languagehat.com

The Varieties of English site (maintained by the Anthropology Department of the University of Arizona) is an ongoing project to describe various English dialects; some links take you to a “we’re working on this” page, but the Canadian English section is well filled out and quite interesting:

Canadian English, for all its speakers, is an under-described variety of English. In popular dialectological literature it is often given little acknowledgement as a distinct and homogeneous variety, save for a paragraph or two dedicated to oddities of Canadian spelling and the fading use of British-sounding lexical items like chesterfield, serviette, and zed.

There is a small body of scholarly research that suggests that if there is such a thing as a Canadian English, all its unique characteristics are being lost… To the contrary, this site’s discussion of Canadian phonology identifies at least four other characteristics not included in Woods’ study, all of which remain robust in Canadian speech. The other sections offer further insight into the character of Canadian English.

(Via mj klein of Metrolingua, a blog on “language discussion and expression.”)

Addendum. A nice supplement: Wikipedia’s List of dialects of the English language. (Via Plep.)

The genesis of this entry goes back almost six years, to April 29, 1999 (I can tell you the date because I kept the sales slip to use as a bookmark, as is my wont), when at one of my periodic visits to the sale cart on the third (foreign-language) floor of the Donnell I found a book by Boris Khazanov called Нагльфар в океане времен (Nagl’far v okeane vremen, ‘Naglfar in the ocean of time’). I’d never heard of Khazanov (it turns out his real name is Gennadii Moiseevich Faibusovich, he was born in 1928, did some time in the Gulag, studied medicine, and emigrated to Germany in 1982, where he’s written a bunch of stories and novels), but the book was part of the Альфа-фантастика [Alpha-Fantasy] series and had an attractive Chagall-ripoff cover… and there was that mysterious word “Naglfar.” I flipped through the book but couldn’t find out what it meant or if it was someone’s name (in fact, I couldn’t find any reference to it at all), but it clearly wasn’t Russian and it had a certain consonantal grandeur whose pull I couldn’t deny, sort of like the Georgian words (t’k’bili, gmadlobt) I always enjoy startling people with. I figured the book was easily worth the 25 cents they were asking and added it to my stack.

Fast-forward to this weekend. I was reading Nicholson Baker to assuage the misery of my wife (who’s picked up, alas, the cold I had just put down); halfway through “Clip Art” (an essay about nail clippers and clipped nails that originally appeared in the Nov. 7, 1994 New Yorker) I reached the following paragraph:

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Here’s a nice little joke (from Martin Kramer, quoting Charles Issawi) that depends on asymmetrical linguistic patterning (semantics not matching up with morphology) for its impact:

A Western orientalist goes to Egypt, and strikes up a conversation in Arabic with his taxi driver. The poor driver, after straining to understand his passenger, plaintively asks him how he came to know Arabic. Ana mustashriq! the orientalist answers proudly. In reply to which, the taxi driver mutters: Wa’ana mustaghrib…

If, like me, you need the joke explained (though I did figure out that mustashriq was ‘orientalist’), hie yourself over to Language Log, where Mark Liberman does the honors.

I suspect many of my readers will have no more problem than I do relating to yesterday’s NY Times story by Carole Braden about Kathie Coblentz, a cataloguer at the New York Public Library, and how she deals with her own large collection of books. (I couldn’t get a blogsafe link, so this one will expire next week.)

Her 16 bookcases – about 214 running feet – reveal no deference to John Dewey and his decimal system and varying degrees of respect for the alphabetical-by-author rule. Indeed, it seems she has grouped her books less by subject than by country of origin. Dust-free and with carefully cracked spines (a sign that books have been read, or at least leafed through), the books in Ms. Coblentz’s library are navigable to no one but her.
“Your system doesn’t have to be logical, it just has to work for you,” said Ms. Coblentz…

Nice to hear, since in my latest attempt at cramming too many books into too few shelves one bookcase has books on Greece and the Greek language followed by books on Central Asia and Iran followed by travel books. I think many of us can also relate to this anecdote (sparked by her recommendation on how to weed out a collection): “Nicholas Basbanes… confessed that he regularly gives books to charity sales, then drops by to rummage and buys back his own donations.” And of direct LH relevance is this: “Grouped by country of origin – Ms. Coblentz speaks or reads 10 languages – the collection includes 12 shelves of classic German literature and 14 of Swedish mysteries.”

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A new (or revived?) site called Mithridates features posts on a multilingual 404 page (Wuhloss, man, de page yuh lookin for ent here!! — Bajan; Siidan du söökkää e int hää meera. — South Helsinki Swedish; Awan ditan. — Ilokano), rabbit language, the first book printed for a Finnish audience, and a Thai page on the original Mithridates, among other language-related posts. (For instance, I can’t read this website, or even verify that it is in fact about Udmurt poetry, but this post says so, and that’s good enough for me. Udmurt poetry! Who can resist?) So welcome, or welcome back, O spiritual descendent of Pontic rulers and/or A.E. Housman, and keep bringing those tasty links.

The bibliographical database of linguistics:

The BLonline database provides bibliographical references to scholarly publications on all branches of linguistics and all the languages of the world, irrespective of language or place of publication. The database contains all entries of the printed volumes of Bibliographie Linguistique/Linguistic Bibliography for the years 1993-2000 and an increasing number of more recent references.

(Via wood s lot.)

I didn’t actually watch the Super Bowl the other night (I care almost nothing about football), but out of some vestigial loyalty to family tradition I checked in on it now and then, and I happened to see an exciting moment at the end of the second quarter. It was a touchdown pass from New England quarterback Tom Brady to David Givens, described by Kevin Hench thus:

This was a clinic in read and recognition as Brady went through his progressions, surveying all the way from one side of the field to the other before finding Givens at the right edge of the end zone. Philly corner Lito Sheppard got caught leaking toward the middle just as Brady located Givens and delivered a perfect strike for the Patriots’ first touchdown.

And here’s what the TV announcer said of Givens as the replay was being shown: “He had nowhere to really else go.”
That is perhaps the single most astonishing sentence I’ve heard a native speaker of English utter (in terms of grammaticality, I hasten to add); it’s so bizarre I had to retype it because I automatically moved the “really” as I was copying it. By comparison, the Murray Chass sentence I analyzed here is a model of construction. There are two words independently misplaced: “else” should come immediately after “nowhere,” and “really” should… well, really, it could go almost anywhere other than where it is and make better sense. But the latter is less of a problem—if you delete “else,” you get “He had nowhere to really go,” which any copy editor would emend to “He really had nowhere to go” but which is a plausible verbal bumble of the kind we all find ourselves making. It’s the “else” that baffles me, and I’d love to hear one of the Language Log mavens or other linguabloggers try to account for how it got there. This is the kind of thing that makes me very skeptical of efforts to derive sentences from little NP-VP nodules that get lexical items inserted before being extruded from the assembly line and out of our mouths.
Update. Language Logger Mark Liberman takes up my challenge and does a bang-up job; I think his conclusion makes perfect sense:

The announcer started to put together the simple cliche “He had nowhere else to go” (689 whG). He decided to modify else with really: “He had nowhere really else to go”. Then in the excitement of the moment, his sequential preferences (“nowhere to”, “to really”) pulled “really else” over past “to”.

(And “mavens” wasn’t a dig, honest, just the aftereffect of reading too much Safire!)

Transblawg has an entry about the secret language used in the German village of Frammersbach; the “language, known as Welschen, is probably hundreds of years old and was started by traders who didn’t want their agreements to be understood by others.” The interest lies not so much in the rather simple-minded form of Pig Latin used (“take the consonants from the beginning of a word and put them at the end, followed by an ä”) as in the fact that there are “a large number of similar secret ‘languages’ used in Germany”—and presumably elsewhere. There must be studies on this subject; I wonder how much deformation of the standard language or dialect is necessary to make sure outsiders don’t understand you?

A Eurozine article by Mischa Gabowitsch examines the problems of Russian translation.

To the casual observer, almost fifteen years after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist regime, the Russian translation market may seem to be booming. Indeed, according to the statistics of the Association of German Booksellers, Russia has been among the top ten buyers of rights on translations of German books for most of the past decade; and the Russian State Statistics Committee tells us that in 2001, translations made up about a third of all fiction titles published in the Russian Federation (though, in 2002, they only accounted for just over 13 per cent of the total number of copies of fiction and non-fiction titles.)
Translation, however, is of course much more than a market. It is a skill, an organised activity, and ideally a process of cultural synthesis and creativity. Concerning all of these aspects, translation is in a wretched state in contemporary Russia. In order to understand why, we first need to consider the status and role of translation in the Soviet Union, all the more so since critics of the low level of most literary translations done nowadays sometimes look back to a reputed ‘golden era’ of translation…
The overwhelming majority of translations published in Russia today are of execrable quality. Words and whole sentences are routinely mistranslated, names are misspelled, and translators’ or editors’ notes on difficult passages, even when they exist, are often simply wrong. This state of affairs is due to a number of factors, some of which are rooted in the Soviet heritage. There are still very few people who have spent sufficient time abroad to have gained proper knowledge of a foreign language. While there is now a considerable Russian diaspora in countries such as Germany and the United States, few Russians manage to master their new language and not forget their mother tongue, let alone keep up with the break-neck speed of transformation of the Russian that is spoken, and written, in Russia. And even among the truly bilingual, only very few are prepared to work as translators into Russian for fees that are ridiculously low by Western standards.

There is an interesting analysis of finances, transportation problems, and “cultural accessibility.” I am bothered, though, by this attack on an author I’m very fond of:

This paves the way for those Russian authors who look to foreign countries mainly to enhance their prestige at home, or to gain symbolic capital abroad by acting as self-styled representatives of Russian culture where there is no-one to disclaim their simplistic and cliché-ridden generalisations. Tatyana Tolstaya, a well-known writer who spent many years in America, is an example of a ‘biased cultural translator’ who likes to write ironically and pejoratively about Russian exceptionalism while in the United States, but happily engages in West-bashing back in Russia and sees no harm in promoting extreme nationalist writers in a TV show she co-anchors.

Does anybody know how much truth there is in this? (Via wood s lot.)

This fine site has everything you’re likely to want to know about lingua franca (Wikipedia), “a mixed language… [formerly] used for communication throughout the Middle East.” The Prefatory Note says:

I am happy to present the fourth edition of the Lingua Franca Website…

A transcript of a valuable lecture delivered on April 22, 2002 by Professor Roberto Rossetti at the University of Nantes, France, has been included. Of particular interest are the Bibliography and Chronologies which follow his lecture, and are given a separate listing on the Index. Even individuals who do not read French readily will be able to make good use of these careful listings. Some additional texts have been added and annotated.

A new section called “Conversazioni” contains materials received from colleagues which I have slightly annotated and edited. It seems to me that these may give encouragement to younger researchers to expand our knowledge of this area, and also demonstrate how the Internet can increase knowledge. As King Solomon said: Iron sharpeneth iron; and a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.

A brief sample:

“Spagnoli venir … boum boum … andar; Inglis venir … boum boum bezef … andar; Francés venir … tru tru tru … chapar.”
‘The Spaniards came, cannonaded, and left. The English came, cannonaded heavily, and left. The French came, blew their bugles, and captured [Algiers].’

(I can’t remember where I found this link; if you sent it to me, let me know and I’ll provide credit.)