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A NY Times story by Pam Belluck discusses what is said to be the longest place name in the US, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in Massachusetts. There’s a picture of a misspelled sign, lyrics from “The Lake Song” by Ethel Merman and Ray Bolger (“Oh, we took a walk one evening and we sat down on a log/ By Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg”), and an etymological excursus:

There is more consensus on the meaning of Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, but it turns out the consensus is wrong. In the 1920’s, a reporter for The Webster Times, Lawrence J. Daly, wrote that it was a Nipmuck Indian word meaning “You fish on your side, I fish on my side and nobody fishes in the middle.” That stuck even though Mr. Daly confessed repeatedly that he had made the whole thing up.
The real meaning, said Paul Macek, a historian in Webster, a community of about 17,000 just northwest of where Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts intersect, is “English knifemen and Nipmuck Indians at the boundary or neutral fishing place.”

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The Great Vowel Shift: See and Hear the GVS, What Is the Great Vowel Shift?, Dialogue: Conservative and Advanced Speakers:

This dialogue does two things. First, it gives the listener four slices of time and shows how vowels would be pronounced in each of these periods. You can click on a time link and get text, sound, and phonetic transcription for the dialogue as it would have taken place in that time. You may also click on a word within the text and get pronunciations of that word (or a similar one) across time.

Second, the dialogue illustrates an important concept: the difference between conservative speakers and advanced speakers. In any community in the midst of a sound change, some speakers will have the new pronunciations while others will maintain older ones. Age may be the most important factor in determining which form a person will use–older people have older pronunciations, younger people have newer ones–but gender, education, geography, and other factors also affect individual speech. In our dialogue, Cole is the conservative speaker; Alice is the advanced speaker. Differences between their pronunciations can be seen most clearly in the word “name”: in 1450-1550, Alice has [æ] in “name,” while Cole has the older [a]; in 1550-1650, Alice has [e], while Cole has [æ]; and so on.

Important Note: This dialogue is not real. That is, we created it, and we did not worry about whether people would actually say these things in 1400 or 1650 or whenever. We tried not to include any egregious anachronisms, but we spent very little time checking to see if the morphology or syntax is representative of ME or MnE. This dialogue is designed for studying the changes in the long vowels and should not otherwise be taken as representative of the speech of any of the four time periods.

Via wood s lot.

Update (August 2018). The links are broken, but the material is available here. Thanks, JC!

Update (August 2025). I have replaced the broken links with archived ones; I doubt the sound files still work, but at least you can see the text.

Unable to sleep last night, I pulled out a little collection of Alexander Kushner (a wonderful St. Petersburg poet; here’s a pdf file of his 2002 speech “Poetry and Freedom”) and opened it at random to a poem whose first stanza is:

Скучно, Гоголь, жить на этом свете!
Но повеет медом иногда
От пушистых зонтичных соцветий!
Чудно жить на свете, господа!

[It’s tiresome, Gogol, to live in this world!
But sometimes there’s a honeyed breeze
from the fluffy zontichnye sotsvetiya!
It’s wonderful to live in the world, gentlemen!]

I didn’t know the words I’ve left in italics, but it was clear from their roots they had something to do with umbrellas (zontik) and flowers (tsvet), and I was too sleepy to bother going downstairs to look them up. So today I did, and it turns out zontichnyi is ‘umbelliferous’ and sotsvetiye is ‘inflorescence.’ Neither meant anything to me, so I looked them up; an inflorescence is a characteristic pattern of flowers on a stem, and one of the several varieties is an umbrella-shaped form called umbelliferous.

So how do you translate that? In Russian, both are perfectly ordinary-sounding words, and even if the average Russian doesn’t know exactly what a sotsvetiye is (I hope my Russian readers will enlighten me about this), it doesn’t carry any of the forbidding “incomprehensible technical term” air of its English equivalent. Nabokov, of course, would have rendered the line “From the fluffy umbelliferous inflorescences,” and quivered with pedantic joy as he did so; for the rest of us, that would risk clubbing the poem over the head with a hundred-ton hammer. But if you don’t, how do you keep it from losing all specificity and becoming a banal reference to sweet-smelling flowers? Ah, the endless troubles of translation…

Don’t make comparisons: the living are incomparable.
I had come to terms with the flatness of the plains
with a sort of fond fear.
The curve of the sky was a disease to me.
I would turn and wait for some service or news
from my servant the air.
I would get ready for a journey
and sail along the arcs of travel that never began.
I am prepared to wander where there is more sky for me,
but the clear anguish will not let me go
away from the youthful hills of Voronezh
to the civilised hills, that I see so clearly in Tuscany.
    —Osip Mandelstam, 18 January 1937
tr. Richard McKane and Elizabeth McKane
(from The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937)

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This is probably all over the internet by now, but I just discovered (via MetaFilter) that Google has a beta search for scholarly publications called Google Scholar. I tried searching on Abkhaz and got 304 results; interestingly, the first page is mostly linguistic material, with the political stuff (“Ethno-Federalism and Civic State-Building Policies. Perspectives on the Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict,” “The Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict in a Regional Context,” &c) coming later. I’ve already turned up a paper on “Kartvelian substrate toponyms in Abkhazia” by T Gvantseladze and R Tchantouria (HTML, pdf) with fascinating information on local toponyms:

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Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article “Taking the Veil,” about the French law (Article 141-5-1 of Law No. 2004-228) forbidding conspicuous religious symbols in public schools (not online), has a couple of problems dealing with French that I thought were worth mentioning here. First is the odd quote on p. 64, claiming that Chirac called the veil “the siege of a politics of Islamization.” The first noun clearly represents the French word siège, which in most contexts (and certainly this one) means ‘seat, locus’; I can’t imagine how this mistranslation got past the editorial staff of one of America’s most prestigious magazines—as written, it doesn’t even mean anything. The other glitch is a quote from a feminist lawyer named Linda Weil-Curiel, who says (according to the magazine) “I’ll take Chirac, with all his casseroles, because his position on [the veil] has been, well, noble.” Casseroles? I’ve packed up my French slang dictionaries, so I can’t look it up, but I shouldn’t need to; the New Yorker shouldn’t be using any foreign slang whose meaning is neither known to every literate English-speaker nor obvious from context. Tsk, is all I can say. That and: can anyone tell me what casseroles means in this context?

Julia Mayhew, whose poetry blog Eagle’s Wing had been inactive since May, has begun posting poems again, making me (and other fans) very happy. Her latest:

HOW TREE TRUNKS BECAME BROWN
There used to be
only one tree.
There was a storm.
It was so muddy the
water was brown
and the tree drank
it and it turned
brown because of
the muddy water.

Language Log has a tradition of “guess the language” challenges, but the answers are usually posted the next day, which doesn’t give much time for working on them; the latest will be up for a week at least, which should allow more people to get in on the fun. So if trying to figure out overheard languages is your thing, go on over there and listen to the three mp3 files and see what you can come up with. I’ve got a general idea, but I’ll have to refine my guess when I have more leisure (today has been taken up with househunting). Tally-ho!
Update. If anyone’s been trying to solve this, the answer is available here; it fits with my general guess, but I don’t think I would have been able to come up with the specific language.

A NY Times article by Marc Lacey, “Using a New Language in Africa to Save Dying Ones,” tosses together a mishmash of vaguely related topics and tries to make them cohere; fortunately, I don’t have to bother going over it in detail, because Mark Liberman of Language Log has already done so. His summary:

Lacey (the article’s author) does start out by talking about “[making] computers more accessible to Africans who happen not to know English, French or the other major languages that have been programmed into the world’s desktops”. So he may have in mind facilitating a new kind of computer-mediated literacy training among those who don’t know English or French. Or maybe he’s thinking about bringing interaction with networked computers to people who are not literate at all, using images and speech technology. Those are both interesting ideas, but it’s odd to write as if the way to to accomplish such things is to put African languages on an equal footing with English or French in the use of Microsoft Office. Mix in references to endangered languages, text messaging in Amharic, machine translation among English, Afrikaans and Sotho, problems of borrowed vs. created technical vocabulary; stir well; and bake till done.

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Take a look at this very attractive timepiece, created by Bob Harris:

I actually just kinda made it for myself as a reminder that the rest of the world is big and has been around a long time, something to keep the current mess in perspective. The characters are in Greek, Arabic, Mandarin, Cherokee, Babylonian, ASL, English, Mayan, Hindi, Roman, Thai, and Ethiopian, in that order.

Thanks to Derryl Murphy for the link!