languagehat.com

A list of Vegetarian Phrases In Other Languages, via Incoming Signals [10/11/04], where you will find an unhinged rant about it:

I imagine it must be very important to have those phrases handy in that part of the world since the phrasebook gives so many options for making your wishes known. Perhaps they have a habit of forcing fish on the unwary traveler, and only a quick response will stop them. Perhaps just at the very last second, before they cram the fish down your throat, live and wriggling, according to their custom. But they will understand. They will sigh dejectedly…

The Russian sentences are given in a virtually unintelligible transcription, which may be a good thing, considering the in-your-face wording of “Yah lyublyu gihvahtnihh poehtahmuh yah nye yem eeh (I love animals, so I don’t eat them).” Might be more sensible to just ask for potatoes and skip the propaganda.

Angelo Mercado, a doctoral student in Indo-European studies at UCLA, has a blog called sauvage noble (“an austronesian’s adventures in altertumswissenschaft and indogermanistik”) that makes me nostalgic for my graduate days spent rummaging in old books in foreign languages. I wish in particular to call attention to his post on the two Indo-European roots meaning ‘fart,’ *perd– and *pesd-, which contains this excellent quote from J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth:

Indeed, it is bizarre recompense to the scholar struggling to determine whether the Proto-Indo-Europeans were acquainted with some extremely diagnostic item of material culture only to find that they were far more obliging in passing on to us no less than two words for ‘breaking wind’.

I should add that he gives all the forms derived from each root (from Rix’s Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben), in case that’s a further attraction.

My friend John and I are having a friendly disagreement, and I’m enlisting you all in its resolution. He was surprised to find that I defined “native speaker” as someone who learned a language from infancy; for him, it describes competence, not biography. I asked him how, then, he would distinguish “native” from “fluent”; he asked me how (without inquiring about biography) I would be able to tell whether someone was or was not a native speaker. He said it was a technical linguistic term and should have an operational definition (like me, he is a former linguistics grad student); I said it was an ordinary-language term and did in fact include the biographical component, whether he approved or not. He claimed that it was used his way in the linguistic literature; I pointed out that neither of us had been reading the linguistic literature for nigh on thirty years. I said I’d throw the question open to my readership, and he said he looked forward to the results. Rather than get tangled in detailed definitions, we agreed to use his father as a test case: he spoke only Arabic until he was six, then went to American schools and quickly became a fluent speaker, indistinguishable from someone who learned English from birth. So: is John’s father a native speaker of English? Comments, please. I am interested in everyone’s response, but please indicate if you are a professional linguist, since we want insight into the technical usage as well as the everyday one.

Although I want your first impression, in the extended entry I provide some food for thought and discussion.

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Kannada (Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia) is one of the main Dravidian languages of southern India, and there’s an interesting history of Kannada literature online:

Kannada is the language predominant in the state of Karnataka in India. It is also the language that we, the Kamats are most familiar with. To mark the celebration of the World Millennium Kannada Conference (held in September 2000 in Houston), I asked my mother Dr. Jyotsna Kamat, a passionate student of ancient Kannada literature to trace the History of the Kannada Language for a special feature at Kamat’s Potpourri.

(Via Plep [7th October].)

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get around to reading Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist; he’s been one of my heroes for many years. At any rate, it’s finally worked its way to the top of my pile, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it—he gives a picture of the Russia he grew up in that is both unsparing and loving, and his descriptions of people are masterful. I’m currently reading the long chapter on his studies at the Corps of Pages, and I wanted to share his vivid description of the impact Goethe’s Faust made on him:

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      NORTH HAVEN
    In Memoriam: Robert Lowell
I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse’s tail.
The islands haven’t shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have—
drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south, or sidewise—
and that they’re free within the blue frontiers of bay.

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For some time I’ve been tempted by The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith, so I was interested to read Sarah Lyall’s article about him in today’s NY Times. My interest cranked up several notches when I read this description of one of the two new books he’s working on:

The first, to be published in December by Anchor, features the pompous Prof. Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany, the author of “Portuguese Irregular Verbs” and a man consumed by jealousy and suspicion.

Now, that’s my kind of protagonist!

Okasha El Daly, a London-based Egyptologist who teaches at Birkbeck College, claims (according to a Guardian story by Robin McKie) that “hieroglyphs had been decoded hundreds of years earlier [before Jean-François Champollion] – by an Arabic alchemist, Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah:

But now it is claimed that Champollion had been beaten by Arabian scholars who, eight centuries earlier, had twigged that sounds were crucial to their decoding. ‘For two and half centuries, the study of ancient Egypt has been dominated by a Euro-centric view that virtually ignored Arabic scholarship,’ said El Daly. ‘I felt that was quite unjustified.’

An expert in both ancient Egypt and ancient Arabic scripts, El Daly spent seven years chasing down Arabic manuscripts in private collections around the world in a bid to find evidence that Arab scholars had unlocked the secrets of the hieroglyph. He eventually found it in the work of the ninth-century alchemist, Ibn Wahshiyah. ‘I compared his studies with those of modern scholars and realised that he understood completely what hieroglyphs were saying.’

(There is also a Reuters story [link to the Daily News of Pakistan].) Now, I’m sure El Daly is a fine Egyptologist, but it seems clear to me that he allowed his animus against Eurocentrism to overwhelm his critical faculties; he was determined to find evidence, so of course he did. Everything I have read about the medieval Islamic world and its attitude towards the pre-Islamic past suggests to me the extreme unlikelihood of the kind of patient and open-minded approach necessary to this kind of decipherment; at most, Ibn Wahshiyya(h) and his fellow scholars proposed that the hieroglyphs were phonetic symbols like the alphabets they knew, but this is meaningless without actually decoding the system and learning which were phonetic and which ideographic and what the meanings were—such proposals were made before Champollion by Europeans, and they are quite rightly forgotten.

Besides, the guy doesn’t seem to have been the most scrupulous of scholars. The History of Islamic Science website has the following entry:

IBN WAHSHIYA

Abu Bakr Ahmed (or Mohammed) ibn Ali ibn al-Wahshiya al-Kaldani or al-Nabati. Born in Iraq of a Nabataean family, flourished about the end of the third century H., i. e., before 912. Alchemist. Author of alchemistic and occult writings (quoted in the Fihrist). He wrote c. 904 the so-called “Nabataean agriculture” (Kitab al-falaha al-nabatiya), an alleged translation from ancient Babylonian sources, the purpose of which was to extol the Babylonian-Aramean-Syrian civilization (or more simply the “old” civilization before the hegira) against that of the conquering Arabs. It contains valuable information on agriculture and superstitions.
This forgery became famous because the great Russian orientalist Khvolson was entirely deceived by it. Of course, Ibn Wahshiya was as unable to read the cuneiform texts as the Egyptian Arabs the hieroglyphic.
Fihrist (311-312, 358).

(Emphasis added.) Via Mirabilis.ca.

Michael Weiss of Cornell University has put online (at his homepage) an Outline of the Comparative Grammar of Latin:

My goal in putting together this outline is modest. I hope to provide the English-speaking/reading student with an up-to-date, reliable, introduction to the historical and comparative phonology and morphology of Latin… The outline is divided into 41 lessons of 5 to 10 pages in length. With a moderate amount of haste, the whole course may be completed in one semester.
I encourage anyone to download these outlines for teaching or learning purposes. They are obviously not intended as works of scholarship and should not be quoted as such. Comments, and corrections, which will be appreciated, may be sent to mlw36@cornell.edu

It’s unfortunate that the chapters are in pdf format (which makes them annoying to access and impossible to quote easily), but I understand the reason: when you’re using lots of Greek and other specialized type, it’s best not to risk the vagaries of HTML. Anyway, it’s an invaluable resource and worth the slight effort. To give just one example of the riches contained within, the chapter on Etruscan (pdf) has a nice detailed analysis of a bilingual inscription, with scrupulous descriptions of alternate views.

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To quote Andrew Zangrilli, from whose Blogbook post I took this list:

Do you have a good vocabulary? Prove it, smarty.

Test your knowledge against the vocab champ, Judge Selya of the First Circuit.

The following word list was gathered from his recent decisions. How many can you define?

Algid
Decurtate
Dehors
Exigible
Encincture
Asseverational
Chiaroscuro
Solatium
Isthmian
Anent
Sockdolager
Nonce
Purlieu
Gallimaufry
Perscrutation
Longiloquent
Integument
Asthenic

Scoring
0-2: dunce
3-5: average
6-11: whiz kid
12-18: 2 smart

I got only one totally wrong (the first — Brother Auger, my seventh-grade Latin teacher, would be very disappointed in me); one other was close enough for government work if not for legal scrutiny. But I had to check the OED several times to make sure my instincts were right. These are, by and large, words you’ll never have a use for (unless you’re Judge Selya), but it’s always fun to stretch one’s vocabulary. (Via Transblawg.)

Addendum. Since I’m linking to this bit of japery on the part of the Tensor, I’d better append the real definitions, so as not to contribute to the Veil of Ignorance:

Algid – cold
Decurtate – to cut short
Dehors – outside
Exigible – that may be demanded
Encincture – to girdle
Asseverational – like a solemn affirmation
Chiaroscuro – interplay of light and shade/dark
Solatium – compensation (law: ‘sum of money paid, over and above the actual damages, as a solace for injured feelings’)
Isthmian – situated on or forming an isthmus (in particular, belonging to the Isthmus of Corinth; esp. in “Isthmian games”)
Anent – regarding, concerning
Sockdolager – decisive blow or answer; something outstanding
Nonce – current occasion, time being
Purlieu – place where one has the right to range at large, or which one habitually frequents, a haunt; outskirts
Gallimaufry – heterogeneous mixture, confused jumble
Perscrutation – thorough investigation, careful scrutiny
Longiloquent – (given to) speaking at great length
Integument – (natural) covering (skin, shell, husk, rind, etc)
Asthenic – weak

(Note: these are mostly not full definitions—that’s what dictionaries are for—just quick approximations that will give you the basic idea and will hopefully be easier to remember, should you wish to do such a thing.)

A couple of the etymologies are particularly interesting. Here’s anent(OED):

The form-history of this wd. presents several points not fully explained; the primitive form is the OE. phrase on efen, on efn, on emn, with the dative = ‘on even (ground) with, on a level with,’ whence later side by side with, beside, face to face with, opposite, against, towards, in view of, etc.; cogn. w. OS. an eban, MHG. eneben, neben, and (with phonetic –t) nebent. In Eng. also a final –t had been developed by 1200, interchanging with –d, perhaps by form-assoc. with some other word. At the same time this extended form occurs with final –e and –es, after datival and genitival words like on-bute(n, on-eanes. Following the latter class also, the final –s became in 14th c. –st, giving anentist, anentst, anenst, as the midl. form, in literary use in 17th c., and still dialectal. The north preserved the earlier anent, still common in north. dial., and in literary and legal Scotch, whence not unfrequent in literary Eng. during the present [ie, 19th!] century. The early form anende may have been influenced by the prec. phr. AN-END; anont, anond(e, are not explained. The development of meaning is largely parallel to that of again, against.

And here’s purlieu:

Exemplified in 1482 in the form purlew(e, app. an erroneous alteration of purley, syncopated from puraley, the natural Eng. spelling (cf. alley, city, army) in the 15th c. of AF. puralé, -alée, taken in its transferred sense (PURALÉ 2).

For the history of puralé, -alee (purale) in English between c1330 and 1482 written evidence is wanting; in Anglo-Fr. legal documents it continued to be written puralé, poralee (examples of which, of 1370-78, in the sense ‘purlieu’ appear under PURALÉ 2); but, as an English word, it would naturally become puraley, puraly (‘pur@le, ‘pur@li), and easily be syncopated to purley, purly, as still seen in the 16th c. and later, esp. in the comb. purleyman, which shows that this was the pronunciation even after the spelling was changed. Purlew may have originated in a scribal error, or as a pseudo-etymological spelling, erroneously associating the word with lew, leu, LIEU, place; app. it did not appear in law Fr. till later, when it was prob. taken over from Eng., and Gallicized as purlieu: see quot. 1574 [1574 in J. Dyer Reports (1592) 327 En le manor dun Fortescue de S. adjoynont al dit chace, come en le purlieu del chase.. le libertie del purlieu remayna unextincted].