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An allAfrica.com article by Ayenew Haileselassie* explains how the syllabary used in Ethiopia, with its more than 300 characters, has been adapted for use on mobile phones:

Ge’ez evokes the ancient and the religious, the chanting of priests in long robes; parchment manuscripts and gold and silver crosses of the old days. The Ge’ez alphabet, also known as the Ethiopic writing system, has always been a source of pride for Ethiopians whose country happens to be the only African country with its own alphabet. Nonetheless it has been regarded as a drawback to the assimilation of information and communication technology with its ungainly 300 plus characters.
From the old typewriter to the new computer and the newer mobile phones, everything has worked with the 26 letters of the English alphabet, consisting of 10 times less characters than its Ge’ez counterpart.
Nothing is a debacle to imaginative souls. Ethiopia will not have to discard its literary tradition to embrace modern information technology.
Young Ethiopian researchers at the Addis Abeba University are making sure the numerous characters of the Ethiopic writing system are only a challenge to be overcome, not a hindrance to its slow but sure integration into the information era. Actually, they stated boldly in their research that the “Ethiopic writing system has now entered the wireless revolution.”…

Thanks to John Hardy of Laputan Logic for the link.)
*The name Haile Selassie, incidentally, means ‘Holy Trinity’ or ‘Power of Trinity’ in Amharic

Herewith two words whose pronunciation is not obvious; one is known to me, the other is not. I’ll start with the latter.

1) A spadia is “a strip just wider than a column, overlapping the front page” of a newspaper or magazine (according to Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Village Voice—scroll down to “Times does strip tease”). I have never seen it anywhere else and have no idea how it’s said; can anyone familiar with publishing terminology enlighten me? (I’m guessing SPAY-dee-a, but I can think of at least three other possibilities.)

2) A crosne (or crosnes) is a Chinese artichoke (also called chorogi or knotroot). I guessed the pronunciation (correctly) before looking it up; you may wish to do the same before peeking inside for the answer.

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Longtime readers will know of my great fondness for the writing of Adam Gopnik; as I have said, he has been the main reason I keep subscribing to The New Yorker, and his absence from its pages recently (apart from the occasional squib) is one reason I’m letting my subscription lapse. For the time being I’m still receiving issues, though, which is good, because the latest contains a new Paris Journal by Gopnik, “The End of the World” (not online [but there’s now a summary and image]). The apocalyptic title refers to the recent scandal involving Le Monde (‘The World’), the most influential newspaper in France. As Gopnik says:

It is hard to adequately explain what Le Monde means to France. People say that it is like the Times in New York, but the Times seems, in comparison, modest in its ambitions. The Times, like certain pagan gods, claims only omnipresence: it is everywhere and sees all. Le Monde, like the God of the Old Testament, claims omnipresence and omniscience: it sees all, knows everything, and is always right.

I won’t go into the newspaper’s troubles, but I will pay homage to Gopnik’s inimitable way with English prose.

Gopnik begins by explaining that Le Monde appears in the early afternoon of the day before its cover date; thus when you read the paper on Monday, you are being spoken to with the voice of Tuesday:

Even news that has not yet taken place is thus imbued with a note of calming retrospective hindsight. The postdating of actuality is typical of Le Monde‘s loft and what was, for a long time, its serenity.

The unexpected word loft startled me; then I envisioned a golf ball (closely covered with type) soaring, hanging, taking in an overview of the surroundings while lesser orbs hurtled in their nervous eagerness directly at me, finally descending magisterially onto my coffee table, ready to give me its considered view. “Loft”: le mot juste.

In the course of describing the paper’s areas of coverage, he says: “On Fridays (that is, Thursdays), the paper does what is, by New York standards, a fairly cursory job of covering food and restaurants, perhaps for the same reason that the Times does a fairly cursory job of covering pigeons: they are just too familiar to notice much.” A strained analogy? Perhaps, but I don’t care; the brio wins me over.

And this analysis of why the top men at the paper were so stung by the accusations includes a great example of an “English idiom” invented by Frenchmen:

Yet the irritant for the subjects of the assault lay in details of supposed bullying and alleged meanness. Indictments accuse, but it is details that vilify. Plenel [the executive editor] was shown harassing small, independent journalists who he thought might beat him to the Jospin-outing punch… Minc [the board chairman], Péan and Cohen suggested, had been comically out of his depth in a business venture in Belgium. (He was, they write, in what they imagine is an English idiom, “too clever by oath.”)

If I notice Gopnik’s byline with any frequency in future issues, I suppose I’ll have to send them my money after all.

According to a Nature story:

Connecting a battery across the front of the head can boost verbal skills, says a team from the US National Institutes of Health.
A current of two thousandths of an ampere (a fraction of that needed to power a digital watch) applied for 20 minutes is enough to produce a significant improvement, according to data presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in San Diego. And apart from an itchy sensation around the scalp electrode, subjects in the trials reported no side-effects…
The volunteers were asked to name as many words as possible beginning with a particular letter. Given around 90 seconds, most people get around 20 words. But when Iyer administered the current, her volunteers were able to name around 20% more words than controls, who had the electrodes attached but no current delivered. A smaller current of one thousandth of an amp had no effect.
Iyer says more work needs to be done to explain the effect, but she speculates that the current changes the electrical properties of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region through which it passes. She believes that the cells fire off signals more easily after the current has gone by. That would make the brain area, a region involved in word generation, generally more active, she suggests.

Very interesting, but I think I’ll stick to my unaided verbality, thanks. (A tip of the hat to Songdog for the link.)

Yesterday the NY Times had an obituary (by Douglas Martin) for a man I’d never heard of but who was well known to the editors of the OED:

David Shulman, a self-described Sherlock Holmes of Americanisms who dug through obscure, often crumbling publications to hunt down the first use of thousands of words, died on Oct. 30 at Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn. He was 91 and lived in Brooklyn…

Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, said Mr. Shulman contributed uncountable early usages to the 20-volume lexicon. “All very good stuff,” Mr. Sheidlower said.

“What David did was read through the sort of things most people don’t read,” he added, mentioning yellowing editions of The National Police Gazette.

Mr. Sheidlower said only a few contributors were more prolific and fewer still possessed Mr. Shulman’s knack for sending usable material. His name appeared in the front matter to O.E.D.’s epochal second edition, each of the Addition Series volumes, and is currently on the Web…

Gerald Cohen, professor of foreign languages at the University of Missouri, Rolla… said Mr. Shulman’s most pioneering effort concerned the term “hot dog.” He found the word was college slang before it was a sausage, paving the way for deeper investigation. A book on hot dog’s glossarial provenance will appear this year under the names of Mr. Shulman, Mr. Cohen and Barry Popick.

Dr. Cohen said Mr. Shulman obliterated a big impediment to finding the origins of the word jazz by proving it was on a 1919 record, not the 1909 version of the same disk. (Other scholars traced first use of the term to the baseball columns of Scoop Gleeson in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913.)

Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Shulman was first to challenge that “shyster” derived from a lawyer named Scheuster. Others, particularly Roger Mohovich, then traced the etymology to 1843-1844. “Shyster” turned out to be a Yiddish corruption of a German vulgarism meaning a crooked lawyer.

A few points:

1) What is meant by “and is currently on the Web”? In a trivial sense, of course, his name is on the Web because the Times has put it there (though he presumably had at least a mention or two before he died). I suspect, however, Martin means “and in the online edition.” The whole sentence is poorly constructed.

2) The Times has misspelled the name of Barry Popik, who is probably New York’s best-known wordsleuth. I don’t have to chide them for this, because I’m quite sure Mr. Popik did a bang-up job of it about five seconds after the obit appeared. (From his page on “hot dog”: “In 2001, the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (www.hot-dog.org) officially admitted that the TAD story is a myth. My name is on the web site as Barry Popick. The myth still gets told by lazy newspaper reporters and writers who do not know how to search the web, or who use old, outdated materials.”)

3) The “German vulgarism” is Scheisser, literally ‘shitter.’ When will the Times give up its increasingly absurd struggle against verbal impropriety? Even maidens don’t have maidenly blushes any more, Times. Join the 21st century.

Wordgumbo is a remarkable site that collects lexicons for all sorts of languages:

A ‘gumbo’ is a spicy okra-based stew, it also means a particular kind of mud; it is one of the few Bantu (African) words that has become part of the English language, itself a gumbo of a language.
The site is primarily an archive of public domain and redistributable language learning resources. We are also developing special content for the site which will be of interest to language learners, travelers, linguists, and other language aficionados.
There are many sites on the Internet with interactive dictionaries and language learning aids; there are also several freeware dictionary/flashcard programs with extensive vocabulary sets. However, in most cases, these sites shroud their data sets in binary or database formats. At Wordgumbo we’ve done the hard work of converting these data sets into flat files and posting them in one convenient archive, organized by language family.

There are word lists for the major Indo-European languages as well as a number of other families: Afroasiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Niger-Kordofanian, and so on. My thanks to Logomacy for drawing my attention to this excellent resource.

The English subjunctive is dead. (Via avva.)

This comes under the heading of “weird but interesting.” The mysterious folks at socialfiction.org have created the site OnlyOneNativeSpeaker (“the collaborative Babylon bonanza”):

Languages, by cultural definition, seek standardisation and mass-adoption; the command of language is one axis on which the ability to participate in all what society has to offer revolves around. It’s to this domain of human culture that OnlyOneNativeSpeaker seeks to add parallelism, diversity and heterogeneity. It will do this by creating thousands of new artificial languages. Languages with deliberately just that: Only One Native Speaker.

A language is a collaborative effort to conceptualise place and time. At the most fundamental level languages reflect the environment of, and the social agreements between, the community it belongs to. The study of languages from other cultures is of direct important to us, as it shows us the boundaries of our own culture, and refutes claims of cultural universality.

OnlyOneNativeSpeaker excludes no possible line of enquiry. Every artificial language, independent of medium, origin and intent helps to display the horizon of possibility, in ourselves as well as in others. But creating a language from scratch is not the only option, finding languages where nobody did before: in crowds, in amoeba, or in the shape of rocks, is of equal interest to the scope of OnlyOneNativeSpeaker.

How can you participate in the Babylon bonanza that is called OnlyOneNativeSpeaker? That’s simple, develop a language! While doing that, send us an e-mail with a link to the website containing the purpose and details of your language. If necessary we can host this information for you. At the same time OnlyOneNativeSpeaker will try to facilitate the exchange of ideas between all people involved as far as language permits.

I’m not entirely sure what the point is, but at least one of the languages, SASXSEK, seems carefully thought out and seriously intended (even if ultimately futile, like most such attempts):

The goal of SASXSEK is to construct a language which is easier for the world to pronounce, with a much simpler grammar, and a small, easy to learn, but powerful core vocabulary from which other words can be formed. SASXSEK has no consonant clusters, which makes pronunciation easy. A one-to-one relationship between spelling and pronunciation using a simple 18-letter alphabet consisting of phonetic units which are already known, or could easily be learned by almost anyone. The grammar is simple. The lexicon is small enough to be easy to learn, but a powerful set of suffixes and the ability to build compound words give the ability to express more complex ideas.

And yes, it’s simpler than Esperanto.

(Thanks, Wilfried!)

Update (Mar. 2023). The SASXSEK links are dead and the URL “has been excluded from the Wayback Machine,” but you can get a description at the Esperanto Wikipedia page. I’ve provided archived links for the others.

Linguist George Lakoff has been in the news lately for his insights into the cognitive frames we use to understand reality—and for the use to which he has put his theories in political consulting. Michael Erard, a reporter for the Texas Observer, wrote a piece three years ago, “Metaphor and Myth,” that does a good job of presenting Lakoff’s ideas and political activity; now he has another one, “Frame Wars,” that compares Lakoff to conservative consultant Frank Luntz and towards the end quotes “one of the more thorough critiques of Lakoff that combines conservative thought with language expertise” by Justin Busch, better known to Languagehat readers as Semantic Compositions. In fact, it was being interviewed by Erard that led the erstwhile SC to drop his mask and reveal himself: “My name is Justin Busch, and I’m a computational linguist at Science Applications International Corporation…”; you can read his extended critique of Lakoff in the posts linked here. And for a very brief overview of cognitive linguistics, see the page on the subject at the fascinating Foamy custard site: “Foamy custard aims to explore the areas where folklore, mytholology, cultural studies and related disciplines come together.” (Thanks for the foamy tip, Mike!)

Tatiana Nikolova-Houston, a doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, works with medieval Slavic manuscripts and has created a couple of excellent websites. One is Slavic Medieval Treasures from Bulgaria:

This web site provides textual materials and graphic images dedicated to the development of the production of Slavic medieval manuscripts. The images on this site belong to the manuscript collection of the Historical and Archival Church Institute (HACI) in Sofia, Bulgaria; most of them from the 15th to 17th centuries.

Here, you will find information about: Development of book production in medieval Bulgaria; Major decorative elements of medieval manuscripts; Major decorative styles of manuscripts; Gospel books and their decoration; Other manuscript decoration.

More recently, she has created Byzantine Medieval Hypertexts:

Yes, the idea of hypertexts from the Middle Ages sounds absurd. We think of the Middle Ages as a time of rampant illiteracy and premature death. We remember stories of monks meticulously scribing away in Latin to preserve the heritage of Western civilization against the onslaught of the barbarian hoards, but we tend to forget that the Renaissance was conceived and transmitted to the West through Byzantine monks meticulously scribing away in Greek and Slavic scripts under far greater pressure from the Eastern invasion.

The information on this website presents the theory of hypertext and its medieval application in Byzantine manuscripts, using examples from the Theodore Psalter, a manuscript created in 1066 in the Stoudious monastery near Constantinople. Hypertextuality in this case manifests as a complex interaction between the text and the illustrations in the manuscript and the text as it relates to other manuscripts and its historical context.

(Via plep.)