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Grant Barrett sends along the following linguistic puzzler:

What language is this? Note that it is transcribed accurately from a first-quality source. There are no characters, words, or diacritics missing.

Mons. Tardini, ki sar sepisanya, sar un prelatyo ridela dal manyeros somyes epe bruskas, dal abord simpla e franka. Il pertenar al vatikana diplomatio dep 1938 e it derkar pratike dep is anyos, prime in kolabor kon Mons. Montini, doe sola dep lo namado d etun al arciveskado de Milan.

Grant is interested in the way people try to figure it out, so if you’ve got a reason for your guess, spell it out. If you know the answer for sure, please e-mail me rather than putting it in the comments; after someone has guessed correctly or I’ve decided to put an end to the torment, I’ll post your name or moniker; let me know how you wish to be credited.

Update. We have a winner! Scott Martens writes: “It’s Neo, an artificial language invented in the 30’s by Arturo Alfandari.” Well done, Scott, and you win a year’s free subscription to Languagehat!

Hold onto Your Hats!: An exhibition about the history and meaning of hats and other headwear in Canada. Everything from Protection and Practicality to Hat Lore, with a Reading List and Annotated Bibliography [Christina Bates, Annotated Bibliography on Women’s Hats and the Millinery Trade 1840-1940]. (Via plep [22nd August].)

As a pendant to yesterday’s name translation post, here’s something that leaped out at me from George Packer’s Letter from Athens [archived] in this week’s New Yorker, which begins:

Omónia, in the heart of Athens, is a working-class district of six- and eight-story concrete high-rises built in the nineteen-sixties on the bones of old garden houses, in an enormous development scheme that Athenians now regret. Even with its streets festooned with colorful Olympic flags and its traffic thinned by newly constructed sections of the Athens metro, Omónia is dense and oppressive. This is where a good many of Greece’s new immigrants live or hang out—Albanians, South Asians, and, in the back streets and cafés around the Hotel Joker, off St. Konstantin Street, Iraqis.

In the first place, the accent on “Omónia” is strange, because he doesn’t put accents on any other Greek names; later in the paragraph he refers to “Karaiskaki Stadium,” not Karaiskáki. But what I want to talk about is “St. Konstantin Street.” This is utterly bizarre. The normal way to render Greek “Odos Agiou Konstantinou” is “Agiou Konstantinou Street” (or, with nods to actual pronunciation, “Ayiou” and/or “Konstandinou”), which reproduces the Greek genitive form (‘street of St. Constantine’). It’s odd enough to want to translate the name (note that he doesn’t translate Omónia to ‘Concord’), but what’s up with “St. Konstantin”? There’s a Bulgarian resort called Sveti Konstantin that’s sometimes called St. Konstantin in English, but why on earth would you translate Greek “Agios Konstantinos” into a Bulgarian form? In English, the only way to render the name of the Byzantine saint is St. Constantine. Where are those famous New Yorker fact checkers?

Last week’s New Yorker had a review article about World War One, “The Big One” (not online), by one of my favorite essayists, Adam Gopnik. I want to highlight one sentence that shows Gopnik’s light touch with an allusion:

History does not offer lessons; its unique constellations of contingencies never repeat. But life does offer the same points, over and over again. A lesson is many-edged; a point has only one, but that one sharp.

This is a clever variation on Archilochus‘s line poll’ oid’ alopex, all’ echinos hen mega ‘The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one./ One good one’ (Lattimore’s translation), which served Isaiah Berlin (another of my favorite essayists) as the springboard for his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” I doubt many readers will have caught it, and it’s certainly not necessary to understanding the passage; Gopnik must have done it primarily to please himself. I like that.

Gôgueule: Google è walon (in Walloon). Pattavau l’ twèle! (Thanks to David for the link.)

Last year I had a brief entry ON TRANSLATING NAMES (whose comment section degenerated lamentably and had to be closed); it’s a subject that’s long interested me, and I’m glad to report that there’s a detailed discussion of it in a pair of articles (Part 1, Part 2) by Verónica Albin (a freelance medical translator and Lecturer in Spanish at the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice University) [LinkedIn]. I’ll quote a few paragraphs to whet your appetite:

Take the list of medieval European queens that another friend of mine compiled. The most popular names were Eleanor, Anne, Mary, and Elizabeth. The problem, he pointed out, was that these names changed according to what language you read them in. Thus a French queen named Aliénor first had to be distinguished from all the other French queens, past and present, who shared that name—and that was usually done by appending her provenance: Aliénor d’Aquitaine, for example. Yet in Spanish she would be known as Leonor de Aquitania, and in English as Eleanor of Aquitaine. To make matters worse, when she married Henry Plantagenet, she was then known as Eleanor of England—making it really hard for future generations to know that that Eleanor was not English, but French. If we take into consideration the fact that medieval queens, due largely to the perils of childbirth, rarely made it past their early twenties, and their husbands—who were likely named Henry, William, or Charles—remarried other Eleanors, Annes, Marys, and Elizabeths, we end up with a royal mess…

The use of articles is often thorny. We say the United States and the Netherlands in English; In Spanish, la Argentina (or, simply, Argentina) and El Uruguay (or Uruguay), but Chile never takes an article in Spanish; in Portuguese we say o Brasil and a Bolívia, but not o (or a) Portugal. Yet, for El Salvador, the article is always preserved in English as in Spanish. When Spanish-speakers travel, we keep the article for some countries, but not for others: al Japón, al Paraguay, al Senegal, but a México, a Portugal, a Chipre. There are no rules, just conventions. Ukrainians insist that their country be referred to in English as Ukraine, rather than the Ukraine, as a sign of their independence from Russia. It is worth noting that neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian language has a definite article. On the other hand, cities like la Habana, den Haag, o Rio de Janeiro, which have an article in their original names, may not have it when translated into another language…

The gender of cities can be more problematic. I remember seeing a sign in the French Riviera that read Le vieux Nice. As a Spanish-speaker who minored in Italian, I had always thought of Nice as feminine, especially since the Italian name of the city, Garibaldi’s Nizza, is clearly feminine. In French, however, it is, at first glance, masculine. It was not until I checked in Le Petit Robert des noms propres that I realized it was deceptive, as the masculine adjective vieux modifies the implied quartier, not the city. It would seem that Nice is also feminine in French. I say ‘seem’ because according to Hanse-Blampain, Nouveau dictionnaire des difficultés du français moderne, in spite of the cited entry in Robert, there is no rule when it comes to the gender of cities. Under Genre des noms propres de villes, item 2, it states that authors often contradict themselves in a single article, but that the masculine seems to take precedence. It further adds that even amongst the best French writers one may find with equal frequency Rome est bâti and Rome est bâtie; Lyon est occupé and Lyon est occupée. It also states that when one refers not to the toponym, but to its inhabitants, the masculine is preferred, especially when used with tout: Tout Genève s’intéresse au débat; le Tout-Paris.

I noticed one mistake: “Texas also has Bexar County, a phonetic adaptation of the Spanish last name ‘Béjar.'” Bexar isn’t “a phonetic adaptation,” it’s the old Spanish spelling, with x for what is now written j (the same phenomenon is preserved in the name Mexico); if it were written phonetically, it would be Bear, because that’s how Texans pronounce it.

I also take note of the following odd remark: “More than 20 years after the decree [mandating the use of pinyin for Chinese] no one calls Zhongguo by any other name than China…” Has anyone, even the Chinese government, seriously suggested we call the country Zhongguo in English? I certainly hope not.

(Via—who else?—aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

I’ve rarely been so happy to read a scientific paper as I was to read “A ‘Paradigm Shift’ in Finnish Linguistic Prehistory,” by Merlijn de Smit. It’s a takedown of one of the absurd nationalistic revampings of the “conventional paradigm” of linguistics (these people love Kuhn) that seem to be springing up everywhere these days, in this case “a hypothesis on the origins of the Finns and Finno-Ugric populations immensely popular, and raising great controversy, in Finland and Estonia.” Like all such hypotheses, this involves throwing out the traditional (“old paradigm”) family tree that is at the base of scientific historical linguistics and substituting various vague and untestable notions of relatedness and influence. I’ll let you read the details in de Smit’s lively paper, and will quote here only the following stirring paragraph, with every word of which I am in emphatic agreement:

Historical linguistics proper is not an empirical science in the sense that physics is – in which repeatable spatiotemporal occurrences are studied – but a discipline which strives to provide a picture of the past as plausible as possible, one in which the interpretations of the researcher play a vital role. This makes a strict methodology and in particular the conviction that it is historical reality we are after, not someone’s reality but reality itself, all the more necessary, since it is all too easy to slide in Von Däniken-like fantasism. Linguistic pseudoscience, invariably striving to paint a picture as glorious as possible of the past of whatever nation you belong to, has always existed, and always will – but during the last ten years in Finland and Estonia, it seems to have made a sustained push to the mainstream. One of the roots of the “new” paradigm in Finland and Estonia is epistemological relativism, the view of language families, and particularly the distinction between genetic transmission of languages and language contact, as epistemic constructs rather than existing in historical reality. And indeed, if “Finno-Ugric” is just a “theoretical construct” – why not talk about “Euro-languages” instead? Why indeed should one distinguish between recent loanwords from Swedish and shared etymological material with Hungarian if the game is no longer about testing hypotheses about linguistic prehistory, but about building up an appropriate national, historical identity in the age of the European Union? Thus, the methodology of historical linguistics has been abused to support an ahistorical, if not positively antihistorical, model of a Great and Glorious Past.

(Via wood s lot.)

I’m reading a powerful, important book that I can’t with a clear conscience recommend. The book is War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, a journalist who’s been covering war zones since El Salvador in 1982 and has gotten fed up, and I have a hard time recommending it because reading it will give you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach and cause you to think even more poorly of humanity than you may already. You can read excerpts here and here and decide whether you’re interested; I’ll just present a few things of LH interest.

First is a striking collocation (from p. 77), the first time I’ve seen the alternate plurals of medium used in the same sentence, and nicely differentiated: “The destruction of culture sees the state or the group prosecuting the war take control of the two most important mediums that transmit information to the nation—the media and the schools.” Since media has become specialized as “a collective term to refer not to the forms of communication themselves so much as the communities and institutions behind them” (AHD), the plural of the more general sense has to be mediums.

Here’s a long quotation (pp. 33-34) about the artificial distinctions created between the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian “languages”:

Spoken Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are of Slavic origin and have minor differences in syntax, pronunciation, and slang. The Croats and Bosnian Muslims use the Roman alphabet. The Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet. Otherwise the tongue they all speak is nearly the same.

Since there was, in essence, one language, the Serbs, Muslims and Croats each began to distort their own tongue to accommodate the myth of separateness. The Bosnian Muslims introduced Arabic words and Koranic expressions into the language. The Muslims during the war adopted words like shahid, or martyr, from Arabic, dropping the Serbian word junak. They began using Arabic expressions, like inshallah (God willing), marhaba (hello) and salam alekhum (peace be upon you).

Just as energetically the Croats swung the other way, dusting off words from the fifteenth century. The Croatian president at the time, Franjo Tudjman, took delight in inventing new terms. Croatian parliamentarians proposed passing a law that would levy fines and prison terms for those who use “words of foreign origin.”

In Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, waiters and shop clerks would turn up their noses at patrons who used old “Serbian” phrases. The Education Ministry in Croatia told teachers to mark “non-Croatian” words on student papers as incorrect. The stampede to establish a “pure” Croatian language, led by a host of amateurs and politicians, resulted in chaos and rather bizarre linguistic twists.

There are two words in Serbo-Croatian, for example, for “one thousand.” One of the words, tisuca, was not used by the Communist government that ruled the old Yugoslavia, which preferred hiljada, paradoxically, an archaic Croatian word. Hiljada, although more authentically Croatian, was discarded by Croatian nationalists; tisuca, perhaps because it was banned by the Communists, was in fashion…

The campaign soon included efforts to eradicate words borrowed from English, German, and French. President Tudjman dreamed up new tennis terms to replace English ones. International judges, forced to use the president’s strange sports vocabulary at tennis tournaments, stumbled over the unfamiliar words, like the unwieldy word pripetavanje, difficult even for Croatians, which had to be used instead of “tiebreaker.”

It reached a point of such confusion that Tudjman began to slip up. When he greeted President Clinton in Zagreb he used the Serbian version of the word happy, srecan, rather than sretan, deemed to be Croatian. The gaffe, broadcast live, was quickly edited out of later news reports on the state-controlled television.

(The c‘s in tisuca and srecan should have acute accents [ć]; it’s a palatalized affricate, between the t of tune and the ch of cheap.)

Finally, a couple of literary quotes well worth repeating here. First (pp. 90-91), Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant“:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

And finally (p. 91), from Proust:

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place.

(The original, from “Sur la lecture,” his preface to a translation of Ruskin: “Tant que la lecture est pour nous l’initiatrice dont les clefs magiques nous ouvrent au fond de nous-mêmes la porte des demeures où nous n’aurions pas su pénétrer, son rôle dans notre vie est salutaire. Il devient dangereux au contraire quand, au lieu de nous éveiller à la vie personnelle de l’esprit, la lecture tend à se substituer à elle…”)

Geoff Pullum at Language Log has propounded an interesting conundrum, which I will repeat here both to propose my own (probably simplistic) solution and to remedy the deplorably renewed lack of comment function at the aforementioned group weblog. Geoff quotes the following sentence from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (in context here):

“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or if you’d like it put more simply— ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’ “

Geoff’s question is whether the Dutchess’s simplified/expanded sentence is grammatical; he says “After four or five careful attempts to make a judgment on this, I find I still can’t decide.”

I approach it as I used to approach math problems in my long-ago days as a math major, namely by stripping away extraneous material. The phrase “or might have been” is grammatically extraneous; the two occurrences of “not otherwise than” are logically extraneous, since “Be not otherwise than what you are” is logically equivalent to “Be what you are.” We are left with “Never imagine yourself to be what it might appear to others that what you were was what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” Now, “Never imagine yourself to be…” requires a nominal construction to follow it; that is to say, in order for the sentence to be grammatical “what it might appear to others that what you were was what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise” would have to be grammatically equivalent to “what you are not” or the like. It seems reasonably clear to me that this is not the case, or (if you’d like it put more simply) that the grammatical knot Mr. Carroll has constructed cannot be untangled without the use of a Gordian sword. But I am not so confident of this that I am not amenable to being corrected by readers whose analytic skills are not inferior to my own.

(Readers with a taste for inextricable tangles may wish to peruse my earlier entry BLACK HOLES OF SELF-CANCELLATION.)

In the course of a (distressing) NY Times article (by Greg Winter) about the increasing numbers of American students acting like jackasses abroad, the following puzzling locution occurs [NB: grammar fixed thanks to a comment by elck]:

“That will eliminate the student who goes to Australia and just hangs out on the beach and drinks beer,” said David Macey, director of off-campus study at Middlebury. “It will probably clean up virtually all hats.“

I have no idea what the sentence I’ve bolded means; can anyone inform me? For obvious reasons, I’m particularly interested in this usage. (Thanks to Bonnie for the link.)

Update. I think MollKW, in the comments, has cleaned up this hat:

The initial “t” of “that” was dropped as a typo (a common enough one, as Googling for “all hat” shows) and they ran a spelling/grammar check without being too careful about proofreading. Experiment shows that the grammar checker in Microsoft Word by default corrects “This will clean up virtually all hat” to “… virtually all hats”.

QED, and bravo!