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A pair of interviews (1, 2, both RealAudio) with Israeli linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann on Jill Kitson’s weekly Radio National show about language, Lingua Franca (previously mentioned here), discuss Zuckermann’s controversial thesis that “Israeli is a hybrid language, both Semitic and Indo-European… Thus, the term Israeli is far more appropriate than ‘Israeli Hebrew’, a fortiori ‘Modern Hebrew’ or ‘Hebrew’ tout court.” The quote is from his paper “A New Vision for ‘Modern Hebrew’: Theoretical, Cultural and Practical Implications of Analysing Israeli as a Semito-European Mixed Language” [pdf file]; it might help to read the paper before listening to the interviews, since that way you’ll be familiar with the details of the argument and can concentrate on the off-the-cuff remarks: that if it had been Moroccan Jews who’d arrived in Palestine and founded modern Israel, the language would be “very Semitic” instead of the hybrid he says it is today; that the Hebrew Bible should be translated into Israeli; that “a language which is a mishmash is nothing to be ashamed of.” I particularly liked his insistence that “a native speaker does not need grammar books.”

Here’s a bit of the paper to get you started:

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I just stumbled on FishBase (German mirror), a website specializing in, well, fish. What makes it of interest here is the attention given to language: not only is the search page available and searchable in many languages, but there is a page dedicated to the issue:

Claiming that the common names of fish are one of their most important attributes is an understatement. In fact, common names are all that most people know about most fish as shown by the fact that most people accessing FishBase on the Internet do so by common name.

Hence, FishBase would not be complete without common names. This fact has been considered very early in the design of FishBase (Froese 1990) and has resulted in the compilation of over 107,000 common names, probably the largest collection of its kind. It has taken us a long time, to realize, however, that each pair of ‘country’ and ‘language’ fields uniquely define a culture, and that a large fraction of what the people belonging to a certain cultue know about fishes (i.e., local knowledge) can therefore be captured through the COMMON NAMES table including these fields…

The most obvious use of the COMMON NAMES table is to identify the scientific name of a fish. Note, however, that non-standardized common names may point to more than one species. Other, less obvious, uses include:

• preserving and making widely accessible ethnoichthyological knowledge from endangered cultures (Palomares and Pauly 1993; Palomares et al. 1993; Pauly et al. 1993);
• testing qualitative or quantitative hypotheses about traditional classification schemes (see e.g., Hunn 1980; Berlin 1992; Palomares and Pauly 1993);
• enabling mutual verification of facts from ethnoichthyology and its scientific counterpart (as in Johannes 1981); and
• following the evolution of the linguistic subset represented by fish names, in space and through history, and test related hypotheses.

They have “over 200 languages in alphabetic order ranging from Adangme to Zande.” My kind of site, even if I don’t like fish.

Addendum. Thanks to Chris Waigl in the comments, I can now add the equally excellent Avibase, for birds.

The World Atlas of Language Structures is a very interesting project which “is in preparation under the editorship of Bernard Comrie, Matthew Dryer, David Gil, and Martin Haspelmath.”

This Atlas will show structural features of languages in much the same way as linguistic data are displayed in dialect atlases. It will, so to speak, show us the isoglosses of the dialects of Human Language. We envisage an Atlas with about 100 structural features, each shown on a two-page global map and accompanied by a two-page description and discussion of the feature. To make areal patterns visible, each feature needs to be mapped for at least 150 languages, and ideally more than 200. In addition to the printed version, we envisage a fully searchable CD-ROM version.

A Guardian article about it doesn’t actually provide much information but does have this amusing quote:

Roland Kriessling, a linguist specialising in African languages, said: “In Namibia, there are many languages which sound completely bizarre to the western ear.

“!Xoop, for example, has different clicking sounds, including the tut, the horse’s hoof sound and the kiss. The phonetic complexity of !Xoop could put it into the Guinness Book of Records.”

Thanks for the link, Pat!

Addendum. One of the contributors to the Atlas wrote me as follows:

Somebody who commented on your post spoke of sparsity of data, and my honest opinion is that that is not a fair assessment. We all got a list of a core sample of 100 languages we were expected to investigate, plus another 100 we were strongly urged to investigate. For the chapters I worked on, I looked at every single of those 200 languages, plus over 100 more. We had access to experts on most of the 200 languages to make up for gaps in written documentation. I have seen a few chapters that indeed fall short of current standards in linguistic typology (there simply were too few languages in the sample), but most chapters are based on sufficient data, in my opinion. Of course you can always say that the picture isn’t nearly complete (it would take a large team and tons of money to investigate anything close to all of the Earth´s languages even for a single feature), but both in terms of topics and languages covered, I don’t think “sparsity” is a valid characterization.

Update (Aug. 2020). The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) now has its own site.

That’s the title of a promising new blog whose proposed ambit is “language, literature, politics, poetry, cinema, music, food, art, heterotopia”; it takes its name from an Adrienne Rich poem, “North American Time,” whose second section I find as memorable as does Elizabeth (the blogger):

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill
We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended
and this is verbal privilege.

You can read the whole thing here, and if you happen to like lentil soup she has what looks to be a tasty Turkish version.

A MetaFilter post alerted me to the existence of an amazing document written in the early 17th century by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a native speaker of Quechua who had learned Spanish and served as an interpreter; he came to regret his collaboration with the invaders and began trying to support Andean traditions and culture, and as a part of this effort he wrote an immense letter in Quechua-based Spanish, the Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), to King Philip II of Spain, who as far as we know never read it. It turned up at the Royal Library of Copenhagen in 1908 (nobody knows how it got there) and was slowly recognized as the unique source that it is. This introduction by Rolena Adorno, one of the scholars investigating it today, says:

With the discovery of the Nueva coronica, a whole new perspective on Andean culture came into being. Here was a document that offered an indigenous Andean perspective on conquest and colonization and, more importantly, a knowledge of Andean and Inca society that most European chroniclers, and even some famous Peruvian-born writers like El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, could not duplicate. As John V. Murra observed nearly twenty years ago, the Nueva coronica y buen gobierno is a “source of basic information about Andean institutions available nowhere else.”

The Royal Library has made the entire document available online in facsimile and annotated translation; so far it’s only in Spanish, but you can get a few selections in English here (with a brief introduction by David Frye, who explains that “Guaman Poma” represents Quechua Waman Puma, “Hawk Puma”), and there are many English articles in the Royal Library site’s resources page. The document is placed in a cross-cultural perspective by Mary Louise Pratt in her article Arts of the Contact Zone, which says:

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A NY Times story by Timothy Williams on the poet August Kleinzahler (thanks for the link, Bonnie!) sent me to Kleinzahler’s scathing, unfair, and thoroughly enjoyable assault on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac (which I praised here, though I agree he certainly reads a lot of bad poems), which contains a magnificent quote from one of my favorite poets, Basil Bunting:

Poetry is no use whatever. The whole notion of usefulness is irrelevant to what are called the fine arts, as it is to many other things, perhaps to most of the things that really matter. We who call ourselves “The West,” now that we’ve stopped calling ourselves Christians, are so imbued with the zeal for usefulness that was left us by Jeremy Bentham that we find it difficult to escape from utilitarianism into a real world.

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I’m reading yet another wonderful book, American Colonies: The Settling of North America by Alan Taylor, and I wanted to share a passage that might shake up your ideas about “ancient tribes.” After describing the grim consequences of the Spaniards’ delusion that there had to be more rich cities laden with gold and silver somewhere north of Mexico, including the devastation of Mississippian culture caused by Hernando De Soto‘s 1539-43 expedition, Taylor says:

The demographic and cultural disaster profoundly disrupted the geography of power in the Mississippi watershed. At the time of Soto’s expedition, the densely settled villages of the powerful chiefdoms occupied the fertile valleys. Poorer and weaker peoples dwelled in small, scattered villages in the less fertile hills, where they lacked the means to sustain a centralized chiefdom. After Soto’s invasion and epidemics, the hill peoples became comparatively powerful as the valley chiefdoms collapsed. Indeed, the dispersed hill peoples suffered less severely from the microbes that fed most destructively on the human concentrations in the lowland towns. And the upland peoples absorbed refugees fleeing from the valleys to escape the epidemics.

In the depopulated valleys, forests and wildlife gradually reclaimed the abandoned maize and bean fields, while the refugees farmed the less fertile but safer hills. The resurgent wildlife included bison, common in the southeast by 1700 but never sighted by Soto’s conquistadores 160 years before. Far from timeless, the southeastern forest of the eighteenth century was wrought by the destructive power of a sixteenth-century European expedition. Soto had created an illusion of a perpetual wilderness where once there had been a populous and complex civilization.

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I was idly leafing through a book on Gunnar Ekelöf’s “A Mölna Elegy” (don’t ask me why, since I knew nothing about Ekelöf and have never been particularly interested in Swedish poetry) when I was struck by the mention of his great respect for the poet Edith Södergran. (So great was his respect that he incorporated chunks of her poetry into his own long poem without attribution, about the ethics of which there has been much discussion, but that’s another story.) It turns out Södergran was one of the first modernist poets in Scandinavia, one of the Swedish minority in Finland… and she was born in Saint Petersburg in 1892, a year after Mandelshtam! She went to a German-language school in SPb and started writing poetry in German, only switching to Swedish later; as this impassioned webpage says:

Her first poems fill a school notebook, 225 altogether, never published. Most of these youthful poems were written in German — only 10% in her mother tongue, Swedish. At fourteen Edith Södergran had become a cosmopolitan, reading Heine, Goethe, and other classical poetry in French, Russian, German and Swedish. One day she wrote in her notebook, Ich weiss nicht, in wessen Sprache schreiben (‘I don’t know in which language to write’). At this point in her writing a long series of poems in German comes to an end. After one poem in French, she now began to write exclusively in Swedish.

For any poet, fluency in foreign languages enriches the diction of the mother tongue, as Chaucer’s daily use of French as ambassador in Paris brought so much wealth to the English language. At the beginning of her switch to her mother tongue, Edith showed better mastery of German than Swedish. She had been intensely studying Goethe, Heine and other German poets, whereas she had read very little Swedish poetry. She grew up outside the boundaries of Swedish culture, just as Jules Laforgue and Isidore Ducasse (“le comte de Lautréamont”) grew up outside of French culture in Montevideo, Uruguay. She spoke an old-fashioned Swedish, often grammatically incorrect. Her spelling was also shaky.

All of that interested me enormously, and of course one can’t help but be fascinated by poets who die young (she died in 1923 of that killer of poets, tuberculosis, in Raivola, then part of newly independent Finland but now the town of Roshchino in Russia, a northwestern suburb of Saint Petersburg). When I looked her up in Martin Seymour-Smith’s Guide to Modern World Literature, I was very taken with the brief bit he quoted in translation:

For my little songs,
The funny plaintive ones, the evening purple ones,
Spring gave me the egg of a water-bird.
I asked my beloved to paint my portrait on the thick shell.
He painted a young leek in brown soil—
And on the other side a round soft mound of sand.

So when I discovered there was a bilingual Selected Poems available (translated by Stina Katchadourian), I sent off for it. I may even learn a bit of Swedish.

There’s surprisingly little on her in Russian, considering that she was born and spent most of her life in what was then Russia and could rightly be considered part of the generation of Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, and Tsvetaeva, but here’s a nice page with pictures of her, her gravestone in Roshchino, and a sculpture of her favorite cat Totti.

Addendum. Thanks to prinses Hyacinta, I’ve discovered a lengthy review by Johannes Goransson of the Complete Poems translated by David McDuff, which is well worth reading.

I have to admit it surprises me this thing is still going after three years of near-daily posting. If I were simply talking to myself, I’d have given it up long ago; it’s the feedback that makes me want to continue, so let me repeat what I said in my first anniversary post:

People occasionally apologize for intruding on my time or say they don’t know enough to comment; I want to make it clear that I welcome everyone with an interest in the things I write about, whether they have any prior knowledge or not, and I love answering questions I get in e-mails—if your message comes at a busy time, I may take a while to get around to it, but I will answer it. And, of course, if you have an interesting link to pass along or a subject you’d like to hear about, let me know; I’m always on the lookout for new topics!

I thank all those I thanked there, and I note with pleasure that since the second anniversary the number of countries from which I’ve had visitors has grown from 120 to 150 (hello, Tonga and Ethiopia!). I quoted Pound (the end of Canto IV) in that first anniversary post; this time I’ll quote him (in Canto CIX) quoting Coke:

Si nomina nescis perit rerum cognitio.
[If you don’t know names the knowledge of things perishes.]

Well, actually, he’s slightly misquoting Coke, who said (in Coke upon Littleton 86) “nomina si nescis perit cognitio rerum.” (If you know not the names of things, the knowledge of things themselves perishes.) But if you googled that to try to find out who said it, you’d be convinced it was Linnaeus, because that’s what virtually every hit tells you; only the Bouvier Law Dictionary (1856) gives the proper attribution. (I imagine Linnaeus said it too, but he lived over a century after Coke.) So be careful out there on the internet, folks, and double-check everything you read, even if you read it here.

Addendum. I thank everyone for their kind (and frequently multilingual) comments, and an amusing one by MM reminded me that it might be a good idea to point out, for those who don’t know, that the family name Coke, as in the Sir Edward Coke quoted above, is pronounced like the word cook and not like the word coke. Amend your puns accordingly. Also, as long as I mentioned Linnaeus, I might as well debunk the myth that his real name was von Linné. His father’s name was Nils Linnaeus and he was born Carl Linnaeus; he took the name von Linné when he was admitted to the aristocracy. Amend your cocktail-party chatter accordingly. (What, they don’t talk about Linnaeus at the cocktail parties you attend? Pfft.)

Name another city that falls into the same category as Carthage and Chiang Mai.