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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.)

According to a story from the Sofia News Agency of Bulgaria (so, um, take it for what it’s worth), Europe’s Oldest Script Found in Bulgaria:

Ancient tablets found in South Bulgaria are written in the oldest European script found ever, German scientists say.

The tablets, unearthed near the Southern town of Kardzhali, are over 35-centuries old, and bear the ancient script of the Cretan (Minoan) civilization, according to scientists from the University of Heidelberg, who examined the foundings. This is the Cretan writing, also known as Linear A script, which dates back to XV-XIV century B.C.

The story goes on to quote a Bulgarian archeologist as saying the discovery “throws a completely different light on Bulgaria’s history.” Me, I’ll wait to hear it from more scientific sources, but it’s certainly intriguing if true. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau.)

Songs of the Russian People, by W. R. S. Ralston (1872):

This book, despite its title, is a treasure-trove of Slavic mythology, tradition, folklore and ethnography. There are plenty of songs, not only from Russia but every part of the Slavic region from Serbia to Siberia. The songs are used as a starting point for a wide-ranging discussion of pre-industrial Slavic peasant life, including weddings, funerals, witchcraft, demonology, games, riddles, and seasonal traditions. Also covered are the details of Russian pagan religion and mythology, with comparisons to related topics such as Vedic and Germanic mythology.
Lacking are samples or analysis of the songs in the original language (except for a very brief treatment in appendix B), and there are no musical transcriptions or descriptions of dance. However, the massive, well documented, and very entertaining collection of Slavic traditions in this book more than makes up for this deficiency.

(Via Plep.)

Once again, the vigilant wood s lot informs us of the anniversary of Joseph Brodsky’s birth and quotes a fine poem, which I will pass on to you:

Letter to an Archaeologist

Citizen, enemy, mama’s boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn’t love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it’s gentler than what we’ve been told or have said ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don’t reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won’t resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.
      1983

(I’ve corrected the online version from my copy of To Urania, adding italics and changing an errant “that” to “than”; also, I’m pretty sure this is a poem Brodsky wrote in English and thus was not “translated by the author.” Incidentally, according to Google, “refujew” occurs only in this poem, so it’s presumably Brodsky’s portmanteau invention. Verrucht is a German word meaning ‘despicable, loathsome.’)

I’ve recently begun reading Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (I suspect this won’t be the last post to emerge therefrom), and I have a question about the word lengkua in the following passage from page 82:

Tis then Mason and Dixon are most likely to be out rambling among all the Spices armies us’d to kill for, up in the Malay quarter, a protruded tongue of little streets askew to the Dutch grid, reaching to the base of Table Mountain. The abrupt evening descends, the charcoal fires come glowing one by one to life, dotting the hill-side, night slowly fills with cooking aromas,— shrimp paste, tamarinds, coriander and cumin, hot chilies, fish sauces, and fennel and fœnugreek, ginger and lengkua.

By dint of googling (only 9 hits for the word as printed) and my amazing linguistic truffle-hunting skills (I combined the “Malay” in the quoted passage with what appeared to be Malay text in some of the Google results and took out my Malay dictionary), I discovered that the word should be lengkuas, a Malay word for the spice whose Linnean name is Alpinia galanga.
[Read more…]

The University of Pennsylvania Press is having a book sale; unfortunately, the prices are not slashed so dramatically that they fall into the can’t-resist category (at least in my current state of incomelessness), but they have such a rich catalog that I linger wistfully over any number of the titles—Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past, by Brian Stock, for instance (“The essays in this volume are about a segment of the past that runs roughly from the end of antiquity to the thirteenth century. More generally, they are about recollecting the past by putting words into writings. They are equally about the past that is written about and the writing that brings it to life. In other words, they deal with the creation of the past as text.”), or much of the Anthropology, Folklore, Linguistics section, for example Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue, by Sascha L. Goluboff (“Sascha Goluboff focuses on a Moscow synagogue, now comprising individuals from radically different cultures and backgrounds, as a nexus from which to explore issues of identity creation and negotiation. Following the rapid rise of this transnational congregation–headed by a Western rabbi and consisting of Jews from Georgia and the mountains of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, along with Bukharan Jews from Central Asia–she evaluates the process that created this diverse gathering and offers an intimate sense of individual interactions in the context of the synagogue’s congregation”) and Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s classic The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizari Ismailis Against the Islamic World (Hodgson, who died at 46 in 1968, produced what is still one of the best places to start learning about the history of the Islamic world in his three-volume magnum opus The Venture of Islam).

I learned about the sale via the new anthropology group blog Savage Minds, which bids fair to be the Language Log of anthropology, entertaining and informative. Drop by and check it out.

In today’s NY Times there is a travel piece on Le Marche by Christopher Solomon that opens with the sentence “‘I bring you a taste of my verdicchio,’ says our host as my friend Laurie and I sit down to dinner beside a murmuring fire.” The rest of the sentence (like the rest of the article: “He also loves the people, saying ,’They’re kind and they’re gentle and they’re modest and they’re slow'”) is standard travel-section cliché, but the word murmuring stands out: have you ever heard a fire murmur? Is this a shiny piece of freshly observed reality, or a simple misuse? We report, you decide. (And my thanks once again to Bonnie for the heads-up.)

John August is a young screenwriter (NY Times article) who has such an enlightened attitude toward language I strongly suspect he was exposed to a good linguistics course at some point, and he occasionally lets fly at shibboleths in his blog. This is a good thing, because his blog is dedicated to providing useful information to would-be screenwriters, and since everybody wants to be a screenwriter these days, I presume he has a substantial readership who will benefit from his strictures. See, for example, English is not Latin:

In an email a few weeks ago, my former assistant (and alarmingly successful writer/director) Rawson Thurber apologized for ending a sentence with a preposition. I insisted that he was well within his rights to dangle a preposition, split an infinitive, or break pretty much any rule he’d been taught about English – especially the seemingly-arbitrary ones.

Grammarians come in two flavors. A descriptivist studies the way people use a language, while a prescriptivist tries to lay down the rules of a language.

Prescriptivists are assholes. Ignore them.

Now, that’s a bit more forceful than I usually am, but the guy writes movie dialogue, so being forceful comes natural to him, and people who might be bored by a nuanced explanation of the pluses and minuses of each point of view will snap to attention and perhaps be shocked into listening and even thinking.

Another good rant announces that ‘Data’ is singular with a ferocity that frightens even me! Go get ’em, JA. (And thanks, Bonnie!)

I discovered E-Julie’s blog The Language Legend (“Keeping you posted on cool stuff happening in the world of words”), via Naked Translations, which highlights (as will I) a post on Geordie (the dialect of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and its surrounding area), which in its turn links to two good sites: Newcastle English (“Geordie”), by Geoff Smith, and the BBC’s Geordie Dialect page (“modern times mean that some Geordie words are dying out and North Easterners are changing how they speak”). Now you too can talk like Andy Capp!

Plep [19th May] links to a useful Wikipedia page [archived 2005 version] on family names around the world. It’s a little sketchy, and some of the sections could use a lot of filling in (Russian springs to mind), but that’s the great thing about Wikipedia: you can fix it yourself!