languagehat.com

Continuing my fascination with Aussie slang, I present my latest find (courtesy of Mark Liberman at Language Log): furphy.

furphy n. (pl. furphies) 1 a false report or rumour. 2 an absurd story. • adj. (furphier, furphiest) absurdly false, unbelievable: that’s the furphiest bit of news I ever heard.
This Ozword comes from the name of [John] Furphy, a blacksmith and general engineer, who went to Shepparton from Kyneton in 1871 and set up a foundry. John Furphy designed a galvanised iron water-cart on wheels and his firm, J. Furphy & Sons, manufactured them. Each cart had the name FURPHY written large on the body. So successful were these carts that during World War 1 the Department of the Army bought many Furphy carts to supply water to camps in Australia and especially to camps in Palestine, and Egypt.

And how did John Furphy’s name wind up meaning what it does? Go read the essay! (Which, by the way, is from Ozwords, an online periodical I should obviously keep an eye on.)

The Jónas Hallgrímsson: Selected Poetry and Prose website is one of the best of its kind I’ve seen. It has the original side by side with an English translation (which tries to match the formal qualities of the original, and I would have preferred a literal version as well), followed by commentary, sometimes quite copious. The Introduction says:

This Web site is intended to make available, through interactive technology, a wide range of materials that will enable interested persons to familiarize themselves with the work of the Icelandic poet and natural scientist Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807-1845) and to have at their fingertips resources contributing to an understanding and appreciation of that work. Jónas is generally acknowledged to be the most important and influential Icelandic poet of modern times. In addition he has a secure place in the annals of Icelandic science and of his country’s cultural and political history.

I want to see sites like this for every major poet in every language!

Here’s a short poem with its commentary (and a link to a recording):

Dalabóndinn í óþurrknum
Hví svo þrúðgu þú
þokuhlassi
súldanorn
um sveitir ekur?
Þér man eg offra
til árbóta
kú og konu
og kristindómi.

The Farmer in Wet Weather
Goddess of drizzle,
driving your big
cartloads of mist
across my fields!
Send me some sun
and I’ll sacrifice
my cow — my wife —
my Christianity!

Date:
1826-8.

Form:
One fornyrðislag strophe.

Manuscript:
KG 31 b I , where it has the title “Dalabóndinn í óþurrknum” (facsimile KJH 4; image 197K).

First published:
1847 (A15; image 109K).

Sound recording:
Anton Helgi Jónsson reads “Dalabóndinn í óþurrknum.” [0:26; 280K]

Commentary: Not surprisingly, the weather has always been a popular subject for verse in Iceland. The present poem is Jónas’s earliest surviving “weather song” (veðurvísa). It suggests very amusingly — and poignantly — the desperation of Icelandic farmers, in the days before mechanized agriculture, when hay needed to keep their livestock alive over the winter lay rotting in the fields and there was no sunshine to dry it. The image of the “goddess of drizzle” (suldanorn) scattering mist across the fields contains a witty allusion to Icelandic agricultural practice. The prayer-format of the poem, and the ironic progression in its last two lines, may owe something to an Icelandic joke about a farmer who prayed to God about his wife, his mistress, and his horse: “Dear Lord, you can take Dæsa. But let Valka live. And if you kill Rauðka, you and me are through” (5Íþs 364).

Since the poem is an imaginative projection, a sort of miniature dramatic monologue, there seems little point in making guesses about when and where it was written.

(Via plep [29th July].)

I was recently given (by pf and a fellow grammar gremlin) a copy of Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage, by Theodore M. Bernstein (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1971). I must admit when I saw the word “usage” my Pavlovian response was to shudder, but when I looked more closely I realized that far from promoting absurd shibboleths, the surprising Mr. Bernstein was debunking them, an activity always dear to my heart. A sample entry:

INSANE ASYLUM.

Says Bierce: “Obviously an asylum cannot be unsound in mind. Say asylum for the insane.” Shall we, then, also banish foreign correspondent, madhouse (dating to 1687), dramatic critic, juvenile court, criminal lawyer, psychiatric clinic and civil engineer? To pose the question is to expose the ridiculousness of the objection. Adjectives are not always confined to a single narrow meaning. Many of them have coordinate meanings, such as characterized by, used by, designed for, derived from. It is one of the conveniences of English, and especially American English, that thoughts can be compressed into a couple of words instead of requiring elaborate phrases; thus, insane asylum rather than asylum for the insane. Of course, insane asylum is avoided these days for a quite different reason: It is too harsh, it does not meet the euphemistic requirement of the day. And so we are more likely to say mental hospital or home for the mentally disturbed.

So thanks, you goofy gremlins!

At first glance, a web page on Kazakh names might seem overspecialized for most people, but it has links to quite a few useful-looking name sites, some specialized (Russian, medieval Russian, medieval Mongol) and others general. (Thanks to frequent commenter zizka for inspiring the search that led to the site.)

Frequent commenter Tatyana has written a brilliant summary of the history of the Russian musical movement known as KSP in Russian, which she calls “the bard scene.” The most familiar name to Americans is probably that of Bulat Okudjava, but there are many more, and the scene comes from various sources, notably the prison camps:

It started in the late 50’s, after survivors from Northern and Siberian camps started to trickle back to populated parts of the country. Very few of them could write like Solzhenitsyn or Varlaam Shalamov, but many more could sing prison songs. The so-called blatnye pesni were written by career criminals, and songs based on the experience of the camps were written by political prisoners, but in form resembled the former (sometimes even using the same melody).

Society’s attitudes towards prisoners changed during the “Thaw” years of the 1960’s. Political “ZK” (inmates), who were previously considered “the enemies of the People,” became human again. Suddenly Pushkin’s line about “mercy to the fallen” was quoted in Pravda; public debates about “physicists vs. lyricists” filled the arenas with audiences. And the first shy voices of social and political dissent started to appear semi-publicly…

She ends with a splendid account of her own visit to a slet, or festival, of the Bard Club of the East Coast; read and enjoy. (Via The Russian Dilettante.)

Via wood s lot, Garth Kemerling’s Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names:

This is a concise guide to technical terms and personal names often encountered in the study of philosophy. What you will find here naturally reflects my own philosophical interests and convictions, but everything is meant to be clear, accurate, and fair, a reliable source of information on Western philosophy for a broad audience… Although the entries are often brief, many include links to electronic texts and to more detailed discussions on this site or in other on-line resources…

A sample entry, for aporia:

[Read more…]

According to a Zachariah Wells column in maisonneuve, Canada is suffering from a lack of poetry translated from foreign tongues into English.

As renowned poet and translator A. F. Moritz put it to me, “If you don’t bring over the most central speech of a people, its poetry, you’ve denied its essential humanness access to the pith of the culture into which you are supposedly welcoming it. You’ve denied the most important contribution it can make to the basic ethos of its new home and the native place of its future children. And you’ve blocked the greatest contribution it can make to the ongoing health and intelligence and development of Canada and of English and French.” Moritz notes that “this nation is a-crawl with literarily talented and ambitious people who have native access to literally hundreds of languages.” Why, then, is this bonanza of talent not translating into more activity?…

Understandably, Friesen finds it a frustrating state of affairs: “There is good work in Canada, and there is good work outside of Canada. They need to meet each other, and our readers have to be educated into being less insular. I don’t know how to do that, except to get the funding and tour foreign poets here with their translated books. The books, by themselves, tend to get lost. I mean, it’s amazing we don’t do this. We need to learn about other cultures, other literatures, more directly than through social study courses in school. We need to read their work and meet them, write articles about them, etc. And they need to read ours.” He adds that “exchanges with Nordic countries seem natural” in Canada because of linguistic roots common to both English and Scandinavian languages…

Kitty Lewis of Brick Books recently told Toronto’s Eye Weekly that Brick would not have been able to publish Immigrant Blues had it not come to them already translated by Simic’s ex-wife, adding, “We just don’t have the resources” to pay translators. For his part, Simic says in the same article, “It’s a pity we are not open to the world.” More than that, it’s a shame.

(Via wood s lot.)

I’ve been slowly working my way through The Russian Language Today, by Larissa Ryazanova-Clarke and Terence Wade—an excellent and detailed discussion of the changes in Russian since 1917—and have gotten to the section on “The restoration of pre-Soviet lexis in the cultural sphere,” which contains this analysis of the histories and current situations of the terms litsei (ultimately from Latin lyceum and Greek lykeion, the name of Aristotle’s school) and gimnaziya (ultimately from Latin gymnasium and Greek gymnasion, a place for exercising):

The renaming of educational establishments has reached mammoth proportions. Here, as in many other spheres of contemporary Russian life, a change in nomenclature symbolises rejection of the past and a new beginning in social life. Schools now often reject the traditional term shkola ‘school’, a word which for some is associated with the Soviet educational system. The words gimnaziya and litsei, from pre-Revolutionary schooling, are perceived as more prestigious and attracting more interest in the educational establishments in question. As critics observe, however, a change of words on a school sign does not necessarily reflect modifications in content or educational method…

The word gimnaziya is of Greek origin, but came into Russian through German and Polish. In the nineteenth century gimnaziya meant ‘high school’. The name was not confined to one particular type of school, thus the klassicheskaya gimnaziya ‘classical high school’ concentrated on classical languages and humanities, while the real’naya gimnaziya ‘real (modern) high school’ placed more emphasis on natural sciences and vocational disciplines.

The word litsei, althouth it derives directly from French lycée, also originated in Greek. In Russian, the word referred to ‘a secondary or tertiary educational establishment for privileged boys’. The word is closely associated for Russian speakers with the life of A.S. Pushkin, who received his education in the most famous Lycée of all in Tsarskoe Selo. The word litsei has become a symbol of liberal thought, enlightenment and the bonds of friendship.

Since the differential semantic properties of these words are not clearly defined in modern Russian, they are of considerable interest as words which have no referent, i.e. no class of objects which they and they alone refer to. Even so, these words have strong connotations, since they are symptomatic of a return to traditional, humanistic values in education and the prestige of new (albeit restored) names…

(I’ve replaced the book’s Cyrillic with transliteration for the benefit of non-Russian-speaking readers.) The phrase “words which have no referent” is overstated, but the situation of words which used to have distinct meanings and now are more or less interchangeable is an interesting one.

A new (since June) linguistics blog, by Neal Whitman: Literal-minded. He has an interesting series of posts about his son’s early difficulties with the l sound. (He also guest-posts at The Volokh Conspiracy.) Via Tenser, said the Tensor.

The Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Libraries maintains a website for their exhibition on Children’s Books of the Early Soviet Era:

The present exhibition in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Libraries draws on an important collection of more than 350 Soviet children’s books published in the 1920s and 30s and which are remarkable for their original aesthetic quality, linguistic variety and thematic diversity. Dynamic constructivist typography utilized the expressive quality of the stocky, ‘architectural’ azbuka, the Russian alphabet. Diagonal layouts introduced a simultaneous representation of contents and often used photomontage as a succinct expression of the narrative text. The emblematic use of red and black as dominant colours linked the children’s material closely to the publishing output at large. Since more than 100 nationalities live within the fifteen former republics of the USSR, the variety of languages in which children’s books were published is nothing short of astonishing. While Russian was the official language of the Union, children’s books published in Ukrainian, Uzbek, Tartar, Kazakh, Azerbaidzhani, Armenian, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, lakutian, Nanaian and other languages are well represented in the McGill collection.

[Read more…]