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Today’s wood s lot is entirely devoted to William Carlos Williams, who thoroughly deserves the tribute; I urge you to visit and check out the many links. Here I will merely quote the last of his nuggets, a parody by that funniest of poets, Kenneth Koch, of one of everybody’s favorite WCW poems:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

Kenneth Koch

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

After a long and stressful day at work yesterday I finally took the 9:02 out of Grand Central, settled into my preferred seat (next to the mid-car open area, where I like to stand or pace when I tire of sitting), and pulled out the Aleksandr Grin story I was reading (thanks, Tatyana!). A young brunette in a black dress settled in across the aisle, leaned against the window and extended herself over both seats, pulled out her cell phone and address book, and started making calls. When I realized she was not speaking English, I automatically began trying to identify the language. A few Slavic-sounding words or syllables—da, ale, chem—made me think it might be something West Slavic, but the closer I listened the more at sea I was. Suddenly I realized I was hearing glottalized consonants, and my whole frame of reference shifted: surely it couldn’t be… Georgian? But it was; as soon as I listened with that in mind, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t known it at once. If I’d been in Brighton Beach, I probably would have, but what are the odds of hearing Georgian on the Hudson Line train to Beacon?

The funny thing was that the more I listened, the more of my long-forgotten Georgian began surfacing. Modi, that means ‘come,’ doesn’t it? And vitsi is ‘I know,’ ara is ‘no’ (I’ll never forget the first time I heard a Georgian say ar vitsi [AHR-wits(i)] and thought “He just said ‘I don’t know’!”—ah, the joy of test-driving a language you’ve been learning), akhali is ‘new’… I had hoped to exchange a few words with her, but I never got the chance; she talked nonstop until she got off at Ossining. I wonder how much of it would have come back if I’d been able to listen to her for a few hours? Memory is a strange business.

Greg Lindahl’s home page links (under “Publishing”) to a series of Renaissance books he’s hosting, including a couple of dictionaries, Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (and its associated proverbs) and Florio’s Italian/English Dictionary, both from 1611; there are also books on fencing, dancing, music, and needlework, among others. In case you were wondering, Lindahl’s motivation has to do with the Society for Creative Anachronism, whose adherents go to a great deal of trouble to achieve authenticity. (Via misteraitch‘s MetaFilter post.)

This website describes “Days of the Week in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese”:

There’s something friendly and familiar about the names of the days of the week in English and other Western European languages. Each has its quirks (the Romance languages use Roman gods, the Germanic languages use Germanic gods, Spanish and Italian use ‘Sabbath’ instead of ‘Saturday’) but with a bit of background they fall into an interesting but reassuring pattern.

Not so Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese (CJV), which seem completely alien. Chinese and Vietnamese simply count the days of the week; Japanese uses a strange collection of elemental names reminiscent of primitive religion. Given that Chinese and Vietnamese can’t even agree which day to count from, the three languages seem to have little to do with each other, let alone the languages of Europe.

But this appearance is deceptive. A little delving reveals a much more complex picture that is every bit as fascinating as the languages of the West. Ironically, Japanese and Vietnamese turn out to be more faithful to traditional Western concepts of the week than modern English is.

It also has a comprehensive link section, which includes material on the Western systems. (Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

Reading the NY Times Magazine story “The Lessons of Classroom 506” by Lisa Belkin, I was taken aback by this: “As a kindergartner, Valente was the only disabled child in her grade…” (my emphasis). It would never have occurred to me to say anything but “kindergartener,” but I looked it up in Webster’s Collegiate and sure enough, the one preserving German morphology is the preferred spelling. So I present this as a public service for those in my former condition of ignorance, and while I’m at it I’ll mention that someone who runs a restaurant is a restaurateur, something that always seems to flummox people. (He’s a “restorator” because he runs a place that does the restoring.)

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Alan DeNiro’s Taverner’s Koans, “a one-room schoolhouse of experimental poetics,” has a Gallery of Underrated Poets that’s well worth exploring (as I could tell instantly from the fact that it included Lorine Niedecker). I’m not sure John Clare and Stephen Crane can be considered underrated, but I’m not going to quibble, since I’ve already discovered the wonderful Melvin Tolson and I’ve barely begun digging. Here’s a snippet from Tolson’s The Harlem Gallery (1965):

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Jonathan Mayhew at Bemsha Swing presents fourteen ways of looking at a Basho haiku and concludes that “the best version is probably the sum total or average of all these”; Mark Liberman at Language Log adds Bill Poser’s analysis of the original Japanese; Hugh Bygott at moments… discusses the syntax of the poem (is it a PAN string?) and suggests that it works as a continuation of a Tu Fu poem; Paul MacNeil mentions the historical context. If you prefer German versions, there are seven of them here. Much ado about seventeen syllables, and a lot of fun!

A nice site showcasing Hungarian literature in English translation, with pages on authors and their works; I haven’t had time to delve very far into it, but I’m intrigued by Orsolya Karafiáth, “a vamp and a poet of great formal talent in one person,” who “writes post-postmodern poems with romantic, sometimes sentimental and melodramatic overtones.” Oh, and there’s an “Online Dictionary” search box on the upper right that gives quite impressive results. (Via wood s lot; therein is also found a link to The Hungarian Quarterly, “Central Europe’s best English-language journal.”)

The great linguist Chao Yuen-Ren once wrote an essay in Chinese using only words which (in Mandarin) would be transliterated as shih (using Wade-Giles; shi in pinyin). You can see the text in characters and two transliterations, read the translation (“A poet by the name of Shih Shih living in a stone den was fond of lions…”), and hear both Mandarin and Cantonese readings here (in Cantonese, of course, the words do not all have the same consonants and vowels). It’s really quite a tour de force. (Thanks for the link go to P. Kerim Friedman, who got it from Muninn.)

Addendum. See also Suzanne McCarthy’s discussion of Chao’s thoughts on reading Chinese, with copious quotes.

This article by Robert A. Leonard is as good a summary of how Black English should be viewed as any I’ve seen:

Any professional linguist will tell you that, as a language system of communication, black English and standard English are equal, in the same way that French and Greek and Chinese and English are all equal. They do things differently, but there is no factual way to say one is better than the other…

But if black English is not deficient, why do so many people believe it is? Because black Americans have a history of powerlessness. And every society I know worldwide looks down on the speech of the powerless. We learn this attitude unconsciously when we learn the million and one rules and beliefs of our society. Most of what we know we learn without being explicitly taught — by observation and deduction.

And Leonard goes on to describe this wonderful experiment:

Texas researcher Frederick Williams asked white student teachers to watch videotapes and rate black, Mexican-American and white Anglo children on whether their English was standard and how fluently they spoke. The white children scored highest. But the videotapes were specially done. Even though the visuals showed different children, there was only one voice track: standard English. Stereotypes were stronger than reality.

That should be taught to everyone as early as possible in the educational process; it might help avoid a lot of ignorant prejudice.

Many thanks to Ted Harlan for the link!

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