languagehat.com

The African Language Resources page has links to Dictionaries, Glossaries and Lexicons and a list of the Mande languages. (Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org.)

Artemy Lebedev has an interesting history of the typewriter keyboard, concentrating on the Russian version.

The Russian letterkey layout originated from America in the late 19th century. The author has failed so far to find any credible evidence of the first company to produce typewriters with this layout, let alone its authorship. The only thing definitely known is that all firms that produced typewriters with the Russian key layout employed the same one— ЙIУКЕН (or ЙЦУКЕН after the reform of the Russian language) that was dubbed “Standard”.

It’s fascinating to see the reproductions of early keyboards, and to learn that in the prerevolutionary version “the numerals row lacks one, zero and three that would be replaced with I, О and З respectively.” And here’s a fun fact:

The first typewriter (the Yanalif model) was produced in the USSR in Kazan only in 1929. At first it was manufactured with Latin (!) letterkeys. It means that for at least 30 years after being put on the market all typewriters with the Russian font had been made abroad.

Via blogchik. (“Yanalif” means ‘new alphabet’ in Tatar—you can read about the sad history of Tatar writing systems here.)

Those are Japanese terms for “words which express voice or sounds” and “words which express actions, states or human emotions,” respectively, and this website is all about them. As mj klein of Metrolingua, from whose post [archived 2005 version] I got the link, says: “The only downside (not for me) is that you have to be able to read Japanese—there is no English or any other language there, not even in the about page of the site.” Go to her post for a description of the various features of the site; it sounds well worth bookmarking if you know Japanese!

I was startled by the following sentence in today’s Pepys’ Diary entry: “One thing more; there happened a scaffold below to fall, and we feared some hurt, but there was none, but she of all the great ladies only run down among the common rabble to see what hurt was done, and did take care of a child that received some little hurt, which methought was so noble.” (Emphasis added.) I had thought that this use of so as a mere intensive, unattached to any other components of the sentence, was much later, but apparently not; it’s the OED’s 14.a. (“In affirmative clauses, tending to become a mere intensive without comparative force, and sometimes emphasized in speaking and writing”), which they take all the way back to Beowulf (“þæt we hine swa godne gretan moton”), and there’s another startlingly modern example from 1741: Richardson, Pamela III. 168 “My Face.. was hid in my Bosom, and I looked so silly!”

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Victor Mair of the very useful Pinyin.info has posted his Remarks on the slogan for the Beijing Olympics, in which he compares the Chinese version of the slogan, 同一个世界，同一个梦想 (tóng yī ge shìjiè, tóng yī ge mèngxiǎng) to the English original, One World, One Dream. He has a most interesting discussion of the Chinese word for ‘world’:

Shìjiè is composed of graphs that individually mean “generation, era, lifetime” and “boundary.” They were brought together over a thousand years ago to render into Sinitic the Buddhist Sanskrit term LOKA(-DHAATU), which was also rendered as shìjiàn, composed of graphs that individually mean “generation, era, lifetime” and “space between.” So how do we get from this translatese for LOKA(-DHAATU), which signifies the finite, impermanent realm, to the contemporary understanding of shìjiè as “world”? (Bear in mind that ancient Chinese did not have a word that means what we now mean by “world.” Instead, they had concepts like tiānxià [“all-under-heaven”], sì hǎi zhī nèi [“all within the four seas”], and jiǔzhōu [“nine administrative divisions”], all of which basically indicated the Chinese empire, beyond which was a cloud of unknowing and barbarism.) It was not until the second half of the 19th century that shìjiè was transformed by the Japanese (using the pronunciation of the graphs as sekai) into the equivalent of English “world.” I call words like this (which began in Chinese with one meaning, went to Japan and acquired another meaning, and then were sent back to China with the newly acquired meaning) “round-trip words.”

(For what it’s worth, an article by A.G.S. Kariyawasam says that loka “implies the limitless cosmos in its entirety as a cosmographic concept” while lokadhaatu means ‘solar system,’ or “the area covered by the movement of a sun and a moon.”)

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OK, this is a little silly, but I can’t resist: someone has decided that August 22 is National Punctuation Day. I’ll take that as an excuse to pass along a history of punctuation (including English, Spanish, French, and East Asian) and an exhaustive account [by Nick Nicholas] of Greek punctuation, ancient and modern. (All links via a MetaFilter post by—who else?—?!.)

I’ll also use this opportunity to repeat my plea for a history of Russian punctuation, specifically the late-nineteenth-century change from a “natural,” intuitive system to the present artificial, rule-bound one. Anybody got a link?

The BBC is beginning a series of programs called Word 4 Word; Simon Elmes, the executive producer, says:

Word 4 Word is the Radio 4 outlet for a unique piece of social and linguistic research called VOICES conducted this year.
Dialect experts at Leeds University devised a set of word prompts for the VOICES survey. Then ‘audio-gatherers’ from local and regional radio stations recorded over a thousand individuals from across the UK. The researchers were interested in recording the vernacular (everyday words and phrases) rather than ‘Standard’ or ‘BBC’ or ‘Oxford’ English.
The fruits of this enormous exercise are explored on Word 4 Word from 3 August.
You can read more about the VOICS survey and add to the regional library of vocabulary on the VOICES website.

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No, not the kind of mat you sleep on—I’m talking about Russian mat (curse words), and the birch bark used for documents in medieval Novgorod and other areas of north Russia. A new blog, Language Geek, reports that “Archaeologists in Veliky Novgorod have dug up some birchbark documents containing Russian profanities” and quotes from a Novosti article:

Archaeologists did not disclose the texts. They only said one of the findings was a note written by a woman to her acquaintance in which she reprimanded the latter for not paying her debt. The other piece is said to be part of a larger document not found so far. … The first bark document did not contain profanities, but was rather unusual. It said a Velikiy Novgorod resident, known as Shilnik, had stolen pigs and horses.

I await further details with considerable interest.

The Geek also translates from a Russian article in Izvestia Nauka:

…This document said that a Novgorod resident known as Shilnik “poshibayet” other people’s pigs and horses. Historians note that in old Russian the word “poshibayet” had several meanings. In particular, it could mean “steals, robs”. “However, the word ‘poshibayet’ had another, quite different meaning for our ancestors,” the historians explained.

The implication seems to be that it had a sexual meaning, which might fit the quote “Аще кто пошибает боярскую жену, за сором ей 5 гривен золота, а митрополиту такоже” ‘if anyone poshibaet a boyar’s wife, for the shame five grivnas to her, and the same to the metropolitan’ (in an article by T.M. Nikolaeva on the language of medieval statutes) at least as well as Dahl‘s ‘hit, beat’ (implied in Nikolaeva’s “берет ее под защиту от побоев” ‘protects her against beatings’).

Incidentally, in looking up birch-bark documents on Amazon, I discovered an interesting sounding book Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300, but when I looked at the price I got a shock: how can Cambridge University Press charge $70 for a 342-page book? It’s insane.

That’s the title of an article by Jack Hitt in today’s NY Times Magazine. It’s about the amazing increase in Native American population in recent decades, an increase fueled by change in self-identification rather than birth rates (and no, it’s not about cashing in on casinos). There’s a good deal about language, and the conclusion is that language-learning is a good way to prove who’s really serious about belonging.

Laura Redish sees language revival at the heart of the new anxiety of identity: “It also takes a commitment to learn a language. I’ve noticed that urban mixed bloods, especially, want to learn—to not be wannabes. And language shows they are serious about connecting to who they are.”

From a small country lane in Connecticut, Stephanie Fielding rambled down a few dirt roads to a small clearing beside a rushing river. Her great-great-great-aunt Fidelia Fielding died in 1908, and a memorial stone dominates the sloping cemetery here. Fidelia was the last speaker of Mohegan. Today, Stephanie Fielding is devoted to reviving the language that Fidelia Fielding spoke. She travels from library to library scouring books and ancient missionary letters and documents. She is putting together her ancestral language, brick by brick, word by word.

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Don’t miss Mark Liberman’s ongoing investigation over at Language Log of the history of the word bullshit as applied to deprecated speech acts. Having taken it back to 1914 or perhaps 1910, he’s now pushed it to 1900. Oddly, he refers to but does not quote the first cite for “B.S.” in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, so I’ll reproduce it here as a public service:

B.S. v. BULLSHIT.
1900 Howitzer (U.S. Mil. Acad.) (No. 1) 118: B.S.—volubility of discourse, or verbosity. Ibid. 138: Be-esse. n….Rough, crude talk.

Mark does, however, quote the glossary provided in the 1905 Howitzer yearbook “for the benefit of our struggling relatives and others who try to read our letters”; it expands “B.S.” to… British science!