languagehat.com

At last, the solution to all the wearisome arguments over “good” and “bad” English! The Original English Movement is here to rescue us:

For decades descriptive linguists and professional prescriptivists—technical writers, editors, and English teachers—have been at war. As most linguists know all too well, the prescriptivists say that descriptivism is at best a weak philosophy of usage, and at worst an invitation to grammatical chaos. However, too many prescriptivists maintain what is, to descriptivists, an illogical position: language should not change—or at least not until all the opponents of a particular change are long dead.
All that is about to end!

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Once again the NY Times has increased my vocabulary. A story about a small New Mexico town describes its current state of decay: “And these days, more animals than people can be found wandering the streets. Quail, javelinas and the occasional mountain lion strut through empty cul-de-sacs…” Quail and mountain lions I know, but javelinas were new to me. It turns out javelina (pronounced hah-v@-LEE-n@) is a synonym for collared peccary and has an interesting etymology:

Alteration of Spanish jabalina, feminine of jabalí, jabalín, wild boar, from Arabic (hinzir) jabal, mountain (swine), from jabal, mountain; see gbl in Semitic roots.

In case you’re interested, peccary is (in the words of Webster’s Third New International) “of Cariban origin; akin to Chayma paquera, Apalai pakira.”

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In the course of an explanation of site changes, Anggarrgoon presents a most interesting explanation of a bit of Bardi grammar:

“look like” or “resemble” is irrganbala, it’s a noun, it’s inalienably possessed, it’s (understandably) obligatorily plural. It is also one of very few words to take the “spouse” suffix –milj. I call it a “spouse” suffix because it marks “appropriate” pairs, e.g. iilamilj, a dog and its mate. irrganbalamilj, though, means “they look like each other”. I can’t remember an etymology, if I ever found one, but it bears a suspicious resemblance to the word for track, footprints, niinbil or niinbal (which would be what we’d expect for the singular, from ni-ganbala, which I think would have to be reconstructed as *niganbila to make the vowels turn out right.) Not to be confused with niyambal, niimbal ‘foot, footprints’. n doesn’t normally assimilate to b.

I have to say, much as I enjoy explaining the role of coincidence to people convinced two similar-sounding words must be related, even I find it hard to believe niinbal and niimbal, both meaning ‘footprints,’ are unrelated. Not saying it ain’t so, just pointing out that I’m not immune to the natural human craving to connect similar things.

A comment thread at pf [scroll down to Thursday 23 September 2004] has inspired me to deal with the vexed question of the various names for the capital of Kyrgyzstan. From 1926 to 1991 it was Frunze, which is not problematic (except for the Kyrgyz—see below), Frunze being the name of a local boy who became a Soviet general. But before that it was called Pishpek and now it is Bishkek; what is the relationship between these amusingly assonant names? Let’s go to E.M. Pospelov, Geograficheskie nazvaniya mira (my translation):

Founded in 1878 as a settlement [selenie] on the site of the former Kokand fortress Pishpek, which in 1926 was renamed Frunze after the Soviet party and military leader M.V. Frunze (1885-1925). But since there is no sound f in the Kyrgyz language and successive consonants at the start of a word are not allowed, the inhabitants pronounced the name Purunze. After Kyrgyzia achieved independence, the question of renaming the capital arose. It turned out that the etymology of the indigenous name Pishpek was unknown; the nearest Kyrgyz word was bishkek ‘whisk with which kumiss is stirred.’ To what extent this piece of household equipment [eta khozyaistvennaya prinadlezhnost’] might be linked with the name of the fortress is unclear, but in 1991 Bishkek was adopted as the new name of the capital.

I love dry wit in reference works.

I can’t resist quoting the anecdote (from jj, a friend of pf’s) that gave rise to the comments:

I left New York for Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, on Wednesday night. At the counter, the check-in agent asked me, “Where is Bishkek?”
“In Kyrgyzstan.”
“Where’s that?”
“In Central Asia, near Kazkhstan, Uzbekistan and China.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
She passed me to another agent. He checked me in, then announced, “Your bags are checked through to Frankfurt.”
“To Frankfurt? I’m not going to Frankfurt.”
“Yes, Frankfurt,” he said, looking at the FRU on the luggage tags.
“You must mean Frunze,” I said, “the old name for Bishkek. I’m going to Bishkek.”
He looked more carefully and realized his mistake. “I don’t think I’ve ever checked anyone in to Bishkek before,” he said. “I’ll have to go home and look that one up on a map.”

Addendum. In case anybody’s wondering why Kyrgyz were unable to pronounce the name of a local boy, Frunze (a variant of Frunza) isn’t a Kyrgyz name but a Romanian one—in Romanian, it means ‘leaf’ (cf French frondaison).

Update. See this post for further Central Asian linguistic fun.

A very interesting essay by Murat Nemet-Nejat, “Orhan Veli Kanik: Translating Clarity,” begins by describing Orhan Veli Kanik’s unfinished poem, “The Parade of Love,” which “was found wrapped around his toothbrush after his death,” gives a brief account of his life and early death (in 1950), and proceeds to the main point: Veli’s poetry and its place in modern Turkish literature:

Orhan Veli Kanik’s poetry strikes one with its ordinariness and the aggressiveness of this ordinariness. His poetry is a mixture of daily life, streetwise humor and an undercurrent of lyricism… He is a poet of moment-to-moment experience, being in love, being bored, being sad, joking, casual musings… On one level, Veli’s poems are an investigation of the meaning of reality. Short, neutral, full of everyday details, they constitute a sustained meditation on William Carlos Williams’ “red wheel/barrow.”

Of special interest here is Nemet-Nejat’s description of various Middle Eastern literary traditions:

Middle Eastern languages, specifically Arabic and Persian, bear a
historical burden. The written and spoken languages have for a long time been divided. Most of the literature exists in written form. One may study Arabic literature for years and still not understand spoken Arabic. If Arabs want to understand their literature, they have to learn a special vocabulary. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Persian.

This division exists in Turkish as well, but with one big difference. Turkish also has a tradition of poetry written in the vernacular. Since the beginning of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish has had two independent literary currents. One is that of court poetry. This polished literature, which continued until the end of the 19th century, was based on Persian and Arabic models and used a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic vocabulary. This language, called Ottoman, is different from modern spoken Turkish. One has to study Ottoman separately to understand a 19th century Ottoman poem.

The vernacular current still coexisted for centuries. It is a folk poetry that encompasses major poets like Yunus Emre and Pir Sultan Abdal. These poets, who lived in the 13th and 16th centuries respectively, are comprehensible without any special study…

From the middle of the 19th century on, Turkish society and Turkish poets expressed a need for reform by turning to the West, but in literature, they saw the necessity for change only in subject matter. Their language remained Ottoman. It wasn’t until the reforms of Kemal Ataturk, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, that the transformation in Turkish poetry took place; then, it occurred very quickly. The speed was due to the presence of a strong folk tradition in Turkish…

Orhan Veli’s colloquialism is radical and transcends the middle class from which he also came. It is an attack on language. His people are low-level civil servants (many poor but few utterly dispossessed) coping with daily life. Surprisingly, there are very few slang expressions in his work, that is to say, very little that belongs only to a sub-culture. His colloquialism is central, classical. In its pared-down naturalness, its selection of the most immediate cadences, it is also abstract. It’s due to the particular nature of Veli’s colloquialism, I believe, and despite the relative narrowness of his subject matter, that his poetry remains fresh, continuously contemporary. In this respect he shares the virtues of major folk poets like Yunus Emre, Pir Sultan Abdal and Karacaoglan.

He sounds a bit like a Turkish equivalent of Paul Blackburn, of whom I am very fond.
(Via wood s lot, where you will find other Orhan Veli links and poems.)

A NY Times article by Charlie LeDuff taught me a new word: “The bodies are then sent to the Frye Chapel and Mortuary in Brawley and tended by Francis Frye, an 86-year-old crosspatch.” My first assumption was that the word I’ve bolded was some arcane job description, but it turns out it means ‘a peevish, irascible person; a grouch’ (AHD). I like this word a lot, and intend to use it as a self-description when I get the chance: “Don’t mind me; I’m just an old crosspatch.”

I’m not sure what to say about this AP story, except to point out the remarkable sentence I’ve bolded, in which “they” has a singular referent:

BRANSON, Mo. – A Branson man has put a face to the anonymous references people often make to “they” by changing his name to just that: “They.” The former Andrew Wilson, a 43-year-old self-employed inventor, was granted legal permission last week by a circuit judge to change his name. It’s just They, no surname. He also has changed his driver’s license to reflect his new name.
They said he did it for humor to address the common reference to “they.” “‘They do this,’ or ‘They’re to blame for that.’ Who is this ‘they’ everyone talks about? ‘They’ accomplish such great things. Somebody had to take responsibility,” he said.
Now, his friends are getting used to his new name. “They call up and say, ‘Is They there?'”
He acknowledged the name could drive grammarians crazy.

Well, I guess his friend Craig Erickson said it best: “Not only is he making a statement about his name, but he’s messing with the entire English language.”
(Thanks to Bonnie for the tip!)

A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (the Hyakunin-isshu), translated by William N. Porter [1909]:

This is a collection of 100 specimens of Japanese Tanka poetry collected in the 13th Century C.E., with some of the poems dating back to the 7th Centry. Tanka is a 31 syllable format in the pattern 5-7-5-7-7. Most of these poems were written about the time of the Norman Conquest and display a sophistication that western literature would not achieve for a long time thereafter. These little gems are on themes such as nature, the round of the seasons, the impermanence of life, and the vicissitudes of love. There are obvious Buddhist and Shinto influences throughout. Porter’s notes put the poems into a cultural and historical context. Each poem is illustrated in this edition with an 18th century Japanese woodcut by an anonymous illustrator… In this text I have put the Japanese, English and the notes on one virtual page per poem, and supplied page numbers for the apparatus.

A fine web presentation (by John Bruno Hare) of a fine (if antiquated) translation-cum-annotation. (Via wood s lot [09.22.2004].)

A sample:

THE RETIRED EMPEROR YOZEI

YOZEI IN

  Tsukuba ne no
Mine yori otsuru
  Mina no kawa
Koi zo tsumorite
Fuchi to nari nuru.

THE Mina stream comes tumbling down
  From Mount Tsukuba’s height;
Strong as my love, it leaps into
  A pool as black as night
  With overwhelming might.

It was a frequent custom in the old days for the Emperors of Japan to retire into the church or private life, when circumstances demanded it. The Emperor Yôzei, who was only nine years of age when he came to the throne, went out of his mind, and was forced by Mototsune Fujiwara to retire; he reigned A.D. 877-884, and did not die till the year 949. The verse was addressed to the Princess Tsuridono-no-Miko. Mount Tsukuba (2,925 feet high) and the River Mina are in the Province of Hitachi.

Koi here means the dark colour of the water from its depth, but it also means his love, and is to be understood both ways. Note also mine, a mountain peak, and Mina, the name of the river.

I have just learned that titch (or tich) is a UK colloquialism meaning ‘a very small person or amount,’ with an associated adjective titchy. (It is apparently derived from one “Little Tich,” a music-hall comedian of a century ago who stood only four feet high; the “Tich” is by way of ironic contrast with Arthur Orton, the gigantic “Titchborne Claimant” in the celebrated impersonation case of the 1870s.) I am glad to know this, but the way in which I learned it infuriated me: I had occasion to look up the Russian word mákhon’kii and found it defined, in the authoritative Oxford Russian Dictionary, as “titchy.” Just that. Now, how in the hell am I supposed to know what “titchy” means? It’s not in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate; fortunately, I have the Cassell Concise on hand, and was able to find out. But I consider it the height of chauvinism and irresponsibility to use parochial definitions like that in a dictionary that is intended to serve the entire English-speaking world. (And yes, I would consider it just as bad if a US-based dictionary used local colloquialisms as definitions.)

It might seem normal these days for church services to be conducted in the language the congregation actually speaks, but it’s a big step in Greece, where the church has stuck to the New Testament Koine of two thousand years ago. According to a Kathimerini article:

Worried that worshippers cannot understand services, Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Church of Greece, has instructed churches in the Athens area to start conducting New Testament readings in Modern Greek later this month, a report said yesterday.

Until now, the New Testament has been read in the original Hellenistic “Koine” or common language, a version of Greek spoken from the late fourth century BC to fifth century AD. Christodoulos is anxious that the young especially do not understand this form of Greek and cannot follow services, according to the Eleftheros Typos daily.

In a major step for a Church that clings to its traditions, the archbishop received approval from the Holy Synod to start a pilot scheme in Athenian churches on September 19 which will see New Testament texts read in the original language before they are read again in Modern Greek.

Let’s hope it doesn’t cause riots.
(Thanks for the link, Dimitris!)

Incidentally, in researching this post I ran across a Wikipedia article on “Greeklish,” the online writing of Greek in Latin characters. Who knew it was so complicated?