languagehat.com

I just saw the new movie Godland on the Criterion Channel; it’s gotten rave reviews and doubtless deserves them, long and grim as it is (it reminded me of an Icelandic saga, though nowhere near as concise). But I’m bringing it here for its linguistic interest — I can’t think of a movie other than Godard’s Contempt (see this 2003 post) that features language difference so prominently. It’s about a Danish priest who goes to Iceland to build a church; he doesn’t speak Icelandic, so he’s dependent on the help of a translator and on the locals’ varying understanding of Danish. The subtitles distinguish the languages (Danish in Roman type, Icelandic in italics), and there is an amusing scene in which he tries futilely to learn a few Icelandic words. (There is also some acerbic commentary by an Icelander on the Awful Danish Language.) All the credits are in both languages, as is the title… but there’s a catch: the Icelandic Volaða land is not synonymous with the Danish Vanskabte land, and neither means anything like “Godland.” Danish vanskabt apparently means ‘malformed; having a birth defect’ (van- ‘mis-, mal-‘ +‎ skabt ‘formed, created’), while Icelandic volaður ‘miserable’ is the past participle of vola ‘to cry, weep’ (from Old Norse vāla, vǣla, probably cognate with English wail). I find it unacceptable that when the Danish and Icelandic titles are shown on the screen, they are both translated as “Godland”; why not give the English-speaking viewer a clue as to what they actually mean? The differences are discussed in this Reykavík Grapevine piece by Iryna Zubenko:

“The name ‘Volaða Land’ comes from a poem by Icelandic priest Matthías Jochumsson who studied for the priesthood in Copenhagen,” Hlynur explains. “He moved up north after he came from Denmark. He experienced a harsh winter in Akureyri when the whole fjord froze. During the next summer, it wasn’t warm enough, so the fjord stayed frozen. He wrote this hateful diatribe about Iceland — a very aggressive poem called ‘Volaða Land,’ which means violent, wretched, disfigured island.”

According to Hlynur, the poem was published without the priest’s knowledge. Matthías faced public backlash and had to write another poem about the beauty of Iceland to restore his reputation.

“That poem was a big inspiration for the film,” Hlynur admits. “The Danish translation of ‘Volaða Land’ is ‘Vanskabte Land.’ It’s a very strange translation but a very beautiful one. It’s very expressive, almost more brutal than the original.” He continues: “The English title, ‘Godland,’ is very different from the original title. I always felt like if you put ‘Volaða Land,’ ‘Vanskabte Land,’ and ‘Godland’ together, they give you a good picture of the film.”

You can read the Jochumsson poem here; it begins:

Volaða land,
horsælu hérvistar slóðir,
húsgangsins trúfasta móðir,
volaða land!

Dwight Garner’s NY Times review (archived) of Ray Isle’s The World in a Wineglass is a master class in how to write a negative review of a book by someone you respect; here’s the nub of it:

Isle is among the best, and best-known, wine commentators in the United States. For many years, he has been the wine editor for Food & Wine magazine. He is a genial presence when he appears, glass in hand, on the “Today” show. His palate is beyond reliable. It should be insured, as Betty Grable’s legs were, by Lloyd’s of London. I would take his wine advice to the bank. What I would not do is take his new book out of the bookstore. It’s too heavy. It’s also too padded, like a student’s term paper. If it were an Easter basket, it would be 95 percent shredded green paper. You must really poke around to find the candy eggs.

But I’m bringing it here for the delightful ending:

There is a certain kind of food and wine writing that walks unwittingly into a class minefield. The liberal urban writer is dropped onto a stony goat path among artistic or successful rural people, or both: How should he describe them? What not to do is to baste them in joie de vivre. Isle consistently and patronizingly refers to people as “cheerful and twinkly” or from the “wise old elf school.” He says that they are “extraordinarily animated” or “fiercely animated” or possessed of “an infectious, impish smile” or “irrepressible.” It’s as if he is describing toddlers, or the brain addled. No one would refer to a lawyer, or an ambassador, or a scholar or indeed a wine writer in this manner.

One Slovenian winemaker says to Isle, in my favorite lines in the book: “I need critics! I don’t need this wow-brow shikimiki zak-zak!” Isle presumes the last bit means something like “useless hipster yes-men.” Shout it loud: Down with wow-brow shikimiki zak-zak! Up with Ray Isle, who has better books in him.

Erin Maglaque (/məˈglɑk/) reviews Aldus Manutius: The Invention of the Publisher by Oren Margolis for the LRB (14 December 2023; archived), from which I learned a lot about that interesting fellow:

Aldus Manutius​ is the bibliophile’s bibliophile. Between 1495 and his death in 1515, Aldus issued from his Venice press more first editions of classical texts than had ever been published before, and more than anyone has published since. With his punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, he designed an elegant new typeface for printing in Greek (a serious technical challenge) as well as the italic font. Aldus shrunk the book: from the large-format volume kept in the library, to a smaller, stylish text to be tucked into a pocket. As Oren Margolis puts it in his new biography, Aldus ‘unchained literature from desks and remade reading as a pastime’. He printed dozens of beautiful books, none more so than the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the book that – by giving equal attention to nymph orgies and classical architecture – captured the libido of the Italian Renaissance.

Aldus seems to have been a difficult character. He squabbled with his workers, even alienating the great Griffo. He was an evangelist for humanist printing and had a zealot’s splenetic temper. He was chronically overworked and felt overlooked by his scholarly peers, though he could namedrop and network with the best of them. According to an earlier biographer, he was ‘almost morbidly sensitive’ about grammar and pronunciation; he got into friendship-straining arguments with Erasmus about case-endings. It’s hard not to flinch from his overweening desire to be praised. He was working himself to death and never let anyone forget it.

But I like him. I can’t help it. Anyone who has sat in the park with a paperback has Aldus to thank for freeing the book from the library, the desk, the metal chain that sometimes bound books to shelves. If you’re the sort of person who gets a quiet thrill from well-chosen punctuation, Aldus is a kindred spirit; he revived the use of the semicolon after centuries of inadequate commas. He is the secular patron saint of pedants and editors. He was so peeved by the widespread practice of shortening Latin and Greek diphthongs into long vowels that he wrote an essay about it. He is also a paragon for those of us awaiting our great second act. In his twenties and thirties, Aldus was an ordinary humanist. But then, at forty, he moved to Venice and reinvented himself as a publisher. Why did he do it? How did he become a printer so ambitious that he changed what reading meant?

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I saw a reference to a Greek film called Attenberg and looked up the director, Athina Rachel Tsangari; I was mentally stressing Athina on the penultimate, since the classical form is Ἀθήνη, but to my surprise I saw her name was given in Greek as Αθηνά. Confused and curious, I went to the Greek Wikipedia page for the name and found that it was “από το επίθετο Ἀθαναία [sic: s/b Ἀθηναία], που συναιρέθηκε σε Ἀθηνάα > Ἀθηνᾶ” ‘from the epithet Athanaia [s/b Athenaia], which was contracted to Athináa > Athiná]’; it’s not just a personal name but the Modern Greek name for the goddess. That seemed interesting enough to share.

Her surname, incidentally, is from τσαγκάρης ‘shoemaker’:

Inherited from Byzantine Greek τσαγκάρης (tsankárēs), from Mediaeval and Late Koine Greek τσαγκάριος (tsankários) & τζαγκάριος (tzankários), τζαγγάριος (tzangários) with simplification of ⟨γγ > γκ⟩, from Koine Greek τζάγγη (tzángē) + -άριος (-ários). The Hellenistic term, chiefly in the plural, found as a transcription of Late Latin zancha / tzanga, from Persian ظانگا‎ (zângâ) as in Parthian. Cognates include the medieval Byzantine Greek τζαγγίον n (tzangíon, “a kind of Byzantine shoe”) and possibly the modern τσαγανό n (tsaganó).

They don’t define τσαγανό, but apparently it means δυναμισμός, θάρρος, νεύρο, ενεργητικότητα [dynamism, courage, nerve, energy]; the semantic connection is not clear to me.

Benjamin Dreyer writes for Kirkus Reviews about his editing career, and it’s a good read:

I can’t say that I recall the particulars of my first day as a production editor—a supervisor of copy editors and copyediting, proofreaders and proofreading—at Random House, some 30 years and a scant handful of months ago. Perhaps along with the key to my office I was handed a reminder of our departmental precepts:

Don’t impose the subjunctive on authors who don’t naturally use it.

Apply the series comma quietly and consistently unless you’re explicitly told not to.

Remember that it’s the author’s book, not yours.

The rest is commentary.

Or perhaps not; it was, after all, a long time ago.

“The past is a foreign country,” we’re reminded by L. P. Hartley at the opening of his novel The Go-Between. “They do things differently there.” And indeed we did. There was no email yet. There were fax machines. If your phone—a landline phone, to be sure, though we had no use for the term yet—rang, you answered it, even if you didn’t know who was on the other end. It might be your mother; it might be, as it once was for me, Isabella Rossellini silkily requesting a tiny but exceedingly late text change to her memoir, a change I promised to get taken care of (well, wouldn’t you?) before we went to print, even if I got yelled at for it. (I got yelled at for it.) And if you did want to make such a late change, you often had to cajole a design colleague to make the change by hand, razoring up a bit of plasticked text from a spare copy of what were then called blues, short for bluelines, and gluing it down where you needed it.

And, yes, I had an office, a state that persisted through three office buildings as Random House—eventually part of Penguin Random House, which itself grew larger and larger through various mergers and acquisitions—moved in a northwesterly direction from the East Side of Manhattan to the West. After the Plague Curtain descended in March 2020, I visited it nearly not at all, though it remained mine till, not very long ago, I packed up the last of my personal effects and shipped home four brimming boxes of books in preparation for my retirement this week. […]

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Alena Dvořáková writes for the Dublin Review of Books about a controversial writer:

There have for a while now been two Milan Kunderas, characters so different as to suggest Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There is Kundera the good European, celebrated as an eminent writer, a defender of freedom of speech, a voice of remembering against the politics of forgetting, and a spokesman for a mythical entity called Central Europe which could yet save the West from decline – if only the Westerners would heed its call to return to their values. If the good Kundera has any blemish, it might be his representations of women – but for every repulsive Helena, Irena or Laura, his defenders will say, you get a fascinating Sabina, Tamina or Agnes, so the man could surely not be a complete misogynist. Then there is the other, darker Kundera, a libertine and philanderer for whom misogyny has not been much of an issue because he has greater sins to hide – at the very least he is viewed with suspicion ‘back home’ as the great mythmaker who made his name on the back of elegant but less than truthful simplifications of the reality of communism, as well as fibs about his own past.

The good Kundera – the best-known twentieth century Czech writer – has been ubiquitous, his work available in many languages. Meanwhile, the darker Kundera – a constant presence on the Czech scene, the Kundera of Laughable Loves and The Joke who later sold out – has mostly skulked in the background, among the people of whom we know nothing, muttering in their incomprehensible Czech. This Kundera-in-hiding might make an occasional appearance in the writing of Western critics, but mostly [only to] be dismissed as a spectre without substance, the creation of those left behind (sometimes also called dissidents) who, filled with envy, cannot but consider the willing and successful emigrant as a traitor to the mother country. Imagine, he even dared to switch his writing language from Czech to French! And he chose not to return home after 1989! The bad faith of these Czech begrudgers would be inferred from their attempts to smear Kundera’s good name with baseless accusations, for example that he was a police informer. […]

But it is only recently, and on the Czech side, following the publication in 2020 of Jan Novák’s controversial biography (in Czech) of the first half of Kundera’s life (1929-1975), that the two Kunderas have been confronted one with the other. The polemic that ensued made one thing clear: the good Kundera is an idol with feet of clay whose demolition is long overdue.

Novák’s biography should be required reading for everyone interested in Kundera or his work. He has managed to avoid the Stockholm syndrome that so often turns critics and biographers into Kundera’s willing captives, reduced to quoting or paraphrasing the master’s words. Whatever reservations one might have about some of his facts and interpretations, he has assembled an incredible amount of relevant material – from extant secret police files to invaluable testimonies by friends, lovers, colleagues and more casual acquaintances – and skilfully used it to come up with the first even remotely convincing portrait of Kundera, unrivalled in detail and informativeness. Crucially, Novák has succeeded in placing Kundera’s habitual responses to events and topics in the appropriate context, in a way that illuminates the difficult times as well as the author’s choices. There is now a better chance than ever that a new Kundera might emerge: one who is less of an idol, more of a fallible human being; a writer whose words are to be examined (rather than rehearsed) to get a better measure of his ideas and images of humanity.

I remember enjoying The Unbearable Lightness of Being back in the ’80s, when everybody was reading it, but I don’t remember much about it; at any rate, it’s interesting to get an inside (Czech) view on him.

Elian Peltier (reporting from Abidjan, Dakar, and Paris for the NY Times) has a fine description of the changes the strong Francophone presence in Africa are bringing to the mother tongue:

French, by most estimates the world’s fifth most spoken language, is changing — perhaps not in the gilded hallways of the institution in Paris that publishes its official dictionary, but on a rooftop in Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast. There one afternoon, a 19-year-old rapper who goes by the stage name “Marla” rehearsed her upcoming show, surrounded by friends and empty soda bottles. Her words were mostly French, but the Ivorian slang and English words that she mixed in made a new language.

To speak only French, “c’est zogo” — “it’s uncool,” said Marla, whose real name is Mariam Dosso, combining a French word with Ivorian slang. But playing with words and languages, she said, is “choco,” an abbreviation for chocolate meaning “sweet” or “stylish.”

A growing number of words and expressions from Africa are now infusing the French language, spurred by booming populations of young people in West and Central Africa. More than 60 percent of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80 percent of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Paris. Through social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, they are literally spreading the word, reshaping the French language from African countries, like Ivory Coast, that were once colonized by France.

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Remember this post from April? Fun, right? Well, this video is twice as long and at least as much fun. I was surprised at some of the bad guesses and very impressed with Matthew, the scruffy music expert. I got a couple of them right off the bat but on the whole wouldn’t have done as well as he did. Thanks again, Eric!

(There will doubtless be spoilers in the comments, so you might want to watch the video first.)

Sonia Colina reports on a linguistic phenomenon we don’t often think of:

Despite efforts to increase research participation, racial and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in results. A review of 5,008 papers in three pediatric journals from 2012 to 2021 revealed that only 9% of these studies included non-English speaking volunteers.

Language is a key barrier to participation, as even those with some English proficiency are less likely to participate in studies when recruitment materials aren’t in their native language. Language barriers also hinder a person’s ability to provide informed consent to participate.

This problem is not likely to fade away. The number of people with limited English proficiency in the U.S. grew by 80% between 1990 and 2013, going from nearly 14 million to 25.1 million people. As of 2022, this number rose to 26.5 million people. Excluding people with limited English proficiency is not only unethical, as these groups deserve the same access to experimental and evolving therapies as the English-speaking population, but also limits how applicable research findings are to the general population.

One way to eliminate language barriers is by translating research documents. As a translation scholar, I strive to discover ways to improve translation quality to benefit the research community and broader society. Translation in research, however, is not straightforward. Not only must the translated materials be accurate, they also have to serve their intended purpose.

More at the link, of course, and I hope attention is paid. Thanks, Bathrobe!

A recent Rusty Foster post investigates a usage of the term “jackpot” I wasn’t familiar with (the usual ‘big prize’ sense comes from “a form of poker, where the pool or pot accumulated until a player could open the bidding with two jacks or better”); discussing the search for “a new label that we can apply to our chaotic historical moment,” he writes:

In Ploughshares Rachel Nevins excerpted Gibson’s 2014 novel “The Peripheral” where a character describes the jackpot as:

…nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.

[…]

For me what makes “jackpot” rise above options like “the terrible twenties” or the entertaining “assholocene” is its referential ambiguity. I don’t usually think of a jackpot as a negative thing. A jackpot is something you win, right? You pull a slot machine handle, the wheels spin, the cherries line up: jackpot! You scoop up the coins.

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