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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.

PhiN. Philologie im Netz “is a journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.”

It publishes articles and reviews within an interdisciplinary framework. The PhiN “Forum” is open to shorter statements, discussions, dialogues, and interviews. Contributions are welcome from all areas of the field. PhiN is published on the internet four times a year, in January, April, July, and October. Viewing, downloading, or printing material from PhiN issues is free… Contributions are accepted generally in English, French, German, and Spanish. All articles should be preceeded by a short (10 lines) abstract in English.

In practice almost all articles seem to be in German (and often without an abstract), but there is interesting material in English, like Ferid Chekili’s “The Position of the Postverbal Subject and Agreement Asymmetries in Arabic.” (Via wood s lot.)

The CBC website has a section called Words: Woe & Wonder that contains lively and sensible essays on all sorts of language-related issues, for instance an excellent discussion of why many news organizations prefer to refer to the ex-dictator of Iraq as “Saddam” rather than “Hussein” (short answer: “Hussein” is the first name of the man’s father, not a family name, and virtually everyone in Iraq knows him as “Saddam” and not “Hussein”). The most recent is Quibbling over Quotes, which begins by defending the shorter noun “quote” (just as good as “quotation,” but used in different contexts) and continues with various related matters; I especially liked their catching the NY Times (my favorite whipping boy) in an incorrect correction:

When Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969, everyone back on Earth heard the following crackle over their televisions and radios:

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

…When Armstrong got back home and saw the mission transcript (as well as some newspaper and magazine coverage of his adventure), he told reporters that he had been misquoted.
NASA concluded the “a” got lost in atmospheric static, the official record was changed and many news organizations ran a correction, including the New York Times on page 20 of its July 31, 1969, edition. After pointing out that Armstrong had requested the revision, the paper embraced the extra word without qualification: “Inserting the omitted article makes a slight but significant change in the meaning of Mr. Armstrong’s words, which should read: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant step for mankind.'”
Wait a minute. Small step, giant step? Is this right? Nope. It turns out that while publishing a five-paragraph correction outlining why an “a” was being added to a line that will be cited for generations, the Times turned “giant leap” into “giant step” by mistake. A slight stumble, to some. An astronomical bungle, to others.

Via MetaFilter.

I wouldn’t normally bother to note the translation of the first Harry Potter book into Greek, but the translator has written an interesting essay describing how he did it.

My intention was to recreate a version of the book which would make sense to a Greek from any era up to the 4th century AD who had managed by some magical process (such as would only be taught only to very advanced students at Hogwarts!) to reach the 21st century. Objects and ideas would be unfamiliar – but once he’d got used to his new surroundings, the book would make complete sense. So I thought it was very important to have this time-travelling Greek in mind at all times, and continually ask myself “would that have any meaning for him? what would he make of that?” In other words a cultural transposition is involved, not just finding the words.

Courtesy of Tom Phillips.

Language hat is going to spend the next week in California. Regular blogging will resume July 18; in the interim, I urge you to visit the excellent sites blogrolled at right, and (for those of you in climates resembling that of New York) drink plenty of fluids and stay in the shade.
Update. Well, I’m back, after a stay in sunny Santa Barbara (my 89-year-old dad is doing reasonably well, thanks), a return flight that ran into momentary turbulence causing me to splash some wine on my wife’s jumper (the airline offered to pay for the cleaning), a tension-racked ride on the express bus to Grand Central (we arrived just in time to catch the 11:02 and avoid an hour’s wait for the midnight train), and a taxi to the house around 12:30 this morning (fortunately our bodies, still on Pacific time, thought it was only 9:30). People were speaking Russian and French, two of my favorite languages, on the plane, so I was happy, and it had rained here during the week we were gone, so my wife the gardener was happy. And here I am.

Once again aldiboronti, in his usual place of business at Wordorigins, comes up with a great link: the Philologos column at the Forward. Aldi cites the column on the Hebrew word for ‘ladybug,’ parat Moshe rabbenu (literally ‘Moses’ cow’), which quotes quite a few European terms for that useful insect (mangling the Russian bozh’ya korovka as bozha kapovka, so use with caution), and I enjoyed the detailed investigation of the etymology of Yiddish shmergl ‘emery,’ which traces it back to Latin smericulum and Greek smaragdos ‘emerald’; I think the bald assertion that the latter is borrowed from Sanskrit marakata goes beyond the evidence, but this is, after all, a newspaper column, not a linguistic journal. Most enjoyable.

A story by David Dunlap in today’s NY Times [link improved thanks to Des] discusses the Gotham typeface used for the Freedom Tower cornerstone:

It could have been imperial Trajan. Or elegant Bodoni. Or generic Helvetica. But the search for the ideal typeface to be inscribed on the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site ended simply, in Gotham.

Gov. George E. Pataki said in his Fourth of July cornerstone speech that the 20-ton block came from the Adirondacks, “the bedrock of our state.” He did not note that its 26 words were set in a typeface steeped in local origin, developed four years ago at the Hoefler Type Foundry in the Cable Building, at Broadway and Houston Street, by Tobias Frere-Jones, a native New Yorker.

The typeface, Gotham, deliberately evokes the blocky, no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the streetscape from the 1930’s through the 1960’s in building names, neon signs, hand-lettered advertisements and lithographed posters.

Its chief inspiration, in fact, were the letters spelling out PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL over the terminal’s Eighth Avenue doors. So the circle comes to a close, since the trade center site is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey…

Michael Gericke, a partner in the Pentagram studio, which designed the cornerstone with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects of the Freedom Tower, said Gotham “didn’t look like something that was created yesterday and would be gone tomorrow.”

“It seems like it’s part of the larger urban environment,” he said. “It seems, in a way, that it’s always been there.”

Another Pentagram partner, Michael Bierut, likened Gotham to the Manhattan street grid. “It doesn’t show individual authorship,” he said, “but it shows a character you wouldn’t find anywhere else.”

The letters that are Gotham’s progenitors—BAR, PIER 40, DINER, PRIMARY SCHOOL 142—appear almost as if they had not been designed at all. The strokes have a uniform width. The forms, like the circular O’s, seem to have been dictated by pure geometry. There are no embellishments like serifs and spurs, barbs and beaks.

Mr. Frere-Jones, 33, who grew up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Heights, found himself drawn to these forms. And he had the chance to explore them in 2000, when Hoefler was commissioned by GQ magazine to design a new font. In 2002, after a period in which GQ had the exclusive right to use Gotham, it was made more widely available. It now comes in 16 varieties…

Ann Harakawa, a principal in the Two Twelve Associates design firm, whose office at 90 West Street was destroyed on 9/11, said the typeface was simple, legible and, given its New York provenance, very apt. “The idea of it being slightly ambiguous is interesting,” she said, “because no one has any idea of what’s going to come.”

Avva has an enlightening discussion (in Russian) of the difficulties involved in translating English bad language into Russian; his basic complaint is that when it’s done at all (Russian official culture is much more prudish than American) it’s done too literally. His suggestion is that fuck (as an expletive) and fucking (in its common use as a general modifier: “that fucking [cat/movie/refrigerator/whatever]”) should be replaced by the equally common blyad’ (literally ‘whore’), inserted in the nearest available slot in the sentence. He feels, and I agree, that the lack of grammatical and semantic equivalence is more than made up for by comparable power and ubiquity.

[Read more…]

Meyers Konversations-Lexikon was a German encyclopaedia comparable to the Britannica, and the entirety of the fourth edition (1888-1889) is online, all 16 volumes and 16,000 pages. You can browse the volumes here or use the search page. For users of German, this is a great resource.

The Russian Legacy website (“We seek to preserve and promote the study of Russian history, culture and language”) has a poetry section with pages for a couple dozen poets, each having poems in facing Russian and English versions. (Via wood s lot [07.07.2004].)