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Frequent commenter Tatyana sent me a link to this “Brief Dictionary of Medieval Bulgarian Geographical Names and Expressions”—something of a misnomer, since this long and detailed list can hardly be called “brief.” The question is, what is its status? It’s associated with the “Djagfar Tarihi,” about which this page says:

There is much controversy and resistance to the publication of the “Djagfar Tarihi” annals. The leading allegations are that the compilation was composed by an office of the Russian NKVD/KGB/FSB at an undefined time with a purpose of splitting the Türkic ethnic groups into opposing camps, that it was written by an unknown person claiming to be only a savior of the annals, that it is a false compilation with no historical merit, that Ibragim Mohammed-Karimovich Nigmatullin is an unknown fictional personality.

In support of these allegations there is no known systematic study addressing the authen[ti]city of the compilation, no known systematic review and study of the materials…

The site doesn’t refute any of these “allegations”; it simply goes on to take the validity of the document for granted:

“Djagfar Tarihi” (“History by Djagfar”) is the only known assembly of ancient Bulgarian annals that reached us. As many other Bulgarian sources, “Djagfar Tarihi” has a difficult and tragical history.

The collection [was] compiled in 1680 under the order of the leader of the Bulgarian liberation movement, seid Djagfar, by the secretary of his office in the eastern part of Bulgaria, Bashkorostan, by the name of Iman…, including in the collection the most valuable Bulgarian annals: “Gazi-Bardj Tarihi” (1229-1246) by Gazi-Bardj, “Rightful Way, or Pious acts of Bulgarian Sheikhs” (1483) by Mohammed-Amin, “Kazan Tarihi” (1551) by Mohamedyar Bu-Ürgan, “Sheikh-Gali Kitaby” (1605) by Ish-Mohammed and some others…

Does anybody know if this is true, or even plausible? Claire, you read medieval Turkic stuff—any enlightenment to shed? I don’t want to immerse myself too deeply in the geographical stuff (which I love) if it’s going to turn out to be a hoax.

A critical essay by Marjorie Perloff on Nancy K. Anderson’s The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat:

Since no translation can quite capture the particular poeticity of Akhmatova’s verse, the best solution may be a bilingual edition (we have one in Kunitz, and in Hemschemeyer’s two-volume edition of the Complete Poems); I wish Anderson had given us one, framed by her very fine and useful biographical narrative, as well as her commentaries. As it stands, the problematic translation is not saved by the elaborate apparatus of critical essays, notes, and appendices. Indeed, the “critical” essays tend toward running commentary and explication rather than any serious analysis of poetic form. The assumption seems to be that these late, great poems need no justification and that, in the case of Poem Without a Hero, Akhmatova’s epic sweep and Pushkinian irony are self-evident. Anderson’s focus, accordingly, is on sources and influences, on biographical reference and allusion.

As literary criticism, then, The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat is unremarkable. But the compelling story of Akhmatova’s life—and of her astonishing modernist poems, still so little known in the West—makes this a curiously appealing book: a collage testament, so to speak, to the workings of poetic power.

I like Poem Without a Hero better than Perloff seems to, but I agree with her about the relative merits of the translations she excerpts (though all are hideously inadequate), and it’s an interesting read.

Also: The Places of Anna Akhmatova. (Both links via wood s lot [02.04.2005].)

A NY Times article by Nicholas Wade describes “a signing system that spontaneously developed in an isolated Bedouin village”:

The language, known as Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, is used in a village of some 3,500 people in the Negev desert of Israel. They are descendants of a single founder, who arrived 200 years ago from Egypt and married a local woman. Two of the couple’s five sons were deaf, as are about 150 members of the community today.
The clan has long been known to geneticists, but only now have linguists studied its sign language. A team led by Dr. Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa says in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today that the Bedouin sign language developed spontaneously and without outside influence. It is not related to Israeli or Jordanian sign languages, and its word order differs from that of the spoken languages of the region.

The article goes on to make comparisons with Nicaraguan Sign Language (see my entry for a couple of excellent comments by Leila Monaghan) and makes some dubious assertions about the implications for “innate grammatical machinery”; see Mark Liberman’s Language Log post for appropriate skepticism (focused on the reporter, not Mark Aronoff, the quoted linguist). My thanks to dinesh rao for the link!

Felicity Rash conducted “research into linguistic politeness in German-speaking Switzerland (GSS) and into one type of politeness in particular, namely the speech acts of greeting and leave-taking denoted by the German verb grüssen” and reported on the results in “Linguistic Politeness and Greeting Rituals in German-speaking Switzerland” (in Linguistik online):

Greeting “properly” in GSS involves more than merely saying grüezi and adieu. Just as with the formal and informal pronouns of address, Sie and du respectively, levels of formality are strictly observed: thus grüezi (grüess-ech in western regions) is generally accompanied by Herr/Frau + family name; salü/sali, hoi, hallo, tschau + first name are informal greetings, and are used more by young people than old. Leave-taking formulae include ade/adieu or uf widerluege for people with whom one is on formal terms, and tschau, tschüss, salü/sali for people with whom one has an informal relationship. Both initial and terminal formulae are often followed by mitenand or zäme (both meaning ‘together’) if two or more people are greeted. A greeting is generally accompanied by a hand-shake or, when close friends greet, kisses on alternate cheeks (usually three). Leave-taking formulae are frequently accompanied by other pleasantries, such as schöne Tag [have a nice day], schöne Namittag [have a nice afternoon], schönen Aabig/Aabe/Obe [have a nice evening], schöne Fiirtig/Fiiraabig [have a good day/evening off], schöns Wochenend [have a good weekend], schöni Fäschttäg [Happy Christmas], schöni Wienachte/Oschtere [Happy Christmas/Easter], e guets neus Jahr/guete Rutsch [Happy New Year]; en Schöne [have a nice one] is considered uncouth by some people. Such good wishes are generally answered with danke/merci gliichfalls [thank you and the same to you]; indeed many of my informants stressed the importance of this particular formula.

All of my adult informants used a selection of the above formulae and most agreed that it is never enough to just say grüezi to a person one knows: one should always mention the interlocutor’s name and it is usually possible to say something topical, even if it is only in recognition of the time of day, as in schöne Namittag. Many informants felt it polite to offer a Gelegenheitsgruss or an Arbeitsgruss if the other person was obviously occupied with a specific task (see section 2.2.xii-xiv below). Otherwise wie gaht’s/goht’s [how are you], with initial greetings, or schlaf guet [sleep well], with leave-taking, make suitable adjuncts to the basic formulae. One informant told me that in the canton of Wallis it is usual to say gueten Aabe/Obe from 1.00 p.m. onwards. In all other regions the evening begins much later, from about 5.00 p.m. or when the working day has ended…

Many people from both urban and rural areas stressed the differences in greeting habits between people from the different environments: many town-dwellers claimed: ‘Auf dem Land grüsst man mehr als in der Stadt’ [People who live in the country greet more than those who live in towns], and village-dwellers said: ‘In der Stadt wird nicht gegrüsst’ [People in towns don’t greet one another]. In fact, the rural/urban difference is chiefly a matter of whether or not one greets strangers: wherever one is it is normal to greet a person one knows, but in rural areas of Switzerland, as in Britain and many other countries, one is more likely to greet strangers if one encounters them on a country walk or in a small village. Hanna Hinnen points out another fundamental feature of greeting conventions in rural areas: inter-family feuds in small villages are more acute than in towns, and they can often continue for years. In her study of the village of Feldis in Graubünden, Hinnen reports on families who have not greeted one another for ten years or more. She tells of one child who would be told at the meal table whom she was allowed to greet and whom she should ignore: ‘Mein Vater sagte jeweils am Tisch, wen man grüssen durfte und wen nicht. Manchmal durfte man dann einen plötzlich nicht mehr grüssen. Das gab so ein Sippengefühl, das durfte nicht gebrochen werden’ [My father would tell us at meal times whom we were allowed to greet and whom not. Sometimes we were suddenly told not to greet a person. There were family bonds that one was not allowed to break]. (Hinnen 2001: 173).

Comparisons were made with other countries. America is seen as a land where people ask after a person’s wellbeing without necessarily being interested in the answer: in Switzerland, apparently, people really want to know the answer when they ask: ‘Wie geht es Dir?’ [How are you?]. Italians were recognized by two informants as more open and genuine than the Swiss. Finally, as one nun remarked, God is disappearing from greeting formulae in Switzerland but not in Germany: ‘In Deutschland sagt man noch Grüss Gott’ [in Germany they still say Grüss Gott]…

Interesting stuff. (Via Transblawg.)

From akuaku, a most enjoyable Russian limerick:

Говорят, что у нас на Урале
Деревянный компьютер собрали.
Без гвоздей, топором!
Винт, модем, сидиром!
Мышь живую в сарае поймали.

Govoryat chto u nas na Urale
Derevyannyi kompyuter sobrali.
Bez gvozdei, toporom!
Vint, modem, sidirom!
Mysh’ zhivuyu v sarae poimali.

The brilliant version by frequent commenter Noetica (a literal translation is in the extended entry):

They made in the Urals, it’s said,
A PC that’s wooden, instead.
With no nails, just an axe,
And with cheap hardware hacks –
Like the mouse, which they caught in the shed.

(Via Avva. The slang term vint for ‘hard drive’ is apparently from Winchester, “the name of one of the first popular hard disk drive technologies developed by IBM in 1973.”)

[Read more…]

This flashy website (created as a companion to, and presumably teaser for, Ellen Lupton’s book of the same name) tells you pretty much anything you want to know about the basics of typography. (Via MetaFilter.)

Sunday’s Safire column on the word vegan, in among the labored puns and vaguely relevant references, actually gives me a bit of useful information. I’d always wondered how to pronounce the word, having heard VAY-gan and VEE-gan more or less equally; now I know how the creator of the word, Donald Watson, intends it to be said. Safire ends his piece:

My problem with vegan, now affirmatively used as self-description by roughly two million Americans, is its pronunciation. Does the first syllable sound like the vedge in vegetable, with the soft g? Or is it pronounced like the name sci-fi writers have given the blue-skinned aliens from far-off Vega: VEE-gans or VAY-gans?

For this we turn to the word’s coiner: ”The pronunciation is VEE-gan,” Watson told Vegetarians in Paradise, a Los Angeles-based Web site, last year, ”not vay-gan, veggan or veejan.” He chooses the ee sound followed by a hard g. That’s decisive but not definitive; some lexicographers differ, and pronunciation will ultimately be determined by the majority of users.

I’ll go along with the coiner’s pronunciation of VEE-gan. He’s a charmingly crotchety geezer who began as a vegetarian. ”When my older brother and younger sister joined me as vegetarians, nonsmokers, teetotalers and conscientious objectors,” Watson says, ”my mother said she felt like a hen that had hatched a clutch of duck eggs.” He obviously inherited her feel for language. I’m a carnivore myself — an animal that delights in eating other animals — but won’t treat this guy like a fad-diet freak: Watson has a major coinage under his belt, and he’s a spry 94.

I even (miracle of miracles) agree with his conclusion: I wouldn’t follow the creator’s preferred usage if English speakers had settled on another one, but since they haven’t, it pleases me to go along with the crotchety geezer (Watson, that is, not Safire).

TechJapan has a nice entry on corporate etymology:

In this article, we dive deep into the corporate names of seven of the world’s most well-known electronics companies:
* FujiFilm
* Fujitsu
* Hitachi
* Panasonic
* Mitsubishi
* Sanyo
* Toshiba
Inside, we investigate two main areas for each company: what the characters that compose their names actually mean, and how the companies actually got their names.

One of the explanations will have a drastic effect on my pronunciation habits:

“Fujitsu” is actually short for “Fuji Tsuushinki Seizou Kabushikigaisha,” or “Fuji Communication Equipment Manufacturing Corporation.” By simply taking the first three syllables of “Fuji Tsuushinki Seizou Kabushikigaisha,” Fujitsu managed to save everyone from having to write so much. The company changed its name to “Fujitsu” in 1967. “Fuji Tsuushinki Seizou Kabushikigaisha” today exists as “Fujitsu Holdings Corporation.”

And here I always pronounced it as if it were “Fu-jitsu,” like a cousin of jiu-jitsu. All together now: FU-ji-TSUU! 富士通! FU-ji-TSUU!

Thanks to Songdog for the link, and be sure to join his Oscar contest if you enjoy such things.

Addendum. Semantic Composition has an interesting entry about his time working for Sony, in the course of which he explicates the company name thus:

Sony started out as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kaisha, and was dedicated to the production of radio receivers (shades of the Walkman!) and electrical measurement equipment. Readers familiar with Sony only through their consumer electronics may not realize how huge Sony is today in the latter department. In any event, as radios and consumer electronics came to be the company’s main claim to fame, they went for a name which both reflected that fact and was easier to sell to English speakers. Sony is claimed to be derived from both “sonus”, Latin for sound, and “sonny”, because they liked the suggestion of youth that it provided. SC’s pet theory is that someone misspelled “Sonny” when silkscreening it onto a batch of parts, and the “sonus” justification was invented post hoc, to save money on having to make more.

I am often perceived as a wild-eyed descriptivist, ready to embrace any utterance by a native speaker as valid. Not so! Geoff Pullum wrote an excellent Language Log entry going into detail about what it means for a speaker to make a mistake; as he says, “Speakers will sometimes speak or write in a way that exhibits errors (errors that they themselves would agree, if asked later, were just slip-ups).” I present for your delectation a fine specimen of such an error, hot off the presses of the august New York Times. A Murray Chass story, “Marlins Don’t Mind Being Rated as Underdogs in the N.L. East,” begins with a rather labored riff on the similarity of the names of Jeffrey Loria, owner of the Florida Marlins (a baseball team, for those of my readers not immersed in the minutiae of American sports), and Jeffrey Lurie, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles (a football team). The third paragraph ends: “Loria and Lurie have never met, never spoken. Once, they recalled, they were confused for the other.”

Now, that second sentence makes no sense whatsoever. You want to change it to “…they were confused for each other,” which would be perfectly grammatical, but turns out to be misleading, implying as it does that there was one occasion on which Loria was taken for Lurie and vice versa. It turns out, as Chass goes on to explain, that there were two separate incidents: ten years ago Loria, then in minor league baseball, was called by a reporter under the impression he had just bought the Eagles; this winter, Lurie was congratulated by a waiter under the impression his team had just won the World Series. As pointless as these recollections are, if you’re going to try to jam them into one sentence you have to do better than “Once, they recalled, they were confused for the other.” (For one thing, you can’t use “once” to mean “on two separate occasions” and “they were” to mean “each was.”) Off the top of my head I’d say “Each has recalled being confused for the other,” but I’m sure there are other possibilities. At any rate, what we have here is a stretch of words that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, but it is not a valid English sentence.

I’ve learned a new word, this time from that delightful (and heroic) writer Nicholson Baker. I was reading the title essay in his collection The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber when I came across this sentence: “And since a large thought seems to wish to pierce and acknowledge and even to replenish many more shoots and plumules of one’s experience, some shrunken from long neglect (for every thought, even the largest, tires, winds down, and hardens into a hibernating token of chat, a placeholder for real intellection, unless it is worried into endless, pliant movement by second thoughts, and by the sense of its own provisionality, passing and repassing through the many semipermeable membranes that insulate learning, suffering, ambition, civility, and puzzlement from each other), its hum of fineness will necessarily be delayed, baffled, and drawn out with numerous interstitial timidities—one pauses, looks up from the page, waits; the eyes move in meditative polygons in their orbits; and then, somehow, more of the thought is released into the soul, the corroborating peal of some new, distant bell—until it has filled out the entirety of its form, as a thick clay slip settles into an intricate mold, or as a ladleful of batter colonizes cell after cell of the waffle iron, or as, later, the smell of that waffle will have toured the awakening rooms of the house.”

(Pause to admire the waffle smell making its way up the long corridors of the meandering sentence.)

The word “plumule” struck me; it turns out it’s pronounced PLOOM-yule [/ˈplu:myu:l/], and it means ‘rudimentary shoot, bud, or bunch of undeveloped leaves in a seed’ (it’s from Latin plūmula, the diminutive of plūma ‘small soft feather, down’), so that “shoots and plumules of one’s experience” is a very tasty phrase, incorporating both the visible (as it were) and the embryonic shoots sprouting up from the depths of our lived lives and mulish memories.

And now, for my own pleasure and hopefully yours, I’m going to reproduce the opening paragraph of the essay:

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one’s hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

And before I go, let me repeat the definition of plūma: “small soft feather, down.” Small soft feather, down—isn’t that a lovely phrase?