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John Emerson has been running Idiocentrism for six months now, and has taken stock of his goals and successes. He writes:

Idiocentrism is not a blog—I write very few topical or personal posts. I use this site to self-publish the fruit of about 43 years of study and thought. (Think of me as a freelance pamphleteer). This is my main publication forum, though I’m always willing to write for pay, and is also my only institutional affiliation.

My long-term plan is to publish 2000 words a week for ten years, if I live that long. (I’m on track). This will add up to more than a million words, and I hope for perhaps a fifth of what I publish to be of enduring value…

He’s one of the most original and wide-ranging thinkers out there, and doing it without any institutional support. (He says, and I agree with him, that “the university has a negative effect on independent scholarship.”) So drop by and show him some love, why doncha? And if you know how to get an RSS feed set up, he’d like to hear from you.

Update (Sept. 2025). Idiocentrism is defunct; after publishing at Haquelebac, Trollblog, and Seeing the Forest, JE can now be found at Epigrues.

In case you’ve ever wondered whether to keep the particle “de” when referring to a person of Frenchness, here‘s the answer (courtesy of this thread at the newly resuscitated Wordorigins):

The rule is this – a “de” attached to a single-syllable name stays no matter what. Anything longer, and removal of the honorific means removal of the “de”.
So you read de Gaulle’s books, but you peruse Tocqueville’s works – and Villepin’s, as the minister is also an author.
And “de”, by the way, is NEVER capitalised.

Just for the record, the new prime minister‘s full name is Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin. (It took me years to fully absorb the idea that Dominique could be a man’s name; when I was a kid I was quite confused by the Singing Nun‘s “Dominique, nique, nique” and its references to “he.”)

Robert Elsie’s Albanian authors in translation:

This web site contains the largest selection of Albanian literature ever to have appeared in English translation. It comprises a wide range of Albanian authors from past and present, including writers from Albania, Kosova and the Albanian diaspora. These translations are the fruits of over twenty years of research in the field of Albanian studies. Some were published, but most of them appear here for the first time.

Compared to other Balkan literatures, very little Albanian writing has ever been translated into English… The scarcity of translations of Albanian literature has, thus, nothing to do with a lack of quality in the original (although there are admittedly many works of dubious merit which would be better left untranslated), but simply rather with a lack of literary translators from Albanian into English. It is to be hoped that the situation will improve in the future.

In the meanwhile I trust that these modest translations of mine will provide some stimulus.

An excellent idea, and I hope it does something to raise the profile of Albanian literature. (Via the irreplaceable Plep.)

A point of information: although the more familiar Serbo-Croatian name Kosovo has the stress on the first syllable, the Albanian term Kosova has the stress on the middle syllable (ko-SO-va).

Update (Nov. 2021). Elsie died in 2017.

I’m delighted to report that R. Devraj, whose marvelous blog Dick & Garlick I discovered a while back, has picked up where he left off back in November, with posts on the dismissive term vernac, the “hybrid French-Tamil expression” bonjour maa, and other goodies. Welcome back, and stick around!

A NY Times article by Craig S. Smith, “Académie Solemnly Mans the Barricades Against Impure French,” describes the sedate, not to say molasseslike, activities of the Académie Française, which “has been toiling for 70 years on the dictionary’s ninth edition and has reached only the letter P.” (The new edition is online up through the word NÉGATON ‘Particule élémentaire chargée d’électricité négative.’)

The eighth edition, published in 1935, has 35,000 words, but the current edition is already up to 50,000 and will probably reach 70,000 before the academy reaches the end of the letter Z. The pace is so slow that by the time the edition is done, the early letters of the lexicon will be largely out of date.
The academy, founded in 1635 under the sponsorship of Louis XIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, has been quietly engulfed by the slow collision of tradition and modernity that remains one of the central dynamics animating Western Europe today…

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It’s no fun going to one’s site and seeing the “bandwidth exceeded” message; I wouldn’t feel as bad about it if it were due entirely to actual visitors, but knowing that the bandwidth eaten by both spammers and the blacklist needed to control them is pushing the site over the limit fills me with rage and I want to kick the bandicoot. (No, we don’t have a bandicoot, I just like the sound of the word: bandicoot! It’s from Telugu bantikokku: banti ‘ball’ + kokku ‘long beak,’ just to get some linguistics into this entry.) The good folks at Insider Hosting have been wonderful about these problems, but yesterday was Labor Day, so nobody was manning the defibrillators. Anyway, we’re back—resume normal banter, and a curse on all who abuse the internet for filthy lucre.

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Anybody who loves the writing of Thomas Pynchon should hie them here and read what Gerald Howard has to say about Gravity’s Rainbow: the experience of falling on it with anticipation in 1973 (“clearly someone at that publishing house understood the impecunious nature of the Pynchon audience, I noted gratefully”—I felt the same way!) and finding it even better than expected, then the discoveries made on going to work as an assistant editor at Viking Penguin:

One Friday in summer 2004, I spent a memorable afternoon in the half-deserted offices of Viking Penguin going through the thick editorial file for Gravity’s Rainbow. There was in this experience the poignance of office technologies past (carbons, telegrams, memos typed on manual typewriters) and the names of the distinguished departed—from Malcolm Cowley, Viking’s longtime literary adviser, to other colleagues, mentors, and friends. But there was also the sheer fascination of peering behind the curtain like Dorothy to discover how the levers had been pulled to launch one of the most consequential novels of the twentieth century.

I envy the man, and I thank him for sharing his knowledge with us. I also thank the estimable Matt for bringing the piece to my attention. Now I know what I’m going to (re)read after Mason & Dixon…

I knew that the word magnet was ultimately from Greek Magnētis (lithos) ‘Magnesian (stone),’ which the AHD says is “from Magnēsiā Magnesia, an ancient city of Asia Minor.” Merriam-Webster’s concurs: “stone of Magnesia, ancient city in Asia Minor.” But my problem, as I looked at my map of Asia Minor, was that there were two Magnesias: Magnesia ad Maeandrum (‘on the Meander River’), now in ruins, and Magnesia ad Sipylum (‘at the foot of Mt. Sipylus’) or ad Hermum (‘on the Hermus River’), now buried beneath the Turkish city of Manisa (whose name obviously derives from it). So I did some googling to try to find out which Magnesia we were talking about, and what did I find but my old friend, the Elementymology & Elements Multidict by Peter van der Krogt, whose magnesium entry says:

The names magnesia alba and magnesia nigra are derived from Magnesia, Μαγνησια, a prefecture in Thessaly (Greece)… Manganese and Magnesium were abundant in oxide and carbonate ores in this region, and they therefore became referred as Μαγνητις λιθος, or stones from Magnesia. The region also contained large amounts of iron oxides (magnetite, or lodestone, for example) so that the ores were magnetized. That explains why magnesium as well as magnet (and magnetism) are derived from Magnesia, while magnesium is not magnetic.

(Emphasis added.) He certainly sounds like he knows what he’s talking about… but could my two favorite American dictionaries both get it wrong? The OED records an ancient dispute and takes no sides:

The origin of the Greek terms is uncertain, and was disputed in antiquity. They may refer to an origin in the district of Magnesia in the east of Thessaly (cf. MAGNESIAN n. and a.1), or in the territory of the city Magnesia ad Sipylum in Lydia; on the other hand, Pliny (Nat. Hist. 20. 2; 36. 126-7) cites Nicander as his authority for the derivation from the name of a shepherd, Magnes, who found that the ground on Mount Ida attracted the iron nails in his shoes and the ferrule of his staff.

Does anybody know if this can be pinned down once and for all?

Update (Dec. 28, 2011). The new Fifth Edition of the AHD has added Thessaly as a possibility: “after Magnēsiā, a region of Thessaly, or Magnēsiā, a city in ancient Lydia.” Good for them!

Jim Tyson, guest-blogging at Naked Translations, has an interesting discussion of the usefulness of linguistics for translators:

Most linguistic theories involve several levels of analysis of text (I use text here to include transcriptions of speech). For example texts can be analysed from the point of view of phonology – the organised system of sounds in a language. They can be analysed from the point of view of morphology – the way that words in a language can be analysed into meaningful units (or not, as the case may be). Then there’s syntax: the analysis of words organised into sentences; semantics – the analysis of the meaning of words and sentences; pragmatics – what people achieve by the use of sentences; and there’s discourse – the analysis of sentences organised into larger texts. One popular conception of the task of translation is the transfer of a structure in a source language to a structure in a target language. What are these structures that are transferred?

Lots of good examples (even though I wish he hadn’t mentioned Chomsky as the linguist par excellence).

This entry was sparked by a sentence in an excellent New Yorker piece by Thomas A. Bass called “The Spy Who Loved Us” (unfortunately not online here [archived], but you can get a summary here). It’s about Pham Xuan An, who served simultaneously as a Time correspondent in Saigon and a high-ranking North Vietnamese spy, and the sentence in question is this: “Dominating the far end of the room is an altar covered with flowers, bowls of fruit, and four hand-tinted photographs of Mai Chi Tho’s parents and his two famous brothers: Dinh Duc Thien, the two-star general who helped build the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and Le Duc Tho, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who snookered Henry Kissinger at the Paris Peace Accords.”

Before I continue, I have to explain how Vietnamese names work. Fortunately, this site has done it for me, so all I have to do is quote:

Vietnamese names put the family name first followed by the middle and given names. Take Pham Van Duc, for example, Pham is the family name or what we call the last name. Van is the individual’s middle name, and Duc is the given or first name.

Vietnam has about 300 family or clan names. The most common are Le, Pham, Tran, Ngo, Vu, Do, Dao, Duong, Dang, Dinh, Hoang and Nguyen—the Vietnamese equivalent of Smith. About 50 percent of Vietnamese have the family name Nguyen.

The given name, which appears last, is the name used to address someone, preceded by the appropriate title. Nguyen Van Lu, for example, would be called Mr. Lu.

The only notable exception to the last rule is Ho Chi Minh, known as President (or Uncle) Ho. (On the other hand, Duong Van Minh, the last president of South Vietnam, was General Minh, or “Big Minh.”) Of course, Ho was not his original family name (it was Nguyen), which brings up the other important issue, that of noms de guerre. No self-respecting revolutionary (aside from Mao) uses his or her birth name, so the family relationships among Communists are often not apparent on the surface. The sentence I quoted from the New Yorker article is a sterling example; it turns out (after much digging) that their family name is not Mai, Dinh, or Le, but rather Phan: Le Duc Tho was originally Phan Dinh Khai, Dinh Duc Thien was Phan Dinh Dinh (found here), and Mai Chi Tho was apparently Phan Dinh Dong (only here, in the not very clear entry “Mai Chi Tho Phan Ðinh Ðông, Hôi ky, tomes 1 et 2, nhà xuât-ban Tre 2001″—but it’s gotta be him, right?). I wonder whether the legendary New Yorker fact-checkers went to all that trouble? Nah, they probably have a book that lists all Vietnamese public figures with birth names and pseudonyms. I’m jealous.

(Oh, one other thing: Vietnamese has two d’s, one plain and one with a bar through it; the latter is like an English d, but the former is pronounced y in the south and z in the north, so that Ngo Dinh Diem, really Ngô Đình Diệm, is /ŋo din yiəm/ in the south and /ŋo din ziəm/ in the north. It’s a truly annoying bit of alphabet creation; thanks a lot, 17th-century missionaries!)

Update (Sept. 2025). Mai Chi Tho now has his own Wikipedia article (in Vietnamese), which confirms that his real name was Phan Đình Đống. As for the legendary New Yorker fact-checkers, we discussed them here. (Also, I’m deeply impressed that a couple of the URLs above still work after two decades.)