languagehat.com

A story by Lester Haines in The Register describes recent attempts to crack down on widespread usage of internet slang in China:

Xia Xiurong, chair of the Education, Science, Culture and Health Committee of the Shanghai People’s Congress, told the Shanghai Morning Post: “On the Web, Internet slang is convenient and satisfying, but the mainstream media have a responsibility to guide proper and standard language usage.”
The problem is apparently that wild youth has taken to using terms such as “PK” (literally “player killer” = “one-to-one [gaming] competition”), the abbrevation “MM” for “girl” and the delicious “konglong” (literally “dinosaur”) for unattractive woman.
Phrases are taking a pasting too, with “bu yao” (don’t want) reduced to the shocking “biao” in net parlance.

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“Which-hunting” refers to editing which and that based on the superstition that the former should be used with a nonrestrictive clause and set off by commas; editors enslaved to this doctrine scrutinize manuscripts for relative clauses and zealously change whiches to thats or encase them in commas, with the satisfaction of someone lining up the pencils on their desk until they’re all perfectly parallel. This often produces esthetically displeasing results, but rarely does it have the potential of wreaking such havoc as in a sentence (Decision 4 of the International F.A. Board to Law 12 – Fouls and Misconduct) from soccer/football’s Laws of the Game:

A tackle, which endangers the safety of an opponent, must be sanctioned as serious foul play.

Since other versions (e.g., French: “Un tacle qui met en danger l’intégrité physique d’un adversaire doit être sanctionné comme faute grossière”) make it clear that the clause was meant to be restrictive, proper which-hunting would have turned the sentence into “A tackle that endangers…” But it’s so easy to get caught up in the game of changing whiches to thats that you lose sight of the point of it all and run the risk of this sort of thing. If I were a referee, I would zealously whistle every single tackle, explaining that Decision 4 of the IFAB banned tackles altogether and handing them a card with the phone number of whoever approved this abomination. Of course the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) probably doesn’t recognize the English version of the rules as definitive, but it would be fun until I got a cease-and-desist call from Zurich or was stomped to death by outraged players, whichever came first. (Via Mark Liberman’s Language Log post.)

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Andrew Wiesner has assembled a collection of links to “Images of Orality and Literacy in Greek Iconography of the Fifth, Fourth and Third Centuries BCE.” Some amazing stuff there, like the Boy seated writing. (Via wood s lot [10.10.2005].)

Incidentally, wood s lot also reminds me that today is the birthday of the great Thelonious Monk, and WKCR is playing his music all day. Click the “live broadcast” link at the bottom, choose your stream, and enjoy.

Today is Hangul Day (한글날): on this day in 1446, King Sejong the Great promulgated the Korean alphabet, hangul. Read all about it in Bill Poser’s Language Log post; I hadn’t realized the purpose of the alphabet was explicitly to bring literacy to the mass of Koreans: “I have been distressed by [the fact that most people can’t express their feelings in writing] and have designed twenty-eight new letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease and make convenient for their daily use.” But “15th century Korea was a highly stratified society rigidly controlled by a small elite in which those who were not elite and not male had few rights.”

Indeed, there was strong opposition to the introduction of Hangul on the part of King Sejong’s court, so strong that they presented a memorial in opposition and debated with him verbally. The reasons they gave were in part that it was wrong to deviate from the Chinese way of doing things, and in part that such a simple writing system would lead to the loss of aristocratic privilege. Their motives may have been wrong, but they understood the effects of mass literacy all too well. After King Sejong’s death, Hangul was very nearly suppressed. It took much longer to come into wide use than he had intended due to the opposition of the aristocracy.

Sounds like something worth celebrating to me.

Jesse Sheidlower has a piece in the current Bookforum on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language that is well worth reading. A snippet:

The abundance and quality of the material are often overshadowed by the smattering of humorous definitions in Johnson, of which the most widely known is surely his entry for lexicographer, which begins “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” (This, its common form, is a selective quotation; the entry goes on more helpfully, “that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.”) A pension was “an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.” And oats is “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” All it takes is one or two such entries, especially when combined with the many witty comments Boswell quotes Johnson as having said, to give the impression that the whole work is a frippery. It is not. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is one of the great intellectual achievements of any age. Praised from the moment of its publication, it remains an astonishing work, not least because it is the product of a single, extraordinarily perceptive mind. Johnson had the help of a half-dozen assistants—most of whom, by the way, were Scots—but their role was chiefly to help him manage the quotations, not to write definitions.
Even sympathetic discussions tend to focus on the unusual—the humorous entries, the weird words (bicipitous; jobbernowl; trolmydames). These are crowd pleasing, and easy to discuss, though ultimately not very important. The trend continues: Most modern dictionaries are publicized with their hottest new words, it being impossible to interest the press in the quality of one’s etymology.

(Via Gnostical Turpitude.)

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Mark Liberman at Language Log has an interesting and depressing post about how lawyers pick up crazy ideas about language. He quotes John W. Brewer:

… a key part of law review culture is a hyperlegalistic concern with details of style and usage, and an almost pathological fear of exercising discretionary judgment among plausible alternatives. For any style/usage issue, the notion is that there must be a rule, and you can look the rule up in an authoritative source, and once you’ve done that you should follow the rule strictly, both in your own writing and especially in seizing opportunities to make petty corrections to the writing of others. The so-called “Blue Book” provides most of the obsessive-compulsive detail on matters of abbreviation and the like (should the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit be abbreviated “(2d Cir.)” or “(2nd Cir.)”? For God’s sake, don’t guess! Look it up!). But it doesn’t deal directly with many issues of prose style where people like this intuitively sense that There Must Be a Rule. For that, many law review types use as their authoritative source the Texas Law Review Manual of Usage and Style (MoUS), which I dimly recall from unhappy encounters with it circa 1990 as having a particularly obsessive and wrongheaded view of the that/which issue…

While as an editor I certainly object to the idea that looking up matters of style is “obsessive-compulsive,” it is unfortunate that so many style manuals take prescriptivism to absurd lengths, and apparently this is worst than most. But that’s not the half of it; Mark quotes Richard Posner’s “Against the Law Reviews,” where I learned the horrid truth about how law reviews work:

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OK, another question for you Africanists. I have a book Munyakare: African Civilization Before the Batuuree, by Richard W. Hull. I long ago figured out that batúuree is Hausa for ‘white man’ (the plural is tuuraawáa), but I have never been able to decipher “munyakare” (which is not in either the index or glossary, nor is it mentioned in the introduction or any other obvious spot). I thought Google would help, but it seems every hit for the word is a reference to this book. Assuming mu- to be a prefix, I googled “nyakare” and got a few hits, but the only one that looked promising was this page, which says “Nyakare: A chiefdom created for a daughter of Ruganzu II Ndoli” (who apparently ruled the baNyarwanda in the early 16th century). I guess a muNyakare would be a person from that chiefdom, but what that has to do with anything is beyond me. Again, I welcome assistance from those who know more than I.

In the course of cataloguing my library, I’m learning a lot about my books (many of which I bought after a cursory inspection and never investigated until now) and being forced to figure out linguistic details that I could gloss over when simply sticking the books on the appropriate shelf. This is the case with Umthwakazi, by P. S. Mahlangu (Longmans 1957), which according to this site is a historical account of Mzilikazi and the founding of the amaNdebele nation and was the first book published in Ndebele. The back cover says “NDEBELE (The Owner of the State),” the parenthetical phrase being apparently a translation of the book’s title; googling “umthwakazi” suggests that it consists of a prefix u- and the noun Mthwakazi, now used by Ndebele nationalists as the name of the Ndebele nation (considered as independent from Zimbabwe). The online Ndebele-English translator says “u-Mthwakazi: the nation of the Ndebele people,” and a news story from earlier this year quotes Godfrey Ncube as saying “Mthwakazi means ‘a nation’. That is what the Ndebele people were called.”

Now, Ndebele is a Nguni language that split off from Zulu quite recently; Dalby’s Dictionary of Languages says “Zulu and Ndebele are still to some extent mutually intelligible, though idioms differ and Ndebele has clearly borrowed numerous terms from the languages previously spoken in its territory” (where it arrived from what is now South Africa in the early 19th century). So I’ve tried to use my Zulu dictionaries to translate the subtitle and author line: “Izindaba ZamaNdebele Zemvelo. Zilotshwe ngu- P.S. Mahlangu.” So far I’ve learned that izindaba is the plural of -daba and means ‘reports, accounts,’ and zemvelo seems to be a form of -velo ‘nature.’ If anyone can provide further enlightenment, be my guest.

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Xavier Kreiss, a guest blogger at Naked Translations, has an interesting post on “The languages of Guernsey.” It starts off:

My mother is a Guernseywoman, and I’ve known and loved Guernsey all my life. The Channel Islands have always held a particular attraction for me – I’m a half-British Frenchman, which probably explains the affinity between myself and those “pieces of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England”, to quote the famous words of Victor Hugo, who spent many years in the archipelago as a political exile. He was fascinated by the local Norman-French dialect, or “djernesiais”, an ancient vernacular that dates back to the days of the Norman conquest.

And it continues with “a highly unofficial bit of potted history” and discussion of the patois (and its near-disappearance), the literature, the law, and the names: “Le Cheminant, Le Page, Le Patourel, Duquemin (pronounced dook-min), Mauger (prononced Major)…” Interesting stuff.

wood s lot turns five today. I don’t know how Mark Woods keeps up such a dependable stream of literary, cultural, artistic, and political links, avoiding the obvious and ferreting out the unusual and unforgettable, but if you don’t already have the site bookmarked, now’s as good a time as any. Today he has the haunting photography of Josef Sudek, poetry by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, various links on the Situationist International, E.J. Hobsbawm, Nassim Taleb, Stirling Newberry, Robert Kelly, Jacques Derrida, and more; tomorrow he’ll have completely different, equally valuable material. Congratulations, and many more!
(Pentacampeão!)