languagehat.com

According to the NY Times Fashion & Style section. Just thought you’d want to know. Now stop complaining that I don’t post enough about hats. (And don’t miss the slide show linked in the right column.) Thanks to commenter Going Dotty in Kansas for the link!

Addendum. At the top of today’s wood s lot is a glorious William Heick [Wikipedia] photograph of a crowd of men wearing hats in 1951; that’s the culture I was born into, and I see no reason not to try to keep it going.

The OEDILF project of defining all English words by means of limericks (see my earlier entry) has moved to its own domain, oedilf.com, as announced by its creator, Chris J. Strolin, in a comment on this thread; Strolin adds:

Any and all lovers of the English language are welcomed to check out our new site particularly if your name is choatime, Clankus Maximus, Don Levey, Elizabeth, evinrude, fiercecupcake, Giles, Hazelsinger, Hilary Ann, indigofaerie, JB Segal, Karner Blue, LadyBeth, LizH, markmywords48, mechaieh, murlach, musik, Peter Sheil, q, Robot Johnny, slabgorb, or Valrus. All these individuals either posted limericks or otherwise expressed interest in our project while we were on the Wordcraft site and we’ve since lost contact with them. Wordcraft PMs went out with no luck. Posting limericks over there, technically, gave us the OK to use them on oedilf.com but I’d really like to do this up right and get them register.

So sharpen your Nantucket quills and join in the fun.

Lowlands-L is a “discussion list for people who share an interest in the languages & cultures of the Lowlands”:

“Lowlands languages” are those Germanic languages that developed in the “Lowlands”: the low-lying areas adjacent to the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. These are primarily Dutch, Zeelandic (Zeeuws, West Flemish), Frisian, Limburgish and Low Saxon (Low German). Also included are those languages that descended from autochtonous Lowlands languages and are used elsewhere; for example, Afrikaans, Lowlands-based emigrant languages, pidgins and creoles, and also English and Scots. “Lowlands cultures” are those cultures that utilize Lowlands languages or are clearly derived from such cultures.

• Lowlands-L is dedicated to discussion, exchange and dissemination of information as well as to networking among persons who have certain interests in common;

• Lowlands-L is a moderated discussion group, not a ‘chat room’;

• Lowlands-L does not focus on one specific language or culture but on a group of closely related linguistic and cultural varieties (which does not include German, North Germanic and Celtic);

• Persons who study one or more of these language varieties are likely to benefit from supplementary information and resources shared on Lowlands-L. However, Lowlands-L does not offer actual language courses, nor is it intended to serve as a substitute for regular, structured language teaching…

Via aldiboronti on Wordorigins.

John Koontz, a linguist at the University of Colorado, has a website full of information about Siouan and Other Native American Languages, with a particularly interesting page about etymologies (including Kemosabe and Tonto, an entry that manages to cite both Aeschylus and the publication glitches of the Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary). The beginning of the Nebraska entry will give you an idea of the level of detail:

The state is named for the Platte River, which is called in Omaha-Ponca NiNbdhaska (=khe) ‘(the) Platte River’; literally ‘(the) Flatwater’, or in Ioway-Otoe N^iNbraske (or, more recently, -brahke or –brat^ke) [all with the same meaning].

My suspicion is that the actual source was Ioway-Otoe. This comes from two factors. First, during much of the later 1700s and 1800s, the Otoe were situated at the mouth of the Platte, in a position to present their own name for the stream to visitors. Second, Nebraska looks to me like a collapsed syllable spelling Ne-bras-ka, probably intended to represent what I would write as in the Lewis & Clark Phonetic Alphabet (LCPA) as Nee-BROSS-kay. That is, I suspect “ka” was intended to represent phonetic (NetSiouan) /ke/, not /ka/ (LCPA kay, not kah), and that would have to be the Ioway-Otoe version. My feeling is that real phonetic /ka/ would have been written “kar,” cf. “Mahar” (this really is a Lewis & Clark spelling) for UmaNhaN ‘Omaha’ or “kah.” The Dhegiha languages retain ska from *ska (LCPA skah) in final position while Ioway-Otoe converts it to ske (LCPA sk ay).

Once the word was written as a lump “Nebraska” and subjected to pronunciation by English speakers who hadn’t heard the original, the final syllable was changed to phonetic (NetSiouan) /ka/ (LCPA kah), or, actually, /k/ (LCPA kuh). In the same way the initial “ne” acquired a lax (short) e (LCPA neh) or schwa (LCPA nuh) pronunciation instead of i (LCPA ee) (long e in English terms) pronunciation, and the medial a in -bras- was fronted to the low front a of American cat (instead of the low central a of American father).

Of course, early popular transcriptions are incredibly imprecise, and I don’t have any information on the early history of the word in English. Maybe final “ka” did represent phonetic /ka/ (LCPA kah), in which case, it would have to be a Dhegiha form something like the Omaha-Ponca version that was the source. In fact, with this word any of the Dhegiha languages would produce pretty much the same effect on English ears. While Omaha-Ponca would seem the most likely suspect because the Omaha and Ponca were conveniently nearby, the Kansa and Osage were also originally both below the Platte along the Missouri and their languages are also plausible sources for the names of major tributaries upstream…

Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.

I was a Pogo fan as a child and remain one to this day; as far as I’m concerned, Walt Kelly was one of the great American humorists (and unlike most such, he did not lose his sense of humor when politics intruded). One of the things I’ve always loved is his gift for nonsense verse, and since Songdog has sent me a couple such from a book he borrowed from the library (I Go Pogo, 1952), I thought I’d share them with you. First, the palindromic:

Smile, wavering wings
Above rains pour,
While hopefully sings
Love of shorn shore
Shore shorn of love
Sings hopefully while
Pour rains above,
Wings wavering, smile.

Secondly, the mystical, à la Churchy LaFemme:

How pierceful grows the hazy yon!
How myrtle petaled thou!
For spring hath sprung the cyclotron,
How high browse thou, brown cow?

Addendum. An AskMeFi thread provides a couple of excellent jingles for Chooly Wummys (“They’re gristle to your mill!”), with pistol shots added by Albert Alligator.

I’ve been meaning for some time to do an entry about Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer who turned his back on a successful career writing in English in order to write exclusively in his native Gikuyu (interview; introduction and excerpts from his book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986). Now I discover, via a post by Hurree at Kitabkhana, that less than two weeks after returning to Kenya following more than two decades in exile, he and his wife were brutally attacked in their own home by a gang of gunmen. It’s not clear whether the attack had anything to do with his writing, but I can’t help thinking that his call for free debate in Africa did not meet with universal approval.

Czeslaw Milosz, one of the few unquestioned giants of world poetry remaining from the last century, died today at his home in Krakow. I don’t have anything useful to say about him except that he speaks to me directly and is one of those rare poets who seem undiminished by translation (I say “seem” because I can’t read him in Polish), so I’ll just quote a couple of poems from New and Collected Poems.

GOOD NIGHT
No duties. I don’t have to be profound.
I don’t have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
I just wander. I say: “You were running,
That’s fine. It was the thing to do.”
And now the music of the worlds transforms me.
My planet enters a different house.
Trees and lawns become more distinct.
Philosophies one after another go out.
Everything is lighter yet not less odd.
Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.
We talk a little of district fairs,
Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,
Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.
That’s better than examining one’s private dreams.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It’s here, invisible.
Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buona notte. Ciao. Farewell.
(from Provinces, 1991)

And a prose poem from This (2000):

In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night, and experienced a feeling of happiness so intense and perfect that in all my life I had only felt its premonition. And there was no reason for it. It didn’t obliterate consciousness; the past which I carried was there, together with my grief. And it was suddenly included, was a necessary part of the whole. As if a voice were repeating: “You can stop worrying now; everything happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you, and you are not required anymore to think of what happened long ago.” The peace I felt was a closing of accounts and was connected with the thought of death. The happiness on this side was like an announcement of the other side. I realized that this was an undeserved gift and I could not grasp by what grace it was bestowed on me.

Thanks to Bonnie, who gave me the news, for sharing my love of Milosz.

Addendum. The NY Times has published a serviceable obituary by Raymoond H. Anderson, but it seems not to have been updated in a while; the last paragraph says “Ecco Press gathered a half-century of his work in ‘The Collected Poems 1931-1987.’ In it is a 1986 poem called ‘And Yet the Books,’…” but Ecco’s New and Collected Poems has been out for three years now (and yes, the poem Anderson quotes is still in it).

An excellent List of European cities with alternative names [Margaret of Transblawg has brought it to my attention that it’s also a Wikipedia entry, which is probably the original (archived 2004 version)]:

Most cities in Europe have alternative names in different languages. Some cities have also undergone name changes for political or other reasons. This article attempts to give all known alternative names for all major European cities. It also includes some smaller towns that are important because of their location or history.

For the purposes of this article, Europe includes Turkey, Cyprus and all the republics of the former Soviet Union. A number of important Mediterranean Basin cities are also included.

I absolutely love such lists, and this one seems thorough and accurate. Some interesting entries:

[Read more…]

God of the Machine has a fine language rant (“‘The people’ cannot take English back, never having surrendered it in the first place”); furthermore, the first comment in the thread (by that loquacious fellow Anon) is a fervent recommendation for one of my own favorite language books:

You remind me of Jim Quinn’s American Tongue and Cheek. I’ve never seen a better case made for American English as a living breathing thing and not the dead set of rules pushed by language mavens like Safire and Edwin Newman (Remember him?). Quinn wrote with just the light touch such an argument requires. Sad to see the book is out of print, while Safire keeps rolling along.

(Thanks, Tatyana!)

The Golden Age Spanish Sonnets site has a collection of sonnets with English translations and explanations of allusions:

At this point I have 109 sonnets with translations posted. I have also included some links to other web sites… Bibliographies for each poet are now available… A general index of mythological links, as well as links to specific mythological allusions in the sonnets, has also been posted… Visitors to this site are invited to submit their own translations and/or commentary.

(Via Plep.)