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An essay by J. M. Tyree on “Henry Thoreau, William Gaddis, and the Buried History of an Epigraph” (found via the invaluable wood s lot) reminded me of the clever (annoyingly clever, if you will) title of Gaddis’s last novel, Agapē Agape, in which

the first word is the Hellenistic Greek term for the early Christian love-communion. The participants were to greet one another, according to St. Paul, with “an holy kiss.” Originally, this was an open-mouthed mutual breathing, in which one “inspired” the Holy Spirit from the lips of another believer… But in the fallen state that Gaddis links to modern life, one is often merely “agape” when one opens one’s mouth, whether in sexual kissing, talking, or, as Tabbi suggests, the slack-jawed response to mass-entertainment culture and mechanized art… So little, after all—a mere Greek accent—separates the false cognates agape and agape.

Now, I don’t know what the last sentence means (accent as in “accent mark”?—but there is none in English—or as in “Southern accent”?—but presumably nobody but a few first-generation Greek-Americans says the English word with a Greek accent), but that’s not what interests me. [I should have checked the actual title of the book, which has a macron over the first e to represent Greek ēta. This is still not a “Greek accent” but at least I know what he means.] What I want to know is how you pronounce the first agapē, the word for “Christian love” (or however you want to define it). I’ve always put the stress on the second syllable, ə-GAH-pay, and this is the first pronunciation given in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary; I assume the stress derives from the accented syllable in the Greek (which was a stress, not pitch, accent by New Testament times). The second pronunciation given has the stress on the first syllable: AH-gə-pay. The only pronunciation given in the OED also stresses the first syllable (which derives from the tradition of pronouncing Greek words as if they were Latin, with the stress on the antepenult if the penult is short), but it is anglicized to AG-ə-pee (first syllable rhyming with bag). So, assuming you ever use the word in speech, how do you say it (please mention which country you’re from)? And (a separate question) which do you think fits better in the title: ə-GAH-pay ə-GAYP, AH-gə-pay ə-GAYP, or AG-ə-pee ə-GAYP? (I don’t suppose anybody knows how Gaddis pronounced the word, but if you do, please share.)

Thanks to a Transblawg post linking to this article, we now have confirmation of what I always thought concerning the famous Kennedy speech:

Linguist Jürgen Eichhoff, writing in the academic journal Monatshefte, confirms there was no flub on Kennedy’s part. “‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ is not only correct,” he says, “but the one and only correct way of expressing in German what the President intended to say.”

An actual resident of Berlin would say, in proper German, “Ich bin Berliner.” But that wouldn’t have been the correct thing for Kennedy to say. The indefinite article “ein” is added to a statement like this, Eichhoff explains, to express a metaphorical identification between subject and predicate. In fact, “ein” is required in a sentence such as this unless the speaker wants to be taken literally.

For example, the German sentences “Er ist Politiker” and “Er ist ein Politiker” both mean “He is a politician,” but they’re understood by German speakers as different statements. The first means, more exactly, “He is (literally) a politician.” The second means “He is (like) a politician.” You would say of George W. Bush, “Er ist Politiker.” But you would say of an organizationally astute coworker, “Er ist ein Politiker.”

So let’s hear no more of this “jelly doughnut” nonsense.

John Stonham, a Canadian-born linguist based at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, has just published the first dictionary of the group of languages known in English as Nootka (the tribe apparently chose the name Nuuchahnulth, which means ‘along the mountains,’ for themselves in 1981). The press release says:

Publication of the 537-page dictionary, which will be used to support the teaching of Native Americans the language of their ancestors, will give hope to those who have expressed concern about the death of many of the world’s minority languages, largely caused by economic globalisation and increased social mobility.

Today, only two to three hundred people can speak Nuuchahnulth, and most of these are aged over 60 years. There are also few written records, and experts predict it could die out in one generation if action is not taken to preserve it.

Nuuchahnulth has three basic vowels, there are 40 consonants and it has a very complex sound structure when spoken.

Dr Stonham incorporated 20-years experience of researching and writing about Nuuchahnulth into his dictionary, as well as the fieldwork materials of the linguist and anthropologist, Edward Sapir, which spans 1910-1924.

His team of researchers used a computer programme to analyse Sapir’s extraordinarily detailed notes, and the resulting database consists of approximately 150,000 words of the language…

Nuuchahnulth referrs to around 15 languages, but some have disappeared since 1900 and the remainder are all on the verge of extinction. Each language has distinct differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, which are acknowledged in the dictionary.

Dr Stonham, who hails from Montreal, added: “They are some of the most morphologically complex languages, which is what initially attracted me to them more than 20-years ago.

You can see a pdf file containing extracts from the dictionary here; the words are cee?iy ‘be secluded in the house observing taboos, so as not to spoil a hunter’s luck,’ kampuu?c’is ‘high rubber boots’ (?u?uuyiihši?aλma ?u?uuiihma kampuu?c’is ‘he sang for high rubber boots’), nuuniiqa ‘speak to one whom one happens to meet,’ quu?as ‘person; Nootka’ (na?aack^wi q^wayac’iik ?uuk^wil quuquu?as ‘wolves understood what humans were saying’), t’aat’aaqsapa ‘speak Aht or Nuuchahnulth; speak true or straight,’ and t’ih ‘wipe the tears from one’s eyes with the back of one’s hand’ (I’ve substituted for the special symbols as best I could, but h should have a dot underneath: ḥ, if that comes out right). And you can see a regular webpage with an extract from what was then “the forthcoming Nuuchahnulth dictionary,” with words beginning with k’- (eg, k’in’a ‘herring guts’).

The Queen Bee, from whose excellent blog I got this information, adds the following quote from Stonham’s personal page:

On the personal side, I am a journeyman sheetmetal worker, a black belt in Kodokan Judo, a licensed welder, an NCCP level 2 coach, and I’ve raised and shown dogs (Akitas – I still have one, Bok-Soon) to champion level in the conformation ring. I’ve taught in three different fields (judo, my trade, and linguistics), in three (sort of 4) languages, in four countries, in five different universities, and I love what I do.

Impressive!

Metrolingua (m j klein’s fine language blog) has an entry on Saikam,

which is “the first online Thai-Japanese/Japanese-Thai dictionary development project initiated by The Association of Thai Professionals in Japan (ATPIJ) and became a research project at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in 1999. Saikam has a unique feature which allows both users and developers to access the database across the Internet. Dictionary data can be accessed and updated at the same time.”
But wait, there’s something there for us non-Thai speakers: a kanji dictionary. And get this–you don’t have to type in hiragana to get the kanji; you can type in the romaji reading for a character, the stroke count, and frequency, and it will give you a selection of corresponding kanji! And it will also give you compounds. This is really helpful if you need to look up something but don’t have the ability to type out hiragana (as seems to be the case on PC’s)…
It seems like they’re hoping to have both English and Thai translations of the compounds, so if you want to provide English translations and have time to kill, you can contact the admins of the site.

A nice find.

Suzanne E. McCarthy has started a blog called abecedaria; in her post ” Why Abecedaria?” she says:

I could have called this The Writing Sytem Blog but it seemed a little too presumptuous. What about the Glyph-based Input Blog – a little too much like a bee in the bonnet.

I want to write about writing systems as concrete realities with a physical organization, something that can be seen, felt, and perceived in the most tangible way… I guess abecedaria is about characters in a writing system being primarily glyphs and secondarily abstract codepoints.

She has a whole range of fascinating posts on Chinese, Tamil, Japanese, Caroline Islands Script, and all manner of script-related topics, even unto Alaric Alexander Watts‘ once well-known hyper-alliterative poem “The Siege of Belgrade” (“An Austrian army, awfully arrayed…”), which she links with a touching memory of her grandfather. Welcome!

Marcel Barang has the noble goal of translating and publicizing modern Thai prose literature via his website (English and French versions). In the preface to his anthology The 20 Best Novels of Thailand, he explains why much Thai literature is not very good by Western standards (“Too many Thai novels, I found, are dripping with honey and rosy beyond belief”) and why there is so little available in translation. And at the bottom of the Menu page, there is a link to the Thai On-Line Library – Bitext Corpus maintained by Doug Cooper, which has parallel translations:

The Thai Bitext Corpus is a collection of Thai and (mostly) English parallel translations or bitexts. The complete library can be searched for usage examples, or individual texts can be read in a variety of layouts. Bitext searches allow either Thai or any available second language (L2), and use an extended AltaVista ‘advanced match’ syntax.

(Via Plep [23rd June].)

Update (Aug. 2025). The Thai Bitext Corpus is now available here, in a different format.

NPR’s All Things Considered has done a show on whistling language in Alaska (you can listen to it at the linked page):

Alaska is home to at least 20 Alaska native languages plus countless individual dialects. It’s also home to whistling as dialogue. The Yupik Eskimos and their Russian cousins have long practiced this form of communication. Alaska Public Radio’s Gabriel Spitzer reports.

I wish they had broadcast some actual St. Lawrence Yupik as well as the whistled versions, but it’s only a four-minute segment, and it’s a lot of fun just the way it is. Thanks for the link go to Songdog, who reminds me I’ve posted about whistling talk in the Canary Islands.

Eddie Kohler has, as one of his many online projects, Indeterminacy. From the About page:

John Cage was an American composer, Zen buddhist, and mushroom eater. He was also a writer: this site is about his paragraph-long stories—anecdotes, thoughts, and jokes. As a lecture, or as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance, he would read them aloud, speaking quickly or slowly as the stories required so that one story was read per minute.
This site archives 186 of those stories. Each story is spaced out, as if it were being read aloud, to fill a fixed area. If you like, you can also read them aloud at a rate of one a minute.

I got this from wood s lot, and I’m going to quote the same one quoted there, for what should be good and obvious reasons:

[Read more…]

Over at aprendiz de todo, Prentiss Riddle discusses the complex set of pronouns given in Sir Richard Winstedt’s Colloquial Malay (Singapore, 1957):

…there are not only separate sets of pronouns for different combinations of social ranks, but a distinct set reserved just for addressing ethnic Chinese. Shades of John Wilkins! No wonder Winstedt goes on to say that “Malays shun the use of personal pronouns”—although the practice he describes of substituting nouns representing rank, title or metaphorical family relationship seems just as complex.
I’d write this off as a quaint and obsolete colonialism but linguablogger Jordan Macvay reports that the situation today isn’t much simpler. In fact he notes with surprise that many Malays have started borrowing the English I and you so as not to have to commit to one of the social relationships encoded in their own pronouns.

Jordan’s post is long and extremely interesting; an excerpt:

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Geoff Nunberg is the LH house linguist not just because of his scholarship but because he’s able to put it at the service of a wider view of language and the world. His latest Fresh Air commentary is about learning poetry by heart, which he agrees with me in thinking a useful practise that should be revived (as Poetry is trying to do). He ends with the following passionate peroration:

If you think you can understand poems without feeling them in your body, you’re apt to treat them as no more than pretty op-ed pieces—you wind up teaching kids to value “The Road Not Taken” as merely a piece of sage advice about making difficult decisions.

I was about seven or eight years old when I learned Burns’s “Scots wha’ hae’ wi’ Wallace bled” from my dad. I had absolutely no idea what the poem was about or even what half the words meant. But I learned something else—how verse can become a physical presence, in Robert Pinsky’s words, which “operates at the borderland of body and mind.”

That’s an experience that you can only live fully when the poem comes from within rather than from the page in front of you. I like the way the Victorianist Catherine Robson put this: “When we don’t learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes… of its own incessant beat.”

I was greatly amused, though, when he slipped one past whoever monitors Fresh Air for decency:

Unless you’re one of those freaks of nature who can soak this stuff up effortlessly, most of what you’ve got left of the poems you’ve learned is only snips and snatches—”My heart aches, and a something something pains my sense”; “I will arise and go now, and go to whatchamacallit”; “Ta tum ta tum, your mum and dad/They may not mean to but they do.”

That last quote is the opening of perhaps the best-known English poem of the last few decades, Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse“; I can’t imagine that anybody who’s once heard or read the line “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” could possibly half-remember it as “Ta tum ta tum, your mum and dad.”

Addendum 1. Dick & Garlick discusses the “Babu English” verb by-heart ‘learn by rote memorization.’

Addendum 2. Mark Liberman is “slightly surprised” at my reaction to Nunberg’s sly half-quote: “the FCC has no regulations against on-air quotations whose (unread) context includes forbidden words.” I’m sure that’s true, but I wasn’t talking about FCC regs so much as the general concern for suitability that prevails at NPR; I can’t imagine Frank Deford or Cokie Roberts alluding, even obliquely, to the word fuck.