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I just discovered an important fact about the pronunciation of a common English word—something that doesn’t happen very often any more. A comment in a (silly) MetaFilter thread informed me that the word trait was traditionally pronounced exactly like tray, at least in the UK; in other words, the final -t is (or was supposed to be) silent. (The OED lists both pronunciations, “tray” first; the 1998 edition of the Cassell Concise lists both, but in the reverse order.) This is not surprising for a borrowing from French, but I had never run across it, and I doubt many Americans have. So what I want to know is: are my UK readers familiar with this pronunciation? If so, is it current, a bit old-fashioned, or something they said back in grandfather’s day? (And of course if any Americans are familiar with it, I want to know that as well.)

A Wordorigins thread introduced me to an interesting word with a disputed etymology, sharawaggi (with g pronounced like j). The OED does not try to define it, sending the reader instead to the first citation, from 1685: SIR W. TEMPLE Gard. Epicurus Misc. II. ii. (1690) 58 “The Chineses.. have a particular Word to express it [sc. the beauty of studied irregularity]; and where they find it hit their Eye at first sight, they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable.” As you can see, Temple spoke of the word as Chinese, but the OED’s etymologists, while throwing up their hands, cast doubt on that: “Of unknown origin; Chinese scholars agree that it cannot belong to that language. Temple speaks as if he had himself heard it from travellers.” In the latest edition they add: “For a discussion of etymological hypotheses see 1949 Archit. Rev. CVI. 391/2.” I don’t have access to that number of the Architectural review (if anyone does, I’d appreciate hearing from them), but in the Wordorigins thread Douglas Wilson linked to an article, “A Borrowed Vista” by Ciaran Murray (HTML version of a pdf of issue 27 of the Kyoto International Cultural Association newsletter) that provides a very plausible theory:

There have been a number of attempts to fit Chinese characters – kanji – to this word, but none of them sounds close to sharawadgi, and none of them means what Temple meant. However, an English teacher who lived in Japan 70 years ago, a man called E.V. Gatenby, suggested that sharawadgi was a Japanese word. He thought it might be the older form of sorowanai desho – that the two halves of a design did not match. This form was sorowaji.

That’s all he said. He was tracing words of Japanese origin for the Oxford English Dictionary, and he never took the matter any further. When I tried to do so, I immediately ran into trouble. Historians of the Japanese language told me that the form sorowaji died out four hundred years ago. Temple wrote a hundred years later. So how could he have heard a word which was no longer in use?

Now I was like the character in the Arabian Nights who cannot remember the phrase ‘open, sesame’ which will disclose a door in the rock and give him access to a treasure inside. I could sense the treasure inside, but the phrase I had didn’t seem to be working. I puzzled over this for a long time, until at last a friend who taught at Tokyo University introduced me to Professor Kanai Madoka. Professor Kanai was involved in copying the documents of Dejima, which are still kept in the Netherlands, and bringing a set to Japan. And he was the one who supplied my ‘open, sesame’.

Professor Kanai told me that yes, it was true that sorowaji had died out four hundred years ago – but only in standard Japanese. It had stayed alive in the dialect of Kyushu. Now if you try to pronounce sorowaji in kyushu-ben, what do you get? Shorowaji. And if you try to pronounce shorowaji in Dutch, you get what Temple got – sharawaji. And Temple, you remember, was ambassador to Holland.

Now, I have no idea if any of the Japanese is accurate, but if it is, I’d say the etymology is pretty well nailed down (though the Dutch bit seems dubious). And the next time you see an image with a pleasing asymmetry, you can say “Ah, what shawaraggi!”

2009 Addendum. David Paquette of Sharawadji.org writes to tell me that

sharawadji is included in the list of sonic effects proposed by Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue in their book Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). They define it (and I quote) as “An aesthetic effect that characterizes the feeling of plenitude that is sometimes created by the contemplation of a sound motif or a complex soundscape of inexplicable beauty.” They attribute the term to 17th century travelers returning from China, and they also mention Wiliam Temple, as well as an article by Louis Marin, “L’effet sharawadji”, in Traverses no. 4-5, Paris (1979). So the term is now also used to refer to sonic sources – the authors of the book also being architects, I would assume they found the term in their literature and applied it to sound.

Thanks, David!

The Logos [Universal] Conjugator takes any verb you give it and conjugates it. Well, not any, of course, but a lot of common ones. I put in “go” and got a full conjugation in English; then I tried “anar” and got:

The infinitive of the verbal voice you chose is one of the following, please select the language you prefer.
* Catalan: anar
* Swedish: ana

So I clicked on the first and got a full conjugation in Catalan. And — my goodness! — I just discovered that if you click on one of the verbal forms, in this case anat, you get a selection of Catalan passages using it! Wonderful stuff, and I can’t thank Songdog enough for alerting me to it.

Update (August 2020). The site has moved from wordtheque.com to its own URL and dropped the “Universal” (so I bracketed it above when I changed the link); hopefully they’ve fixed some of the problems noted below, but it’s no longer the case that if you click on the forms you get passages using them. (Also, I can’t seem to link to a particular page — the URL remains the site one.) Sad.

Unfortunately, the trial period is half over, but there are still a couple of days of free access:

Free Open House – Access millions of articles from thousands of publications including journals, magazines, newspapers, images and more, For Free January 24 – 28! HighBeam Research is celebrating its first anniversary with a present to you: This week only, you get total access, totally free to all the full-text sources plus powerful members-only research tools on HighBeam Research, the most powerful research engine on the Web.

A search on the great linguist Leonard Bloomfield turned up (as the ninth hit out of 1,649) a paper from Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies by Hildegard L.C. Tristram called “Diglossia in Anglo-Saxon England, or what was spoken Old English like?” Bloomfield is only mentioned in passing, but the paper is extremely interesting; here’s the abstract:

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A Blogchina article discusses the 1977 round of simplified Chinese characters, which was rescinded in 1986. The details of the characters won’t mean much to non-readers of Chinese, but the Unicode situation might:

Scholars using Unicode will find themselves able to discuss the length and breadth of China’s Glorious Five-Thousand Years of history, and yet there is one period about which they must remain silent: the vast majority of the characters in the 1977 simplification draft are simply not present. The first sixteen characters in the quiz are all present in a full Unicode font, although 13-16 are in the Extension space. The remaining sixteen I pieced together with eudcedit.
The sinograph section of Unicode has always been a hotbed of political controversy, mostly in the form of nationalism on the part of Japan and the traditional-simplified struggle among China and her outlying regions. I suspect our situation here is much the same, whether through active efforts to exclude the characters, or a simple indifference. With electronic composition and transmission, scanning and indexing integral parts of current-day research, this decade-long orthographic experiment is as if it had never even existed.

Thanks go to Nelson (whose blog, now unfortunately on hiatus, inspired a lengthy LH post on the name Vietnam) for the link.

Christopher Sundita’s Salita Blog “is dedicated to his thoughts about the language situation and the over 160 languages in the Republic of the Philippines.” His “obligatory introductory post” says:

Salita is a Tagalog word. Its meanings include word, speech, talk/speak and language. I wanted a word that not only reflects the subject of this blog, but also something that is found in a number of Philippine languages. So far, I have found six more; Ilokano (sarita), Kapampangan (salita), Pangasinan (salita), Rinconada Bikol (sarita), Botolan Sambal (halita), and Tina Sambal (salita).

(If I’m reading my Tagalog dictionary aright, it’s pronounced /salitá’/, with stress on the second /a/ and a final glottal stop.) Chris is a man after my own heart; the bio at the end of his essay “Languages or Dialects?” says: “He is fluent in English, Tagalog, French, and Spanish and has a working knowledge of other languages like Japanese, Bikol, Ilocano, Korean, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Hindi and others.” I wish him luck in his study of linguistics, and I hope he’ll update the blog regularly—there are recent entries on Christmas and New Year greetings in various Phillippine languages and a very interesting entry on noun markers in Waray-Waray and other languages.
I found his blog via a typically meaty post at Sauvage Noble, which uses the discovery of Chris’s blog as a springboard for a discussion of Sanskrit loans in Tagalog, including a transcription of a pop song (!) about such loans.

Mitrius, in his (Russian-language) blog, has a nice post on “сакральные имена в советском тексте” [sacred names in the Soviet text]. I thought the rules were interesting enough I’d provide a summary for English-speakers:
Politburo members’ names were pronounced without the normal reduction of final -o: Chernenko pronounced -/ko/, not -/k@/.
Important names could not be broken between lines.
In the ’40s and early ’50s they could not be abbreviated as were other encyclopedia entries (after the first mention): always I.V. Stalin, never simply S.
There were similar rules for Soviet institutions; eg, Вооруженные Силы [Armed Forces] with two capital letters when referring to the military of the USSR, Вооруженные силы with one capital when referring to other socialist countries, and plain old lower-case вооруженные силы for capitalist countries. Another interesting point is that the adjective from Bolshevik is большевистский [bol’shevistskii] rather than the morphologically expected большевицкий [bol’shevitskii]; apparently the -цкий ending was felt to have a negative tinge. (Thanks go to Avva for the link.)

Sarah Roberts, a sociolinguist studying Hawai’i Creole English, has begun a language blog, Namu Pa’i ‘Ai, which

will chiefly concern itself with the linguistic situation in Hawai’i (as it is my area of expertise), but it will also cover news and research concerning other pidgin/creole varieties around the world… I will be writing mostly for a linguist and language specialist audience but I hope this blog will interest non-specialists as well — especially Pidgin speakers and those who take an active interest in the language.

She’s posted on Polari (see here for description and Bible translation) and girls being punished for speaking pidgin, among other things. A promising start!

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I’ve just discovered a wonderful resource for readers of Russian: Conradish.net.

Conradish.net is a website designed for English-speaking people who are studying the Russian language. It began life in 1997 as The Russian-English Literatures Exchange, which was hosted at UC Berkeley’s Open Computing Facility. My student account had rather limited disk space quota, however, and as a result, the original website stagnated. Now, at its new location, I’m able to include more literary works and incorporate new features, such as the collaborative translation section.

The main page has a list of over twenty authors whose works are on the site, from Karamzin and Pushkin to Sholokhov and Nabokov, and there are all sorts of special features that make it even more useful: for instance, you can search by the English definitions of Russian words. Searching on “#inquisitor” (the # is used for English definitions) brings up Nabokov, Chekhov, Dostoevsky (of course), and Gogol.

(The introduction says “When you encounter a word that you don’t know, position your mouse pointer over it to see its English equivalent. For a more detailed description, click on the word,” but this does not work for me; I presume you need to download something.)

There is also a Polska prasa section with “newspaper and magazine articles from the Polish press, covering topics ranging from politics to popular culture.”

Update (August 2019). The site is long dead; I’ve replaced the main link with an archived one, but you’re on your own for the rest.

The Economist has a good article (unsigned, alas, as is the magazine’s practice) on what linguists do and why the internet is such a useful resource:

Linguists must often correct lay people’s misconceptions of what they do. Their job is not to be experts in “correct” grammar, ready at any moment to smack your wrist for a split infinitive. What they seek are the underlying rules of how language works in the minds and mouths of its users. In the common shorthand, linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. What actually sounds right and wrong to people, what they actually write and say, is the linguist’s raw material.
But that raw material is surprisingly elusive. Getting people to speak naturally in a controlled study is hard. Eavesdropping is difficult, time-consuming and invasive of privacy. For these reasons, linguists often rely on a “corpus” of language, a body of recorded speech and writing, nowadays usually computerised. But traditional corpora have their disadvantages too. The British National Corpus contains 100m words, of which 10m are speech and 90m writing. But it represents only British English, and 100m words is not so many when linguists search for rare usages. Other corpora, such as the North American News Text Corpus, are bigger, but contain only formal writing and speech.
Linguists, however, are slowly coming to discover the joys of a free and searchable corpus of maybe 10 trillion words that is available to anyone with an internet connection: the world wide web…

The article goes on to discuss the limitations of the web (for example, meaningless spam sites filled with strings like “When some sandbank over a superslots hibernates, a directness toward a progressive jackpot earns frequent flier miles”), its immense usefulness notwithstanding the limitations, and its appearance in research papers (very recent indeed: an “early paper on the subject” was written in 2003!), and it concludes with this stirring paragraph:

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