languagehat.com

According to a Guardian story by John Ezard:

The Man Booker prize organisation yesterday unveiled a £15,000 special translation award as part of its international fiction prize, whose first winner is due to be announced early next month.
The move has been inspired partly by the judges arriving at a final shortlist in which 10 of the 17 authors wrote in other languages. The winning author would have got £60,000, with nothing, until now, for the translator.
“The judges became increasingly aware of the huge role translators play,” said their chairman, John Carey.
Among those in line for the inaugural prize are the translators of Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Lem, Naguib Mahfouz, Tomas Eloy Martínez and Kenzaburo Oe. The winning author decides which translator gets the prize, with discretion to split it among several translators.

About time, say I. But which translator’s picture did they use to illustrate the story? Why, none of them, of course; they ran a photo of Gabriel García Márquez! In fact, they didn’t even name any of the translators. Calling Rodney Dangerfield…
(Via Naked Translations.)

Reading Fred Anderson’s superb Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766, with its penetrating insights into every side’s point of view and what really mattered in the end (the Battle of Quebec, in which Wolfe and Montcalm so famously fell, was less important to the fate of Canada than the Battle of Quiberon Bay two months later, which put the French navy out of commission and prevented the resupply and reinforcement of Canada), I noticed a particularly telling misspelling in the following quote from the journal of Captain Samuel Jenks, a Massachusetts blacksmith, in an entry written after the fall of Montreal on September 9, 1760: “I fear we shall be kept [at Crown Point] until ye last of November, for ye command is left to Haverland, & I know he delights to fatigue ye provincials.” (I should point out that ye is a purely graphic alternative for the, due to the similarity of handwritten y and Þ; he would have read it “…until the last of November…” and so on. I will also point out that he was quite correct, and the commander, so solicitous of his regular troops from Britain, kept the provincials “working on the fort and its barracks despite a terrifying outbreak of smallpox, severe weather, and the utter lack of an enemy threat”; Anderson adds that “there was no love to be lost between the provincials and regulars who together had added Canada to the British empire.”)

Now, the commander’s name was Haviland, and Jenks’s spelling Haverland tells me that his dialect was non-rhotic (did not pronounce postvocalic r). I had somehow got it into my head that the loss of the r sound began later, but as this site says:

In the seventeenth century, most of England was rhotic, but non-rhotic speech was common in the southeast, near London. By the eighteenth century this became a prestige variety. In America, areas colonized by higher-class immigrants from southeastern England, such as Tidewater Virginia and the Eastern New England area, maintained non-rhotic speech, which is why the stereotyped Boston accent is r-less–“I pahked my cah by Hahvahd yahd” being a prime example. The r-lessness resulted partly from these speakers being (or being descended from) speakers of r-less dialects in England, and partly from the contact that wealthier speakers from these regions maintained with London at a time when r-lessness was prestigious.

Other regions, such as the mid-Atlantic states, Western New England, and upland areas around Virginia, were chiefly colonized by Scots-Irish or Western English immigrants who spoke r-ful dialects, and did not maintain much contact with upper-class British speech. (New York City, traditionally r-less, is a slightly differerent story; the area was originally r-ful, but r-lessness grew in the mid-nineteenth century through immigration from New England.)

The site also has this nice bit: “a classic joke in the New York area has a student writing ‘A tragic hero is one who falls through the floor in his character.'”

The High Icelandic language centre (Miðstöð háfrónska tungumálsins) is… well, it’s pretty strange. In the words of their manifesto:

The High Icelandic Language movement has its origin in the Icelandic hyperpuristic circles of the nineties. Its members were inspired by the puristic extremities of the nineteenth-century Fjölnismen and the fanatic translation of Goethe’s Faust by Bjarni Jónsson frá Vogi. Towards the end of the millennium the movement was nothing more than a few individuals who were unsatisfied with the ‘in their opinion’ moderately puristic endeavours of the Icelandic word-commissions. These men went further where the Fjölnismen had stopped. Lists of purely Icelandic geographical names, Icelandicized proper names and names of chemicals were collected. All these efforts culminated in the foundation of the ‘Language Laundry’ (Nýyrðasmiðja Málþvottahús), which brought hyperpurism into the spotlight…
Languages free of foreignisms don’t exist. From a linguistic point of view, there is no such thing as a ”pure” language. All languages (even High Icelandic) have borrowings. But there is a difference between purity and originality. A word like ‘sinkbróðir’ for ‘cadmium’ contains a loan-word, but the compound as a whole is unique in the world. In a way, this kind of genuineness could be interpreted as a form of purity. Still the High Icelandics aim at reducing as much as possible the foreign words in Icelandic that were borrowed after the first written texts. The exclusion of many words won’t necessarily lead to language impoverishment. In order to avoid that, a large part of obsolete Old Norse vocabulary will be resurrected. The result will be a hyperpure variant of modern Icelandic…

But you needn’t be Icelandic to be High Icelandic:

[Read more…]

OK, first go read Gary Shteyngart’s The Mother Tongue Between Two Slices of Rye (from the Spring 2004 Threepenny Review). It’s very funny.

When I return to Russia, my birthplace, I cannot sleep for days. The Russian language swaddles me. The trilling r’s tickle the underside of my feet. Every old woman cooing to her grandson is my dead grandmother. Every glum and purposeful man picking up his wife from work in a dusty Volga sedan is my father. Every young man cursing the West with his friends over a late morning beer in the Summer Garden is me. I have fallen off the edges of the known universe, with its Palm Pilots, obnoxious vintage shops, and sleek French-Caribbean Brooklyn bistros, and have returned into a kind of elemental Shteyngart-land, a nightmare where every consonant resonates like a punch against the liver, every rare vowel makes my flanks quiver as if I’m in love…

That was great, right? The man can tell a story. I would have posted the piece for its own sake posted the piece a year ago, but I also want to go on for a bit about this:

Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony sits on the slope of a hill, beneath which lies a small but very prodigious brook, from which my father and I extract enormous catfish and an even larger fish whose English name I have never learned (in Russian it’s called a sig; the Oxford-Russian dictionary tells me, rather obliquely, that it is a “freshwater fish of the salmon family”).

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Mark Liberman of Language Log is posting a great series of entries on the function of the well-known Canadian tag “eh”: The meaning of eh (describing the findings of a 2004 paper [pdf] by Elaine Gold, “Canadian Eh?: A Survey of Contemporary Use”), Open access eh (the results of a search of Canadian Hansards), Um, em, uh, ah, aah, er, eh (other “filled pauses”), and most recently Canadian “eh” and Japanese “ne” (comparison with a similar Japanese particle). An interesting quote from the last:

Robin Lakoff’s 1975 account of English tag questions, based on her introspective judgments, was that such tags “are associated with a desire for confirmation or approval which signals a lack of self-confidence in the speaker.” But when Cameron et al. 1988 looked at the distribution of tag questions in nine hours of unscripted broadcast talk, they found that such tags were used only by the participants that they characterized as “powerful” — in other words, those “institutionally responsible for the conduct of the talk”. These were doctors as opposed to patients, teachers as opposed to students, talk show hosts as opposed to guests.

This is why it’s important to do research rather than depending on introspection and theorizing.
Update. There’s further interesting discussion at piloklok, Bob Kennedy’s new linguistics blog, which I discovered via HeiDeas.

Natalia Dmytruk, a sign-language interpreter for Ukraine’s state-run television, has received the Fern Holland Award at the Vital Voices Global Partnership’s fifth annual ceremony honoring women from around the world who have made a difference. According to Nora Boustany’s Washington Post story:

During the tense days of Ukraine’s presidential elections last year, Dmytruk staged a silent but bold protest, informing deaf Ukrainians that official results from the Nov. 21 runoff were fraudulent…
Election monitors had reported widespread vote rigging immediately after the runoff between Yushchenko and the Russian-backed prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych. With Yanukovych leading by a slim margin, the opposition urged Ukrainians to gather in Independence Square in front of the parliament building to protest the results…
The opposition had no access to the state-run media, but Dmytruk was in a special position as a television interpreter to get their message out.

[Read more…]

The National Library Service has a very useful page called The ABC Book, A Pronunciation Guide; the symbols used are idiosyncratic (á = able, rate, é = evil, reel, ð = schwa), but the pronunciations I happen to know are spot-on, even the obscure ones:
Hippocrene (hip-ð-KRÉN-é) Publishers, foreign reference works
Rao’s (RÁ-óz) N.Y. restaurant
So I’m willing to trust them on ones I didn’t know, like:
Boni & Liveright (BÓ-ní and LIV-rít) Publishers (I said BOH-nee, not -nigh)
Brearley (BRÂR-lé) NYC East side private school
CMEA (SMÉ-ð) Council on Economic Assistance
Djer Kiss (DÉR KIS) Cosmetics mfr. (how’d they make Djer = deer?)

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The Discouraging Word is only updated once a month or so these days, but it’s worth visiting, because it provides some real lexicographical entertainment. The latest entry (Sommer prowde with Daffadillies dight, Posted Saturday, April 30, 2005—there are no permalinks) focuses on the word “dight,” which I knew as an archaic word for ‘adorn’; I probably once knew, but had forgotten, that it was from Latin dictāre ‘to dictate, order.’ What I did not know was how it had once flourished; the OED says “From the senses of literary dictation and composition in which it was originally used, this verb received in ME. an extraordinary sense-development, so as to be one of the most widely used words in the language.” As TDW says, there are 16 primary definitions, but I feel obliged to point out that that the last one shouldn’t be there (it’s “an erroneous use by Spenser,” F.Q. I. viii. 18 “With which his hideous club aloft he dights”—one of the odd Victorian features of the OED is its deferential inclusion of hapax mistakes by Great Writers, which have no more linguistic significance than similar errors made by the man on the Clapham omnibus); I also want to point out definition 4.b.:

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I’m basically going to repost here an entry from No-sword, because it’s an interesting question that I’m completely incompetent to answer, and I thought perhaps some of my more theoretically inclined readers might have some interesting comments:

Japanese is considered to have SOV word order and topic-comment sentence structure. So one uncontroversial way for a man to casually say, for example, “I don’t understand English” is

俺は英語が分からない
ore wa eigo ga wakaranai
I (topic) English (subject) be-understood-NOT
“As for me, English is not understood”
= “I don’t understand English”

But in spoken Japanese, it’s very common to hear something like this (note that the particles (wa and ga) have been dropped and wakaranai slurs into wakannai; these are uncontroversial changes):

英語分かんない、俺
eigo wakannai, ore
English be-understood-NOT, I

[Read more…]

Coming soon to a venue near you: Miguel de Cervantes will be promoting Don Quixote! (Thanks to Brecht for the tip.)

Addendum. It occurs to me that Harper-Collins will probably be taking this embarrassing page offline at some point, so I should reproduce it here for the benefit of posterity:

Miguel de Cervantes Events

Bookstore Appearances
No Events in this category.

Libraries, Museums, Fairs, Others

Wednesday, May 11, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman
MUNK CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES/Talk and roundtable discussion
Munk Centre, Campbell Conference Centre, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto

Tuesday, May 17, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
QUEEN SOFIA SPANISH INSTITUTE/Discussion and Signing
684 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021

Friday, June 03, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
INSTITUTO CERVANTES/Panel Discussion on Don Quixote
211-215 East 49 Street, New York, NY 10017

Thursday, June 23, 2005 07:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA/Montgomery Auditorium
1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103

[…]

In Print

Sunday, May 01, 2005
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
GLOBE & MAIL

Sunday, May 01, 2005
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
EDMONTON JOURNAL