languagehat.com

The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech project (SCOTS) has created a search facility that allows you to find all occurrences of a given form in their half-million-word corpus. As the Scotsman story puts it:

From today, the most detailed analysis to date of the Scots language will be accessible on the internet.

Containing 400 texts, the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech project (SCOTS), aims to help instil in Scots, both native and expatriate, a pride in their national identity, as well as to try to halt the decline of the language, which unlike Gaelic receives relatively little promotion.

It has taken researchers from Glasgow University three years to compile the archive from all areas of Scots culture. Ranging from broad Scots to Scottish English, examples of prose, poetry, drama, essays and correspondence are included, along with additional audio and video material.

All texts will come accompanied with cultural and social commentary and analysis about the work and its author…

Dr Wendy Anderson, from the Department of English Language at the University of Glasgow, said: “We’re interested in the currency of distinctively Scottish words, such as gallus, canny, muckle, sonsie and braw. All Scots know these words; indeed they are often used to stereotype the people of Scotland, but are they actually still used? By whom? Where? In what contexts?

“And what about the grammatical features of Scots? Some people might frown on yous as a plural form of you, but research shows it’s overwhelmingly common in spoken language and written representations of speech.”

(LINGUIST List announcement here.) I got this via Mark Liberman at Language Log, who got it from abnu at Wordlab, and they both quote this wonderful paragraph from Alexander Fenton’s “Craiters: ‘I cannot get enough of it’,” which I can’t resist either:

Faar I wis brocht up, e only seabirds we’d see wis e seamaas. In my time we caad em seagulls, bit aaler fowk wid say seamaas, makin’t soon like ‘simaaze’. Ere’s ay change goin on in e dialect, an ye get a mixter o aal an new, bit it’s e life o language tae be aye adaptin tae different generations an different times. It’s naething tae greet aboot. Naething staans still, bit gin a wye o spikkin’s richt hannlet, fa’s tae say bit fit it michna leave its mark tee on fit ey caa e standard language? – for ere’s nae doot at e standard language sair needs a bit o revitalisation noo an aan. Bit I’m on aboot seagulls, nae hobbyhorses.

“Seamaa” is known to the OED as seamaw, not that it matters (it’s an archaic word for ‘seagull’), and “greet” is Scots for ‘cry’; I assume “bit gin a wye o spikkin’s richt hannlet, fa’s tae say bit fit” is ‘but if a way of speaking is handled right, who’s to say but what.’ The rest shouldn’t be too hard; there’s always the Dictionary of the Scots Language if you’re stuck.

While looking up Marie Curie in my trusty Большой Энциклопедический словарь (Bol’shoi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ‘Big Encyclopedic Dictionary’), I happened on the entry Кускусы (kuskusy). I assumed it meant ‘couscous,’ but when I looked at the definition, which began “genus of mammals,” I realized I was way off base. It turns out there is a marsupial called the cuscus, “probably from the native New Guinea word for the animal.” I found both the word and the animal charming and thought I’d share them.

Incidentally, I couldn’t find Marie under Кюри (Curie); it wasn’t until I thought of looking under Склодовская (Sklodovskaya = Sklodowska) that I found her, listed as СКЛОДОВСКАЯ-КЮРИ (Sklodowska-Curie) Мария. I wonder whether she’s normally referred to as Mariya Sklodovskaya-Curie or whether a shortened version is used; perhaps my Russian readers can tell me.

Update (Sept. 2022). The OED entry (updated December 2019) has this etymology:

Originally (i) < French couscous, †coes-coes (1756 or earlier) < Dutch koeskoes (1724 as coescoes) < Malay kuskus, probably < a language of the Molucca Islands.

In later use (ii) (in the form cuscus) probably reinforced by scientific Latin Cuscus, former genus name (1826 or earlier in this form; 1798–9 as Cœscoes: B. G. E. de la V. de Lacépède, in Tableau des mammifères 5).
Both the French variant †coes-coes and scientific Latin Cœscoes reflect Dutch orthography, probably following A. Seba Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio (1734) I. 64, which is often referred to in early discussions of the animal (e.g. in the French source of quot. 1775). Seba cites the Dutch word (or perhaps its etymon in Dutch orthography) in a Latin context.

Related earlier borrowing.

Compare the following earlier passage, which may show an isolated early borrowing of the same word (transmitted via French), apparently in an erroneous form; the origin of the error is unclear as there is apparently no corresponding passage in the underlying (shorter) German text:

1662 J. Davies tr. A. Olearius Voy. & Trav. J. Albert de Mandelslo 165 in Voy. & Trav. Ambassadors There is in this Island a kind of beasts they call Cusos [Fr. Cusos], that keeps constantly in trees, living on nothing but fruit. They..have a thick, curling, and smooth hair,..eyes round and fiery, little feet, and such strength in the tail, that they will hang by it.

This CBC News story made me quite happy:

This is a tale of two cities — or, rather, of two cities’ names. And it reveals how we sometimes have a dickens of a time spelling foreign nouns in English.
The story begins many months ago, when the CBC was preparing to broadcast the Summer Olympics from Athens. Like a relay runner sprinting toward the baton pass, we glanced ahead to the next Games in 2006.
Our announcers and writers would inevitably refer to the host city in Italy. And it quickly became clear that a decision was needed for a smooth handover.
Some people were calling the 2006 Winter Games the Torino Olympics. Others opted for the Turin Olympics.
Neither was actually wrong, unless you happen to publish or broadcast in Italian. But which was right for us?

[Read more…]

An excellent place to investigate non-European poetry:

The Poetry Translation Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies was established in February 2004 thanks to a generous grant from the Arts Council, London and support from SOAS. The Centre will concentrate on translating contemporary poetry from non-European languages into English to the highest literary standards through a series of innovative collaborations between leading international poets and poets based in the UK…

[Read more…]

Joey Comeau (of the online comic A Softer World) composes strange cover letters for jobs he’s seen advertised; this one is

To: Human resources, The University of Victoria
Re: Linguistics Professor

I am applying to the position for university linguistics professor with your university, because while my love is language, it is also worth noting that language’s love is me, for real, and it isn’t as strange as it sounds because I think you will agree that while the verb love requires an agent of a living nature, language fills that requirement nicely – living as it does in the hearts and souls of every man, woman, child, and seeing eye dog that wanders this earth with a song in masculine, feminine, or neuter’s possessive pronoun’s heart and mind, and I feel that working in your university program, teaching undergrads and graduate students would not be the hell that this description evokes, but instead an opportunity to teach a love of language to a world that has decided to hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate, and hey, have you ever stopped to think that explicity is a much nicer word than explicitness on all fronts, at every border, in every way I feel this is true, and because I sat down to write them out, about a dozen times each, I feel I can speak with authority, using definiteness, definity, and seriously –it’s just nicer I think, spiritually, though I’m still working on this study to try and prove it through polling of students at my current university, even though they just sort of stare at me all slack jawed, drool making the mad dash for a pavement that couldn’t help but offer more in the way of intellectual stimulation than the chasm that is the modern undergraduate mind, that couldn’t help but challenge the drool in a way that no English composition course could hope to, not in a world where universities are just as willing to hire professors who prescribe standard grammars as truer languages as they are to grant doctorates to such nincompoops with nonsense in their heads, no hearts in their chests, making me wonder about, well, don’t think I haven’t noticed that explicity has that little red underline in my word processor, my computer’s way of endorsing those effers and their effing prescriptions, their nasal voices preaching “no prepositions at the ends of sentences, unless you have to, no split infinitives, no run on whatever, no this, no that,” and I sincerely believe that they’ve cheated on their significant others, like I bet they’ve heard someone say something hateful toward the speech patterns of foreigners just learning English, and laughed, like I bet they’ve used the word “ebonics” knowing full well the condescending, racist nature of the word itself, relishing that root, “ebony”, smiling at their coworkers from the African studies department in the hall, all the while having to consciously refrain from asking “what is it that be the up?” in perfect imitation of the phonetic transcripts they’ve been reading about in little journals, hate rags, and maybe they’ve picked up on the careful lexical selections in my anonymous letters, in the casual threats I leave on their answering machines, and no I can’t promise that I won’t physically attack these people if you hire me, but I can promise you this, I will be the best linguistics professor you’ve ever had, the professor that students recommend to one another, the new hotness, the rad, and in dark corners my colleagues over in the department of “Standard English is the one true lord,” will fear the truth I bring to their students, my anger, my explicity.

Joey Comeau

(Via anastasiav‘s MetaFilter post.)

Or, in its own words, Langue sauce piquante: Le blog des correcteurs du Monde.fr: the blog of the proofreaders of Le Monde. If you know French, or are trying to learn, this is a great way to immerse yourself. A recent entry discussed the history of the multivalent word sacre (carrying both the positive and negative connotations of Latin sacer); another explains why you sometimes have to use the singular even when it seems you’re talking about something plural. I have to say, though, that I’m not sure they properly understand the quaint sexist outcry “Va va voom!” (or, as they have it, “Va va voum !”), since they include it in an entry on onomatopeia; like the similar “Hubba hubba!” it’s more a venting of primal emotion in assonant syllables than an attempt to represent a natural sound, like “oink.” (Thanks to Mark for the link!)

Roy Blount Jr. has a combined review (in last Sunday’s NY Times Sunday Book Review; archived) of The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), edited by Joseph S. Hall and Michael B. Montgomery, and Suddenly Southern: A Yankee’s Guide to Living in Dixie (Fireside, 2004), by Maureen Duffin-Ward; he praises the former and eviscerates the latter, all the while tossing in handfuls of succulent dialectal expressions taken from the dictionary:

Under ”splunge,” for instance, we read: ”She would fill the kittel to the crack with muddy water and splunge chips and leaves down deep into it with her hands and watch it close till she said it was done enough to eat.”… Under ”wonderly” we read: ”I have been thinking what a wonderly sight it will be to sit by the fire and look at the snow through all them new glass winders!”

He expends a good deal of energy on Duffin-Ward’s annoying contention that y’all is singular:

Recently I became aware of an airy new Southern lifestyle publication — Y’all: The Magazine of Southern People — out of Oxford, Miss., that might better be entitled Y’all: The Magazine That Doesn’t Know What Its Own Name Means. In its premiere issue, Y’all declared that: ” ‘Y’all’ is singular. ‘All y’all’ is plural.” That bit of blatant misinformation also appears in the ”Dixie Dictionary” portion of ”Suddenly Southern.”

I don’t know whether Y’all picked this up from Duffin-Ward or vice versa. She is not the first non-Southerner to insist that Southerners may call a single person ”y’all,” but to my knowledge she is the first to declare categorically, in the face of everyday evidence and all philological authority, that it is always a single person we so address. But she isn’t one to brook elucidation. With regard to the singularity of ”y’all,” she writes: ”Southerners will beg to differ here. They insist that even though they use it to address one person, it implies plurality.”

Something — either second-person-plural envy or hyperjocularity — has affected Duffin-Ward’s ear. People in the South do indeed sometimes seem to be addressing a single person as ”y’all.” For instance, a restaurant patron might ask a waiter, ”What y’all got for dessert tonight?” In that case ”y’all” refers collectively to the folks who run the restaurant. No doubt the implication of plurality is hard for someone who didn’t grow up with it to discern. It may even be that Duffin-Ward has heard a native speaker, in real life, violate deep-structure idiom by calling a single person ”y’all.” That would be arguable grounds for saying that ”y’all” is singular on occasion. But how can she have missed daily instances of people unmistakably addressing two or more people as ”y’all”? When a parent calls out to three kids, ”Y’all get in here out of the rain,” does she think only one child is being summoned? (”All y’all” is of course an extended plural: ”Y’all listen up! I mean all y’all.” Often it is pronounced ”Aw yaw.”)

(I’ve italicized the magazine’s name for clarity.) The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English sounds wonderful, and I expect I’ll enjoy flipping through a copy in a library someday, but at $75 it’s a tad rich for my own bookshelves.

(Thanks to Elias for kindly letting me use his computer during my Berkshires visit!)

I should have posted something about the death last month of Anthony Hecht [see this 2003 post]; he’s one of the poets who’s helped me through the past few decades, not only by his reliable craftsmanship (a rare trait these days, shared with the too-little-appreciated Richard Wilbur) but by his dogged investigation of the darker side of human behavior (prompted by what he saw during World War Two, including both heavy fighting and the liberation of a concentration camp). But I had problems of my own and couldn’t even begin to frame a post, so I let it go.

Now, reading the NY Times Sunday Book Review (this week a special Poetry Issue, though as my wife says most people will toss it out thinking it’s a particularly cheesy advertising supplement with its hideous yellow-and-red cover), I come across an appreciation by David Yezzi that does a better job than I would have done:

He internalized the prosodic traditions of English the way a virtuoso violinist works a complex sequence of rhythm and pitch into muscle memory. The rest is making music. Hecht played fluently in any key: the minor organ tones of his Jamesian ”Venetian Vespers,” the major-chord affirmations of the love poem ”Peripeteia,” the sober procession of his canzone ”Terms,” and ”The Dover Bitch,” his buffo sendup of Matthew Arnold: ”And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me, / And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad / All over, etc., etc.’ ”

Hecht’s sumptuous verse earned him a reputation for accomplished formalism, but that, I think, says more about the free-verse age in which he wrote than about his sterling achievement. He was a poet who, like Thomas Hardy, could capture in the image of a barren landscape the specters of history.

Hecht’s poems often layer biblical and classical themes over modern or even quotidian concerns, creating rich palimpsests at once immediate and broad-reaching in their implications. The binding of Isaac, for instance, becomes a resonant image in Hecht’s war poetry. His keen dramas—a family held by a soldier at gunpoint, a tourist ripped off in Naples, a miscarriage—and his various personae reflect a poet attempting, as Hecht once said, to disguise himself. Yet the poet’s impersonality never dulls emotion; it tempers it to heartbreaking effect…

Towards the end, Yezzi quotes Hecht’s ”Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven”:

The dramatis personae of our lives
Dwindle and wizen; familiar boyhood shames,
The tribulations one somehow survives,
Rise smokily from propitiatory flames
Of our forgetfulness until we find
It becomes strangely easy to forgive
Even ourselves with this clouding of the mind,
This cinerous blur and smudge in which we live.

I was struck by the word cinerous: it clearly had something to do with ashes (Latin cinis, root ciner-), but what exactly did it mean? It’s not in the OED, surprisingly, but Webster’s Third International has it: ‘a light bluish gray to light gray that is redder and darker than skimmed-milk white and very slightly redder than glaucous gray.’ I’m sure that presents an exact image to someone familiar with color nomenclature, but for me it reduces to a blend of ‘off-white’ and ‘light gray,’ which I hope is good enough for Hecht’s purposes. What caught my attention, though, was the entry a few lines above: cinereous ‘gray tinged or shaded with black.’ Now, I love the variety and depth of the English vocabulary, but this seemed excessive; who could possibly keep those two words apart, one meaning gray verging on white and the other gray tinged with black? To make matters worse, there’s an alternate form cinereal defined as ‘cinereous.’ (I might add that the OED does have cinereous, defined as ‘Of an ashy hue, ash-coloured, ashen-gray’—but what color are these ashes?) And to make matters worse, Aegypius monachus is known in English as both cinereous vulture and cinerous vulture. Sometimes it’s all just too much, and nothing but poetry helps.

Incidentally, this may be my last post until Sunday; my laptop died and I’m leaving for Thanksgiving with the inlaws right after lunch. I wish a happy holiday to those of my readers who celebrate it, and may the cinerous blur and smudge in which we live spare all of us any unnecessary grief.

The Urdu Poetry Archive collects ghazals and nazms (see Uma’s Ghazal Page for a good introduction to the genre, and the Novice Nook at the Archive for more information):

Welcome to the Urdu Poetry Archive! Urdu poetry is like a vast ocean. Walking along its shores on the sands of time, I have gathered a few gems that I would like to share with you.

The ghazals and nazms in the Urdu poetry archive have been indexed alphabetically as well as by poet. As of 17th August, 2003 there are 1814 ghazals and nazms by 343 poets in the archive… The ghazals and nazms are written in transliterated Urdu (Urdu written in the English script).

Unfortunately, there are no English translations, but if you’re adventurous you might try using the online Urdu-English dictionaries available at Urdu Poetry Resources (if you know any Persian much of the vocabulary will be familiar), and you might find some translations on the web if you google an author’s name. (Via plep.)

I had always understood (as the etymologies in dictionaries told me) that the word kamikaze means ‘divine wind’ in Japanese, originally referred to the storms that hit the Mongol fleet in 1281 and saved Japan from invasion, and was later used to refer to Japanese suicide pilots during World War Two (the only sense in English). Now I learn (from Hippietrail) that this is misleading, that (according to feedback he’s gotten on Wikipedia) in Japanese the reading kamikaze refers only to the thirteenth-century event and for the suicide pilots the same characters are read shinpū… except that others say the correct Japanese term is tokkōtai. (Relevant Wikipedia discussion threads here and here.) I’m hoping my readers who are knowledgeable about Japanese will chime in here with more information.