languagehat.com

The word saunter, like many others, can’t be traced back very far (AHD: Probably from Middle English santren, to muse), but of course that doesn’t stop people from trying, and this word has a particularly enjoyable pseudo-etymology, discussed in the following typically piquant passage from one of the stories in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Martians (a book I recommend to anyone who likes thoughtful, human-oriented science fiction):

Long walks around Odessa at the end of the day. Aimless, without destination, except perhaps for an evening rendezvous with Maya, down on the corniche. Sauntering through the streets and alleyways. Sax liked Thoreau’s explanation for the word saunter: from à la Saint[e] Terre, describing pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. There goes a Saint[e] Terrer, a saunterer, a Holy Lander. But it was a false etymology, apparently spread from a book called Country Words, by S. and E. Ray, 1691. Although since the origins of the word were obscure, it might in fact be the true story.

Sax would have liked to be sure about that, one way or the other. It made the word itself a problem to mull over. But as he sauntered Odessa thinking about it, he did not see how the matter could be investigated any further, the etymologists having been thorough. The past was resistant to research.

The second paragraph expresses quite well one of the reasons I got out of historical linguistics. The past is, indeed, resistant to research. After a century or two of philological hypotheses, there’s not much further you can go into the history of most words, and picking over the remaining obscurities is not as rewarding as it might be.

[Read more…]

In response to a commenter’s query on this thread, I googled my way to this page of Japanese learning resources (part of the Zozenawayone site); there are all sorts of goodies there, but the one that first struck me was this:

Into this void comes the Japanese-English Dictionary Server, an online database with kanji, kana, slang, names, technical jargon, and about eighty different ways to show the results. (This is important if your computer isn’t set up to display Japanese.) The dictionary even includes idiomatic phrases, though they’re run together with no spaces between the words (so hotoke no kao mo sando, “to try the patience of a saint,” appears as “hotokenokaomosando”). And to gild the lily, the site loads quickly and is rarely down.

And I’m glad the Zozenawayone author shares my fondness for the Living Language Common Usage Dictionary, which is indeed “surprisingly in-depth for a small dictionary.”

Hayden Carruth, as I’ve said before (hi, Moira!), is one of my favorite American poets; tonight I was reading my wife a poem of his called “Vermont” (1975, available in Collected Longer Poems) and came across these lines (towards the end), which I thought I’d share with y’all:

What is the difference, now at last, between
the contemporary and the archaic? I
say “drawed” for “drew” and “deef” for “deaf” and still
use “shall” and “shan’t” in ordinary conversation
like any good Vermonter, and sometimes too
I write “thou” for “you.” So am I therefore
dead? That will come soon enough. Meanwhile
my language is mine, I insist on it,
a living language as long as it is spoken
by living men and women naturally,
as long as it is used.

[Read more…]

A story by Peter Landesman in the July 11 NY Times Magazine begins:

On Dec. 14 of last year, just hours after being hauled out of a hole in the ground by American forces, Saddam Hussein received his first visitors as a prisoner of war: two Americans, L. Paul Bremer III, at the time the top United States administrator in Iraq, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the commander of American-led forces in Iraq; and four prominent Iraqis—Mowaffak al-Rubaie, then a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and now Iraq’s national security adviser; Adnan Pachachi, the foreign minister of Iraq before Hussein’s reign; Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite representative; and Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress.

Aside from being about as far from a grab-you-by-the-lapels opener as can be imagined, this sentence is an object lesson in the problems of proper punctuation. Amid that forest of commas and semicolons, with a colon and a dash thrown in for good measure, one stands out as wrong.

[Read more…]

It’s Spooner’s Day! Grab your binoculars and let’s go word botching! (Via wood s lot.)

To quote aldiboronti, from whose Wordorigins thread I swiped this link:

Lovely page from Adobe on the historical development of the ampersand, from the ligature of ET or et to the & of today, with illustrations of various stages, the earliest being a ligature from Pompeian graffiti dated 79AD.

A wonderfully exhaustive treatment of this relic of ancient times.

Addendum. See the wide-ranging discussion of the use of ampersands in poetry going on at Dave Bonta’s Via Negativa.

I’ve just discovered another language blog, Every Way but One, authored by Russell: “Student of linguistics. Student in Japan.” There’s a lot of good material about Japan and the Japanese language; I was particularly taken with the post English Readings for (Japanese) Chinese Characters, which describes a truly weird onomastic development:

The original name for [an army base in Miyazaki Prefecture] was pronounced shin-den-baru (new-paddy-field). But the current pronunciation is nyuu-ta-baru. That is, the first character, which means new, is now being pronounced with the (Japanese rendition of the) English word. (Oh, and for some other reason the second character now has a native Japanese reading instead of a Chinese reading…not sure why that is – generally the S[ino-]J[apanese] readings go just as fine with foreign words as they do with other SJ morphemes).

The Online Sanskrit Dictionary “cannot be a substitute for a good printed Sanskrit-English dictionary. However, we anticipate this to aid a student of Sanskrit in the on-line world.” I can’t vouch for its accuracy (and the quality of the English in the introduction doesn’t inspire confidence), but it’s a handy quick reference. (Via Incoming Signals.)

Lawrence Venuti has a good essay, “How to Read a Translation,” in the July Words Without Borders.

The foreign language is the first thing to go, the very sound and order of the words, and along with them all the resonance and allusiveness that they carry for the native reader. Simultaneously, merely by choosing words from another language, the translator adds an entirely new set of resonances and allusions designed to imitate the foreign text while making it comprehensible to a culturally different reader. These additional meanings may occasionally result from an actual insertion for clarity. But they in fact inhere in every choice that the translator makes, even when the translation sticks closely to the foreign words and conforms to current dictionary definitions. The translator must somehow control the unavoidable release of meanings that work only in the translating language. Apart from threatening to derail the project of imitation, these meanings always risk transforming what is foreign into something too familiar or simply irrelevant. The loss in translation remains invisible to any reader who doesn’t undertake a careful comparison to the foreign text—i.e., most of us. The gain is everywhere apparent, although only if the reader looks.
But usually we don’t look. Publishers, copy editors, reviewers have trained us, in effect, to value translations with the utmost fluency, an easy readability that makes them appear untranslated, giving the illusory impression that we are reading the original. We typically become aware of the translation only when we run across a bump on its surface, an unfamiliar word, an error in usage, a confused meaning that may seem unintentionally comical…

There are telling examples from Margaret Jull Costa’s version of The Man of Feeling by the Spanish novelist Javier Marías as well as other translations, and some more general remarks like the following:

Some languages and literatures are particularly undertranslated today. Take Arabic. Little Arabic writing is available in English, much less than Hebrew writing, for instance, undermining any effort to gauge the cultural impact of social and political developments in the Middle East. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz deserves to be ranked among the most fascinating Arabic writers, but to regard him as the literary spokesman for the Arab world is undoubtedly a mistake. Mahfouz should be read alongside his countryman Abdel Hakim Qasim, whose Rites of Assent (translated by Peter Theroux) combines modernist techniques with Qur’anic allusions to interrogate Islamic fundamentalism, the forced conversion of an Egyptian Copt under the aegis of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qasim might then be juxtaposed to Sayed Kashua, whose Hebrew novel Dancing Arabs (in Miriam Shlesinger’s translation) incisively depicts the identity crisis of an Arab Israeli who, although raised in a family of militant anti-Zionists, tries to pass among Jews. Sometimes, to gain a broader view of the cultural situations that translation leaves behind, a reader must venture into neighboring languages and territories.

Via wood s lot.

The creators of Etymologic! call it “the toughest word game on the web,” and for all I know they may be right.

In this etymology game you’ll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to solve; in each case the word or phrase is highlighted in bold, and a number of possible answers will be presented. You need to choose the correct answer to score a point for that question. Beware! The false answers will often also seem quite plausible, and some of the true answers are hard to believe, but we have documentation!

I was pretty smug after the first two, which gave me no trouble, but the next two stumped me, and I sweated out my 8/10. Mind you, I’m not sure they’re always on firm ground with their etymologies, but the quibbles are minor; if you like this sort of thing, you’ll love this. I got it from Avva, who got 10 out of 10 on his first try, damn him; furthermore, in his comment thread someone (in the course of an argument about the supposed origin of French bistro(t) from Russian bystro ‘quickly’) linked to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé (TLF), a fantastic resource for French lexicography.