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As a followup to my earlier entry on the construction “boring of the task” and the Language Log entries by Mark Liberman linked therein, Mark has posted Horror and boredom in Castile, a summary of Christopher J. Pountain’s paper “The Castilian reflexes of ABHORRERE/ABHORRESCERE: a case-study in valency“:

The basic observation is that Latin abhorrere started out meaning “to shrink back from, have an aversion for, shudder at, abhor”, but one of the Spanish descendents, aburrir, wound up meaning “to bore”. So not only did the meaning change, but also the “valency” (in the sense of which verbal arguments go where). “I abhor you” turned into “you bore me”.

The original paper has several useful diagrams showing semantic ranges, and Mark reproduces the one showing the historical development in Castilian.

I would also like to second the recommendation in Mark’s more recent post for Pountain’s book (coauthored with R. E. Batchelor) Using Spanish: A Guide to Contemporary Usage. It’s part of a Cambridge series (of which I also have the German volume by Martin Durrell), and it’s extremely well done, with lists of “misleading similarities,” fields of meaning, complex verbal expressions, and the like, all with careful attention to register and geographical restrictions. (I assume, by the way, that Pountain rhymes with fountain, but if anyone knows for sure, please comment.) [It does: see Y’s comment below.]

I have previously reported on a contretemps over whether the plural of euro should have an s; now comes a brouhaha over inflected forms. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the News-Telegraph:

Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Malta triggered the rare linguistic showdown by refusing to accept the established usage in translations of the European constitution, calling it inelegant, inaccurate, or even gibberish in their languages.
They have all agreed to use the harmonised “euro” form on future notes and coins when they join the monetary union, but that was not good enough for Brussels.
All official EU texts must be spelt the same way even if it makes no sense in the Baltic languages.

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I know, I know, reverse Babelfish translations are old hat, but this one I find irresistible, so just this once… Surely everybody’s familiar with the classic 1979 Sugarhill Gang hit “Rapper’s Delight“? “I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie/ to the hip hip hop, a you dont stop/ the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie/ to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat…” Well, the folks at Shtick! sent it off to Italy and back (linguistically speaking), and they got this: “I have said a luppolo of the hip, hippie to the hippie, the hip, hip a luppolo and not arrested, one cliff it/ To the boogie of explosion of explosion as an example on the jump the boogie, to rhythm of the boogie, the beat…” It goes on and on, and it’s very funny. Via Boing Boing, and I thank Songdog for the tip.

From the World Briefing in today’s NY Times:

GEORGIA: DEVICE EXPLODES IN CAPITAL An explosive device went off in Tbilisi, the capital, news agencies reported, near a monument for soldiers who died in the 1990’s conflict with the separatist region of Abkhazia, over which tensions continue to run high. No one was injured. The Security Ministry said that a letter addressed to President Mikhail Saakashvili was found but that its contents were not yet known because it was composed in ancient Georgian.     Sophia Kishkovsky (NYT)

Judith Shulevitz’s NY Times review [archived] of The Five Books of Moses: A Translation With Commentary by Robert Alter not only raves about the book (“Alter’s magisterial translation deserves to become the version in which many future generations encounter this strange and inexhaustible book”), it goes into the kind of detail that whets my appetite:

What Alter does with the Bible instead [of allocating bits to “J” and other presumed authors] is read it, with erudition and rigor and respect for the intelligence of the editor or editors who stitched it together, and — most thrillingly — with the keenest receptivity to its darker undertones.

In the case of the binding of Isaac, for instance, Alter not only accepts a previous translator’s substitution of “cleaver” for the “knife” of the King James version but also changes “slay” (as in, “Abraham took the knife to slay his son”) to “slaughter.” Moreover, in his notes, he points out that although this particular Hebrew verb for “bound” (as in, “Abraham bound Isaac his son”) occurs only this once in biblical Hebrew, making its meaning uncertain, we can nonetheless take a hint from the fact that when the word reappears in rabbinic Hebrew it refers specifically to the trussing up of animals. Alter’s translation thus suggests a dimension of this eerie tale we would probably have overlooked: that of editorial comment. The biblical author, by using words more suited to butchery than ritual sacrifice, lets us know that he is as horrified as we are at the brutality of the act that God has asked Abraham to commit.

Translators often win praise for their attention to nuance, but in the case of the Hebrew Bible subtlety has hurt more than it has helped. Biblical Hebrew has an unusually small vocabulary clustered around an even smaller number of three-letter roots, most of them denoting concrete actions or things, and the Bible achieves its mimetic effects partly through the skillful repetition of these few vivid words. The translators who gave us the King James version appear more or less to have understood this, but many 20th-century English-language translators have not. In their desire to convey shades of meaning brought out by different contexts or, perhaps, to compensate for what they perceived as the primitiveness of the ancient language, they replaced biblical Hebrew’s restricted, earthy lexicon with a broad and varied set of often abstract terms.

Not Alter. As he explains in his introduction — an essay that would be worth reading even if it didn’t accompany this book — the Hebrew of the Bible is, in his view, a closed system with a coherent literary logic, “a conventionally delimited language, roughly analogous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical theater,” though plain-spoken where neoclassical French is lofty. Alter’s translation puts into practice his belief that the rules of biblical style require it to reiterate, artfully, within scenes and from scene to scene, a set of “key words,” a term Alter derives from Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who in an epic labor that took nearly 40 years to complete, rendered the Hebrew Bible into a beautifully Hebraicized German. Key words, as Alter has explained elsewhere, clue the reader in to what’s at stake in a particular story, serving either as “the chief means of thematic exposition” within episodes or as connective tissue between them.

I like the appreciation (even if muted) for the King James, which will always be my favorite version, and the comparison with the restricted vocabulary of French classicism, and I especially like the preference for rendering the same word or phrase the same way whenever it makes sense: that’s the only way to bring across the growing web of associations that characterizes any great work of literature.

Martin of bloghead (if that is indeed the blogtitle; it may be “monochrome mondrian”) ruminates about stops and fricatives in English, Spanish, and Hebrew. Interesting stuff, but is it true that Modern Hebrew turns /t/ into [θ] after vowels (“‘Ruth’ is pronounced [ruθ]”)? I never heard that. (Via pf, who is back from moving-induced hiatus and linking away like a madman.)

Reading a NY Times Magazine article by Scott Anderson [archived] about the dreadful situation in western Sudan, I was stopped in my tracks by the following sentence: “Pulling a stack of business cards from the pocket of his white robe, he read off a dizzying list of initials — W.H.O., W.F.P., I.R.C. — before boring of the task and setting them aside.” Boring of the task? This doesn’t sound to me like a marginal or dialectal usage, it sounds completely ungrammatical, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s not to trust my own judgments about acceptability. So: do any of you think this is an acceptable equivalent for “becoming bored with the task”? Would you write or say it yourself?

Addendum. See Mark Liberman’s statistical investigation at Language Log, wherein he unleashes his famed Google-fu and winds up continuing to agree with me that the construction just ain’t right, and his comparative and etymological discussion, titillatingly titled “Etymology porn.”

A Guardian story by David Ward lists 101 buzzwords, one for each year from 1904 to 2004, as given by Susie Dent in her new book Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report. It’s UK-oriented (or should I say -orientated?), so there are entries like whizzo (1905), tiddly-om-pom-pom (1909), naff all (1977), and OK yah (1985); furthermore, the years given are not (as one would expect) the year in which a given word was especially inescapable but the first year for which the OED has a citation (for gene, 1911: W. Johannsen in Amer. Naturalist XLV. 132, I have proposed the terms ‘gene’ and ‘genotype’.. to be used in the science of genetics). With those caveats in mind, the list is a lot of fun, and educational too—who knew hip went back to 1904? (G. V. Hobart Jim Hickey i. 15 At this rate it’ll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?) Thanks to Nick Jainschigg for the tip!

Beth of Cassandra Pages has been doing a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) about her father-in-law, born in 1911 in Ottoman Syria and now in a retirement home in Montreal Vermont. The whole series is remarkable, humane and honest and deeply moving, but I want to call your attention to the latest post, which begins and ends with the teaching of Arabic (I’m quoting about half the entry):

“I may have a new Arabic student,” my father-in-law told us, after dinner. “It’s a woman. She called up other day and said she had heard that I teach. She’s coming next week.” He has one regular student who studies with him each Wednesday, and another student who is “on leave”: he’s a minister who is currently in the Sudan doing relief work.
“Grandpa, how would you explain to someone how to pronounce an ‘ayn’?” M. asked. “Is it different than a glottal stop in Hebrew?
“Oh yes,” he said, “In Arabic you have to open your throat and…” he demonstrated, and asked her to repeat; he demonstrated again, a little smugly; he loves being able to do things that are difficult for us…

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Songdog sent me this comic, which I just had to share with all and sundry.