languagehat.com

Charles Kelly’s Online Japanese Language Study Materials are “free-to-use online materials that I have developed to help people study Japanese.” Looks like good stuff, and for you Mac users, he’s got crossword puzzles too! (Via Plep, who also links to a Wolof course—but it costs money, so I didn’t make a post of it.)

An article by Dan Bloom reports on a controversy over the way ‘Jew’ is written in Chinese:

There are many Chinese characters for ‘you-tai,’ or Jew, but the combination that is currently being used refers to an animal of the monkey species, and has the connotation of parsimoniousness,” Chien Hsi-chieh, director of the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan, said recently…
Chien said the biased Chinese characters were devised by Christian missionaries in China around 1830, when they were translating the Old Testament and New Testament into Chinese and needed a term for Jews.
“A better choice for the word ‘Jews’ in Chinese writing would be one that is pronounced the same, but written with a more neutral character,” he said.

You can see the characters themselves in the Taipei Times story on the dustup. At first glance the complaint looks plausible, but Bloom quotes a correspondent, MK Shum of Hong Kong, who says:

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Geoff Pullum, back at Language Log after a move to Cambridge, Mass., has posted a long and detailed refutation of the myth that FOXP2 is the “language gene”; he links to “Alec MacAndrew’s authoritative survey of the issue” and provides his own acerbic commentary. Unfortunately, we all know that the press will pay no heed, myths being so much more fun than facts.

A BusinessWeek Online article by Brian Grow reports on companies that market to the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants in the US, focusing on the identification card known as the matrícula consular issued by Mexican consulates. What brings it into LH territory is the following bit:

So far, Blue Cross says it may have signed up several thousand Mexicans with the matrícula, although it doesn’t yet track the number. In May it extended the program to matrícula holders from Guatemala, and it’s working on a video-marketing campaign for Guatemalans who speak an ancient Mayan dialect, K’anjobal, so old that it’s no longer written.

“So old that it’s no longer written”—never mind that it’s not true (Ethnologue, Bible excerpt), what does it even mean? If languages somehow lost their writing systems as they aged, you’d think the Chinese, for example, would have been illiterate for many centuries. I wonder if it’s an editing goof or simple absence of thought on the reporter’s part.

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These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,
Though this is only one example.
They emerged until a tower
Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back
Into the past for swans and tapering branches,
Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.
Then you are left with an idea of yourself
And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon
Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others
Who fly by you like beacons.
The night is a sentinel.
Much of your time has been occupied by creative game
Until now, but we have all-inclusive plans for you.
We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,
To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air
To you, pressing you back into a startled dream
As sea-breezes greet a child’s face.
But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.
The worst is not over, yet I know
You will be happy here. Because of the logic
Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.
Tender and insouciant by turns, you see
You have built a mountain of something,
Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
    —John Ashbery, from Rivers and Mountains (1966)

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It turns out Eskimo doesn’t mean ‘eater of raw meat’:

In spite of the tenacity of the belief, both among Algonquian speakers and in the anthropological and general literature […] that Eskimo means ‘raw-meat eaters’, this explanation fits only the cited Ojibwa forms (containing Proto-Algonquian *ashk- ‘raw’ and *po- ‘eat’) and cannot be correct for the presumed Montagnais source of the word Eskimo itself. […] The Montagnais word awassimew (of which ay- [in ayassimew ‘Micmac’] is a reduplication) and its unreduplicated Attikamek cognate [ashkimew ‘Eskimo’] exactly match Montagnais assimew, Ojibwa ashkime ‘she nets a snowshoe’, and an origin from a form meaning ‘snowshoe-netter’ could be considered if the original Montagnais application (presumably before Montagnais contact with Eskimos) were to Algonquians.

Too late for the reputation of the English word, but good to know. (Thanks to Rusty Brooks for linking to this in his MetaFilter comment.)

Oh, and even if you prefer to avoid Eskimo, you can’t just refer to everyone as Inuit. The situation is complicated. There’s an interesting discussion by Steve Sailer here:

It’s generally assumed among up-to-date English-speakers that an ethnic group should be called by whatever it calls itself, not what outsiders call it.
Yet, practically no one outside of the Anglosphere worries about this principle at all. For example, Inuit Eskimos call French Canadians “Uiuinaat” or “Guiguinaat,” from the French word “oui” for “yes.” Anglophones are known as “Qallunaat.”

Considering how hard it is for English-speakers to correctly pronounce words even from other European languages that share our basic alphabet, asking Americans to accurately transliterate words from radically different phonetic structures would appear close to hopeless.

It’s become common, for instance, for Western journalists to refer to the “Qu’ran” [sic; should be “Qur’an”] instead of the traditional spelling of “Koran,” but virtually no American understands what sound the apostrophe in “Qu’ran” stands for. Nor could many even produce that sound properly.

Beyond the pronunciation difficulties, outsiders’ names are actually often more useful than insiders’ names for themselves.

Outsiders can enjoy a broader perspective that lets them see the similarities among ethnic subdivisions. In contrast, insiders can be so obsessed with small differences between themselves and their kin that they can’t see the forest for the trees. That’s why insiders’ names — like “Inuit” — sometimes discriminate against smaller groups, such as the Yup’ik Eskimos.

Tom Alton, the editor of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks’ Alaska Native Language Center, pointed out, “The name ‘Eskimo’ is considered derogatory in some areas of the North but is still acceptable in Alaska, mainly because Alaska includes Yup’ik people who are closely related culturally and linguistically but are not Inuit. ‘Eskimo’ includes Yup’ik as well as Inuit.”

Further, the word “Eskimo” is less ethnocentric than is “Inuit,” which implicitly draws a distinction between “the people” (the Inuit) and all those non-Inuit. Ironically, the movement to change ethnic names to those used by the groups themselves frequently restores these kind of self-glorifying terms. For example, Comanche Indians are now supposed to called the “Numunuu,” which means “the people.”

Sailer continues with a great discussion of why it’s ridiculous to use “San” for Bushmen, who hate the term: “It quickly became a badge among Western academics: If you say ‘San’ and I say ‘San,’ then we signal each other that we are on the fashionable side, politically. It had nothing to do with respect. I think most politically correct talk follows these dynamics.”

This Live Journal features Russian slang words and expressions, with stressed syllables helpfully indicated in red. One useful post [scroll down to Friday, August 5, 2005, 6:58PM – That’s, Like, Totally Bad Russian] reprints a Michele Berdy Moscow Times column about слова-паразиты, literally “parasite words.”

Sometimes they are used as intensifiers, but more often they just seem to appear in your speech all by themselves. Nasty little parasites that they are, you don’t notice them until they have taken over half your utterances. And then ridding your speech of them is virtually impossible.

Like all speakers of Russian in Moscow, I’ve been infected by the parasite как бы. This is a perfectly useful phrase that means “as if.” You can use it legitimately in sentences like, Как бы в шутку он сказал, что хочет жениться. А, может быть, он серьёзно? (As if in jest, he said he wanted to get married. But maybe he’s serious?) According to linguists, как бы as a parasite originated in St. Petersburg, but it has swept through Moscow like a particularly virulent flu. It doesn’t really mean anything and is used the way some people use “like” in English. Он как бы поехал купить хлеб. (He, like, went to buy bread.)

Another parasite is типа, which, like как бы, has a legitimate use: to express a comparison or similarity. Он купил новую машину — она типа Джипа, только меньше размером. (He bought a new car — something like a Jeep, only smaller.) As a parasite it means “kinda, sorta, like.” Я, типа, хотел ей позвонить. (I kinda wanted to give her a call.) It can also be used to indicate a quote: Она, типа, не хочет пойти сегодня в клуб сегодня. (She’s like: I don’t wanna go to the club tonight.) This can be sometimes translated by the equally appalling “go,” used in Valley Girl English to mean “say.” Он, типа, хочет выпить. И ей, типа, всё равно. (He goes: I wanna drink. And she’s like: Whatever.)

She goes on to discuss короче, конкретно, чисто, прикинь, and понимаешь. In the comments to the LJ post, there’s a joke that depends on the word типограф ‘printer’ being pronounced with the stress on the final syllable, so that it can be confused for типа граф ‘like, a count’; I thought it was tipógraf, with the stress on the penultimate, but I guess I’m behind the times as usual. (Via digenis.org.)

People seemed to appreciate my earlier post linking to Chinese texts, so I thought I’d pass along the immense treasurehouse that is the Classical Historiography for Chinese History site compiled by Professor Benjamin A. Elman (艾 爾曼) of Princeton University. The Relevant Electronic Resources page has lists of General Resources, Databases and Electronic Texts, Dictionaries, Maps and Geography, and more; the texts section has the Analects, the I Ching, the Dao De Jing (with translations into many languages), novels, poetry… you name it. And the Reference Guide to Classical Book Titles has got to be extremely useful for sinologists. Explore and enjoy. (I should mention that I found it via an anfractuous Googlepath that began with this No-sword post about a great Kyoto University Digital Library exhibition.)

Update (Oct. 2023). The Princeton site has moved here; I frankly don’t understand why they didn’t take the trouble (like decent human beings) to make sure links redirected to the new site, but it’s too much trouble for me to update all the ones above, so you’ll have to go to the new site and click the links there. At least it still exists…

The latest New Yorker is the Food Issue, featuring Judith Thurman on tofu in Japan, John Seabrook on fruit in Umbria, Malcolm Gladwell on creating the perfect cookie, and other appetizing articles, most of which are not online (including, alas, Adam Gopnik’s “Two Cooks”). But the first one, Calvin Trillin’s “Speaking of Soup,” is, and it describes his quest to learn a little Spanish in Cuenca, Ecuador, while gorging on as many servings of fanesca as he could fit in during Holy Week, the only time the thick (“marginally liquid”) fish-and-grain soup is served.

Being able to say anything I wanted to in Spanish before the moment had passed was what I’d been daydreaming about. I was thinking of the day when my response to a particularly good fanesca (the only kind of fanesca I’ve ever experienced) would no longer be limited to “delicious” or “very tasty, thank you.” I could envision myself pushing back from the table and making a statement to the waiter that was as complex as the dish itself—something like “I can’t take leave of this glorious establishment without saying, in utmost sincerity, that the fanesca I’ve just had the honor of consuming made my heart soar, or at least go pitter-patter, and I want to emphasize that each and every bean had a valiant role to play in what was, when all is said and done, a perfectly blended and modulated work of art.” In that daydream, the waiter is so impressed by my eloquence that he offers me seconds. I decline, with a short speech that reminds him of something he once read in a story by Jorge Luis Borges.

As much as I enjoy Trillin’s hearty style, I was most excited about the Gopnik piece, about a British chef who specializes in every kind of meat (“nose to tail”) and a French one who uses no meat whatever (“One day, I found myself regarding a carrot in a different light, and I saw the cuisine végétale ahead of me through an open door”). I can’t link to it, but I can quote my favorite sentence, in which the author shows that his love affair with words is as powerful as Fergus Henderson’s with meat:

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The Germanic Lexicon Project is the new incarnation of what was the Indo-European Language Resources page.

The goal of this project is to create comprehensive online coverage of the lexicons of the early Germanic languages. All of the data is available free of charge and free of copyright or other intellectual property encumbrance…

The Texts page contains numerous copyright-expired dictionaries and grammars of the older Germanic languages. These are in various stages of being digitized. Some are available only as scanned page images. Others are available as online text, sometimes corrected and sometimes not.

The Search page allows you to search some of the texts in the collection.

The Messages board is a message board where you can discuss the early Germanic languages and digitizing historical linguistic materials. You can use it like an ordinary chat board. The message board system has an extra feature: you can make editorial comments “in the margins” of the online dictionaries. If you comment on a dictionary entry, your comment is available when that entry is displayed in the search system.

Cleasby-Vigfusson, Zoëga, Bosworth-Toller, Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language… it’s all here! The internet just keeps getting better and better. (Via the new incarnation of Glosses.net, regarding which I will permit myself a quiet “Calloo, callay!”)