languagehat.com

Ilan Stavans, subject of an earlier LH post, is interviewed by Christine Lagorio for the Village Voice; his new book sounds like fun:

In his new Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (Graywolf), Stavans pushes the limits of how reference books can be read. He does so by pointing out their necessary imperfections, such as trying to lock a language in its time and place, à la Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. To Stavans, a dictionary takes on many other roles: sharp consultant, witty comrade, flip arm candy, live-in partner. In an ode to the rigid orthographic volumes, he even titles a chapter “Sleeping With My OED.”
The book is a brave feat not only because it shows he’s got academic boxing gloves on, but also for the intimate vantage point it affords readers. By opening up his personal life, Stavans seems to enhance his linguistic argument, recognizing that this intimacy—e.g., the hyper-detailed description of Stavans’s personal library bookshelves and his eight-year-old son’s talk of heaven—is part of why people read.

Unfortunately, there are a number of pointless swipes at lexicographers other than the hip, “radical” Stavans. Claiming that “many common curses” aren’t to be found in dictionaries is a moldy complaint that a glance at anything published in the last couple of decades should have forestalled, and talking about “the growing dialects that lexicographers fear” is dumb and insulting—the words are the interviewer’s, but they seem to represent Stavans’ chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, at least as reflected here. On the other hand, we know better than to trust how reporters represent linguists.

A useful 1982 reference book, Bookbinding and the Conservation of books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, by Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington. From the Foreword:

The text of the present book is not a history of bookbinding—although there is a great deal of history about the craft contained herein, and it also discusses the materials used, the notable binders whose names illuminate it, and other useful information. It is rather an up-to-date dictionary.
The succinct definitions and explanations, as well as the biographical vignettes, contained in this dictionary will be a boon to those who seek this kind of information. Those concerned, whether they are practicing binders, technicians, rare book librarians, collectors, or simply laymen, will find this a welcome source of answers to their questions. Not the least of these is the one frequently asked of me during my long service in the Library of Congress as Chief of the Rare Book Division. How can I best treat the leather bindings in my personal library ? But this is only one of the thousands of questions to which this dictionary provides the ready answers. The text speaks accurately and helpfully to all those who will seek it out and profit from the immense amount of information it presents in a lucid and comprehensible form.
FREDERICK R. GOFF Honorary Consultant in Early Printed Books Library of Congress

Courtesy of ElizaD at Wordorigins.

My wife and I were discussing the delightful character Marvin the Robot when she said “Marvin… what an odd name. Where is it from?” I didn’t know, so I looked it up, and it turns out it’s from the Welsh name Merfyn (pronounced MEHR-vyn), the name of an early king. The Welsh name was borrowed into English as Mervin, which turned into Marvin by the same process that turned person into parson and (uni)versity into varsity. More fun with etymology! Oh yeah, the Welsh name probably means ’eminent marrow’: mer ‘marrow’ + myn ’eminent.’ (M becomes v, which is written f, for complicated Celtic reasons I won’t go into here; take my word for it.)

This paper by Quang Phuc Dong* of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology** begins “There is an extensive literature dealing with English imperative sentences. As is well known, these sentences have no overt grammatical subject…” and ends “… it is clearly no accident that many quasi-verbs are homophonous with normal morphemes.” However, it is no ordinary linguistics paper, and if you don’t at least skim it you’ll be missing out on some great example sentences. And if you actually read it, you’ll learn interesting facts about some very common words.

*There is no such person.
** There is no such institution.

If you scroll all the way down past the paper itself, you will find the following among other elucidations:

“Quang Phuc Dong” is a nom de guerre (linguistique)… of James D. McCawley, who “created the interdisciplinary field of pornolinguistics and scatolinguistics virtually on his own.”

Every time I decide to cut William Safire some slack or just let him be, he does something so egregious I have to drag him once again before the bar of justice. His latest “On Language” column is called “Go To!” and is mostly an unobjectionable discussion of the spread of two terms that originated in sports jargon: go-to (as in “go-to guy”) and walk-off (as in “walk-off home run”); he wonders if the latter will undergo the same kind of metaphoric extension as the former. But, being Safire, he’s unable to broach the subject he wants to talk about without a cutesy historical lead-in, and since he knows essentially nothing about the history of language and apparently is not subjected to the humiliation of having his column fact-checked, he regularly perpetrates howlers in his tossed-off intros. This time he begins:

The sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, obsessively trying to wash her hands of imaginary blood, is observed by a Doctor of Physic and a horrified Waiting-Gentle-Woman. As Shakespeare’s most famous villainess cries, ”Out, damned spot!” the doctor whispers a warning to his fellow witness: ”Go to, go to; you have known what you should not.”

The meaning of the imperative go to, four centuries ago, was ”beat it,” now ”geddoutahere” or, as those who cherish archaisms still say, ”get thee hence.” In our time, those two short words have fused into a compound adjective with a wholly different meaning, and that modifier is sweeping the language…

Did he even glance at the scene he’s quoting? The Doctor and the Gentlewoman, secretly observing Lady Macbeth, are overcome by horrified compassion and exchange murmured comments to each other after each of her outbursts. When she says “The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?—What, will these hands ne’er be clean?—No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting,” the Doctor says, clearly to Lady Macbeth though of course not for her ears, “Go to, go to; you have known what you should not,” and the Gentlewoman agrees: “She has spoke what she should not, I am sure of that: heaven knows what she has known.” And regardless of the addressee, the phrase simply does not mean what Safire thinks it means, as a glance at the OED would have told him: definition 91b under go is:

go to Used in imp. to express disapprobation, remonstrance, protest, or derisive incredulity; —Come, come!

When Richardson’s Mrs. Jewkes says to Pamela “Go to, go to, naughty, mistrustful Mrs. Pamela; nay, Mrs. Williams […] I may as good call you,” she is not (forsooth) telling her to go away, she is chiding her for her supposed mistrust. (I should mention that at that time the abbreviation Mrs. was read “Mistress” and did not imply married status.)

I beg you, Times, exercise some quality control!

Aldiboronti at Wordorigins has been posting so many fine links lately I thought I’d do a roundup of a few of them. English Slang in the Nineteenth Century “aims to provide a conspectus, if not comprehensive then at least covering a wide range, of nineteenth-century English slang”; as aldi says: “It includes general works such as Hotten’s The Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words by a London Antiquary, 1859, as well as more specialized books.” Dictionaries Published in the United States, 1703-1832 (pdf) is just what the name implies; aldi cites “a few of the more intriguing entries.” You can read Chapter 1 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, by Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, here (“From the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the word serendipity—that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident—is today ubiquitous. This book traces the word’s eventful history from its 1754 coinage into the twentieth century—chronicling along the way much of what we now call the natural and social sciences…”); towards the end of the chapter are two “examples of the use of a kind of private language”:

The first is “Glynnese,” created by William E. Gladstone’s
in-laws, the Glynnes. Writing of Glynnese, Gladstone’s biographer
Philip Magnus says:

The Lytteltons and the Gladstones [Lord Lyttelton and Gladstone married the Glynne sisters] were so numerous and devoted, so quick, eager and vital, that for many purposes they felt themselves to be self-sufficient. They invented a kind of language for themselves, which was formally embodied by Lord Lyttelton in 1857 in a glossary which was privately printed. It was entitled Contributions Toward a Glossary of the Glynne Language by a Student (George William, Lord Lyttelton) . . . Gladstone, who loved to hear Glynnese spoken, did not often use the language himself. But Mrs. Gladstone used it on every possible occasion.[…]

The other family with a language of its own creation was the Barings, and they too were well established as members of the social elite. Sir Edward Marsh, a great friend of Maurice Baring, describes the language in his autobiography: “I have mentioned the Baring language, or to speak more idiomatically, ‘The Expressions.’ It was started, I believe by Maurice’s mother and her sister, Lady Ponsonby, when they were little girls, and in the course of two generations it had developed a vocabulary of surprising range and subtlety, putting everyday things in a new light, conveying in nutshells complex situations or states of feeling, cutting at the roots of circumlocution. Those who had mastered the idiom found it almost indispensable.” Among those who had mastered it were high officials in the Foreign Office, members of the literary elite such as Desmond MacCarthy, and many others. In this circle, the “Expressions,” far from being frowned upon, were used as a symbol of unquestioned membership and helped mark off the boundaries of the group.

Finally, there’s the Festus Lexicon Project:

The Lexicon of Festus (de uerborum significatu) is a Latin dictionary compiled in the Roman imperial period which preserves a great deal of priceless information about the history, society, religion and topography of Rome and Italy in earlier centuries… The objectives of this project are:
● to make this mass of information available to researchers in a usable form;
● to stimulate debate on Festus’ own work, on the antiquarian tradition from which he was drawing and on the subsequent history of the text in the Renaissance and thereafter; and
● to enrich and renew studies on the many particular areas of Roman life on which Festus provides such essential information.

Well done, aldi, and keep ’em coming!

This has been niggling at me for years, and now that the guy is back in Lebanon I’m inspired to ask my readers who know Arabic: is General Aoun‘s name, which I gather is عون in Arabic, pronounced the same as the identically spelled word ‘aun ‘help, aid; helper, aide, assistant’? This is one of those times when I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough.

The other night I watched a deeply moving documentary on PBS, “Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness,” about a heroic Japanese consul who saved thousands of Jewish lives during WWII:

As Japan’s consul to Lithuania, Sugihara risked career, disgrace, his life, and the lives of his family defying Tokyo by writing transit visas for refugees desperate to escape persecution. In August 1940, Sugihara spent upwards of sixteen hours a day issuing visas, until Soviet-occupied Lithuania forced the final shutdown of the country’s last remaining consulates. In the end, more than 2,000 Sugihara-stamped passports allowed hundreds of families to flee Europe through Russia to safe havens abroad. Today it is estimated that more than 40,000 people owe their very existence to Sugihara’s heroic acts of humanitarianism.

(You can find many more details, as well as video clips, at the website.)

His full name was Chiune Sugihara, but after the war, when the Japanese government fired him and he was forced to take any job he could get, he wound up working in Moscow under the name Sempo Sugiwara. I wondered about the relationship between the names, and now Bill Poser of Language Log explains what’s going on in a detailed post (hint: the pairs of given names and family names are identical, but in different ways). I’m glad he posted about it, both because it informed me and because it gave me a chance to post on this topic and urge everyone to read about a nearly forgotten man.

Anggarrgoon quotes the following news report by Abantika Ghosh:

NEW DELHI, MAY 2 Four months ago, his tribe’s near-miraculous escape from the devastating tsunami catapulted King Jirake to fame. His interviews describing the disaster, and how his tribe was adjusting in their new quarters in Port Blair, made headlines across the world.

But all that was in stark contrast to the 65-year-old’s quiet and painful death in a Chennai Hospital on April 17—the tribal chief died of brain haemorrhage and consequent paralysis.

And apart from the 49 remaining members of his tribe, including Jirake’s grandson Berebe, who was born days before he died, the only other people mourning his demise were a group of researchers from the School of Languages in Jawaharlal Nehru University.

For, Jirake was the last member of his tribe who knew all the 10 variants of the Great Andamanese language. With his death, the trilingual Great Andamanese-English-Hindi dictionary that Professor Anvita Abbi’s team from JNU is working on, has suffered a setback that it will probably never be able to fully recover from…

(The rest of the article is here.) I thought at first that the “10 variants” were those listed in the Ethnologue family tree for Great Andamanese, but all except A-Pucikwar are said to be extinct.

I had always vaguely wondered about the place name Bikini (after which the famous swimwear was named); now, thanks to an exhaustive investigation by piloklok (Bob Kennedy’s linguistics blog, which has been promoted to the blogroll for this service to etymology), I know that the Marshallese form is Pikinni and that this “is composed of pik ‘surface’ and ni ‘coconut’.” Now I have only two questions: 1) Is the stress, as my Webster’s Geographical Dictionary and the Wikipedia article say, on the first syllable? and 2) What does “piloklok” mean?

(Via Literal-Minded.)

Update. See now Jory Dayne’s extremely informative comment in this Wordorigins thread:

Pik and Ni are glossed as ‘plane surface’ and ‘coconut’ in The Marshallese-English Dictionary—and according to Abo, Bender, Cappele & DeBrum, Pik,Ni is the origin of the place name Pikinni. I guess the real mystery, however, is why the Marshallese opted to single that particular islet out for that specific feature, when nearly all the other islets in the whole of the group share almost identical features: namely, a flat surface where coconuts are growing.

There is another gloss for Pik, and that is to fly, as in the flight of birds, or flapping. Given the tendency to name places for an apparently arbitrary, isolated event, this seems like it could also be a possibility—perhaps in a storm or what have you; that’s pure speculation on on my part, however.

As for stress, I would offer that PIK(ih)NI was probably the original pronunciation—for a couple reasons.

1. I’m willing to bet that the second ‘i’ in Pikinni/bikini is actually just an excrescent vowel… For instance, the Marshallese word for ‘doctor’ is taktõ (dahkduh)—borrowed from English. It is pronounced, however, as DAHK(ih)Duh. A non-loan word, jerbal follows the same pattern. It is pronounced JEHR(ih)bahl.

So you’re probably looking at the name actually being Pikni, with the excrescent vowel inserted between the two parts to help it conform to custom. Other place names also follow this pattern…

2. The ‘N’ in Ni, is a heavier ‘n’—the doubling in the current spelling (Pikinni) is probably to reflect that (although they have recently switched to using a cedilla beneath the heavy consonants to indicate this). So while the stress would be placed on Pik, the weight of the ‘n’ would give that syllable a stress of its own.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that the current pronunciation of Pikinni seems like it has changed to match the one common to English speakers (biKIni). I offer that with the caveat that I have only been in contact with Marshallese who have relocated to the U.S. (although most very, very recently)—so it may just be that group, while native Marshallese are “keepin it real.”