in reading last week’s New Yorker means that it’s no longer on newsstands (and the article isn’t online), but if you can find a copy, the November 7 issue has an article by David Remnick called “The Translation Wars” [archived] that discusses the history of English translations of Russian literature, beginning with the sainted/damned Constance Garnett (“She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on”) and focusing on the husband-and-wife team of Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (she provides him with detailed trots, he turns them into literary English). The saga of how they got their first translation (The Brothers Karamazov) published is depressing at first (Random House responded: “No, thanks. Garnett lives forever. Why do we need a new one?”) but turned out happily, and they’re now well off and working on War and Peace (and keeping the French in French, hurrah!). Aside from a pointless rehash of the many-times-rehashed Nabokov-Wilson spat (“Your translation of Onegin sucks!” “No way, it’s your Russian that sucks!”), it’s well worth reading.

But since you probably can’t read the Remnick piece, I’ll share a nice bit of Georgii Adamovich I just ran across in his essay on Remizov: Разговорный язык слагался у нас, как впрочем и везде, в стороне от грамматических насилий, под различными перекрестными влияниями, одно отбрасывая, другое усваивая, и как всякий подлинно живой организм переваривая, претворяя в свое то, что было чужим. [Conversational language among us, as everywhere, has been formed apart from grammar’s violence, under various reciprocal influences, rejecting one thing while adopting another, and like every genuinely living organism digesting and making its own that which had been another’s.]

Musil is one of those Great Authors I’ve always looked forward to reading one day but haven’t gotten around to; many of the writers I love most deeply come from that early part of the twentieth century and I have a fascination with the Austro-Hungarian Empire (all those languages!), so I expect to enjoy him when I finally read The Man Without Qualities (no, I’m not going to try reading him in German: life is too short). In the meantime, I’m happy to have Jerry van Beers’ Musil site; he’s been putting online everything he can find about and by Musil since 1997 (at first in Dutch, but he quickly added an English version), and it’s a real treasure trove. I got the link from wood s lot, who put up lots of Musil-related items yesterday (11.06.2005); my favorite snippet is:

“Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write in short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes and in writing, it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.
—Musil, from ‘The Paintspreader’ in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, 1936

A very handy page lists the various sets of terms used for the sizes of books and the paper they’re made from. Who can resist words like pott (OED: “originally bearing the watermark of a pot”), columbier (“F. colombier dove-cote, used in same sense”), demy, double elephant? Oddly, the OED entry for pott includes a citation from Frederick T. Day’s An introduction to paper: its manufacture and use (1962) that reads “Sizes of paper in the United Kingdom centre round fifteen designs: Foolscap, Demy, Medium,.. Pott, Elephant,.. Eagle and Columbier,” and yet there is no corresponding definition under eagle (nor is the word in the list of sizes). I both love and hate loose ends like that.

I must also say that like Matt of No-sword, from whom I got the link, I prefer the resonant older names like sexagesimo-quarto to the oafish new-style sixty-fourmo and its fellows.

An affecting poem by Maurice Leiter:

Lacking languages I stumble
in the darkness of translation
finding satisfaction second-hand
Here is Cavafy soft-spoken subtle
speaking free of affectation
or so it seems in this translation
said to be exemplary by many
But the curtain of my ignorance
keeps me from truly knowing him
nor is his work the sole example…

So learn those languages, folks; you don’t want to wind up, like the poet, saying “Too late I see my life’s great error”! (Via wood s lot.)

So I’ve been reading a book by James G. Cowan called The Elements of the Aborigine Tradition, and I’ve been putting up with balderdash like “This suggests that science has no way of answering problems posed by the spirit, however much it might claim to have identified the structure of DNA and the principles of life in the laboratory. The Rainbow Snake as an expression of world creation resolves that problem…” because he has a lot of interesting things to say about Aboriginal culture, but this, this is too much:

The etymology of the word ‘rite’ more properly suggests the origin of Aboriginal ceremony than does its obvious association with religious ritual. This, of course, is never far away, as most ceremonies are in one way or another religious. But the earlier etymological meaning, deriving from the Latin word recte meaning ‘in a straight line, perpendicularity [sic], uprightly’ goes nearer to the heart of what Aboriginal ritual means to them.

The etymological fallacy—using a word’s etymology as a guide to its current meaning—is bad enough, but at least it can get people to learn etymologies. This alleged etymology is just plain wrong. The word rite is from Latin ritus ‘ceremony,’ which has nothing to do with rectus ‘straight.’ Don’t publishers fact-check any more? (That’s a rhetorical question; I know they don’t.)

The erratic swings of my mental searchlight have focused once again on the native cultures of Australia, something that has fascinated me off and on ever since I learned about the complex grammar of the languages and especially since I bought Wally Caruana’s Aboriginal Art and fell in love with the stylized imagery, intimately linked with the tales of the Dreaming. Well, I just ran across the following entry in my Australian Oxford Paperback Dictionary:

Koori /kuu-ree, koor-ree/ n. an Aborigine. (Awabakal gurri ‘an Aboriginal person’.)
Usage Many Aborigines understandably dislike the use of ‘Aborigine’ or ‘Aboriginal’ since these terms have been foisted on them and can carry pejorative overtones: they prefer to use the word for ‘person’ from a local language. Because of the wide variety of Aboriginal languages, however, Koori has not gained Australia-wide acceptance, being confined to most of NSW and to Vic. Other terms are preferred in other regions: Murri over most of south and central Qld, Bama in north Qld, Nunga in southern SA, Yura in SA, Nyoongah around Perth, Mulba in the Pilbara region, Wongi in the Kalgoorlie region, Yammagi in the Murchison River region, Yolngu in Arnhem Land, Anangu in central Australia, and Yuin on the south coast of NSW.

Now, it’s clearly impossible for anyone but a specialist to know all these terms; my question to Australian readers is, do average non-Aboriginal Aussies tend to know the term for their own region, or is even that a matter of special knowledge? In other words, are these terms normal (like Inuit in Canada) or are they the province of the politically correct? (Note: I’m not making any judgments one way or the other, and I hope this doesn’t turn into a heated discussion of “political correctness”—I’m just trying to get a sense of actual usage.)

[Read more…]