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Mark Liberman of Language Log has an enjoyably discursive post on the use and misuse of the word fakir, properly ‘a Muslim religious mendicant’ (it’s from Arabic faqi:r ‘poor’) but with an extended meaning ‘Hindu ascetic or religious mendicant, especially one who performs feats of magic or endurance’ (in the words of the AHD definition); when I asked my wife what image she associated with the word, she said “a guy lying on a bed of nails,” which fits the second sense exactly and I think would be the most common answer if you took a poll.
But Mark seems to think the meaning has been broadened even farther, to overlap with faker; his entry begins:

In connection with a post on Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to learn Gaelic, I read an interesting paper by Jack Lynch entitled “Authorizing Ossian”, in which he calls James MacPherson “history’s most perfidious literary fakir”. Lynch is being unfair to fakirs — though in a characteristically American way. Fakirs were not fakers, before a series of 19th-century American shifts of meaning.

After an excursus on Edmund Wilson, he goes on: “Wilson was reflecting a common usage that arose out of the American spiritualism craze of the 19th century…” The implication, it seems to me, is that ‘faker’ is not just an occasional misuse but a common US meaning, and I don’t agree. It’s certainly an easy mistake to make, and I’m sure one could come up with more citations than the OED’s four, but I would interpret each as an individual confusion rather than a feature of American English. But I’ll throw the floor open for discussion; my awareness of the Arabic and of the Indian use may be blinding me to vox populi. (I’ll add also that it’s possible the word is a simple typo in the online paper.)

There’s a fascinating discussion going on at Crooked Timber about the proposal that Irish should be an official language of the EU. Maria‘s attitude in her post “What’s the Irish for boondoggle?” is clear from the title alone, and the opening paragraph nails it down further:

It’s not every day that Fine Gael, the Progressive Democrats and Sinn Fein agree on something. But they all say Irish should be an official language of the EU, and complain that the government (which the PDs are part of) hasn’t done enough to make this happen during the Irish presidency. Our presidency of the EU is at best a partial success because we haven’t managed to force the EU to spend an extra 50 million euro a year to translate speeches and documents into a language that no one actually needs them in. It’s the principle, you see.

I agree with her, despite my fondness for an Gaeilge, but a number of her commenters don’t, and the debate spills over onto Maltese as well while staying remarkably civil. (Via MetaFilter.)

Reading today’s NY Times, I ran across a sentence (in the story “Separatist Revives Movement in Quebec” by Clifford Krauss) whose ungrammaticality was even subtler than the one cited in my entry OF OF: “A government audit found that the federal government had furtively passed out tens of millions of dollars to friendly advertising companies involved in antiseparatist publicity efforts deeply offended Quebecers.” I’m betting the people who had to reread the Fernea sentence will have to parse this one even more carefully, while my fellow editors will grasp the problem right off the bat.

Frequent commenter Tatyana sent me a link to a Russian blog where there was a discussion of the Arabic word SiraaT ‘path’ (famously used in the first sura of the Qur’an, the Fatiha: Ihdina al-sirata al-mustaqima ‘Show us the straight path’), mentioning that it was from Latin stratum ‘path.’ Not having any way to determine whether this was true, I wrote to an Arabic scholar about it, asking also where one could go to look such things up. He confirmed the derivation and added “There is no Arabic etymological dictionary.” I found this shocking, and am hard put to explain it. I can understand why the cultural emphasis on the Arabic of the Qur’an as the perfected form of the language might have made native speakers less likely to look beyond it and work on its Semitic connections, but how could the avid European Orientalists of the Victorian era have omitted to produce such a thing? In an age obsessed with philology, when Edward William Lane was producing his monumental Arabic-English Lexicon and men like Theodor Nöldeke and Carl Brockelmann were doing groundbreaking work on Semitic, how could no one have done an etymological dictionary? And how could no one have done one since? Get cracking, people!

Update (May 2022). See now A. G. Belova, Этимологический словарь древнеарабской лексики (на материале избранных текстов доисламской поэзии). Выпуск 1:

Словарь является в арабском языкознании первым
систематизированным сводом этимологий знаменательной лексики избранных памятников арабской поэзии и прозы доисламского и раннеисламского периодов и восполняет существенный пробел в арабском историческом языкознании. Построен по корневому принципу и в порядке арабского алфавита. Привлекается сравнительный материал древних и живых семитских языков, а также — современных арабских диалектов. Словарь рассчитан на арабистов и семитологов широкого профиля, на историков Ближнего Востока древнего и средневекового периодов.

Thanks, drasvi!

In the course of reading Elizabeth Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik (a lively account of a year in Iraq which anyone interested in life in the Shiite south should read), I came across the following sentence: “Probably it was a combination of particular circumstances, many of which I remained unaware, plus the fact that people were just becoming used to our presence.” I instantly noticed that there was one “of” too few in the clause beginning “many of which…,” but I wonder how many readers pass right over it? I suspect that my job as an editor may make me hypersensitive to the inner workings of syntax.

Avva says that Evan says that half of all Google searches are conducted in languages other than English, and Evan works for Google, so he should know. Avva says he would have thought the non-English searches only amounted to 20%; I would have guessed it was higher than that, but I’m surprised and pleased to discover it’s half and half. Let the world search!

Faithful correspondent Andrew Krug sent me a link to a BBC story by Oliver Conway claiming that:

The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as “ilunga” from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.
It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.
Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time”.
It seems straightforward enough, but the 1,000 language experts identified it as the hardest word to translate.

[Read more…]

Or for persons with a great fondness for seal meat. Desbladet has a tasty report on a couple of books on Greenlandic. My favorite bit:

Now, Janssen’s phrasebook was prepared for Europeans in Greenland, hardly doctors. So it was probably also handy that when all these sicknesses were treated, there a consoling word to close with: “Have no fear, God and his help are always with you and will make you hale again.”
A section on groceries starts with Greenlandic food: “Are you in the habit of eating seal-meat?”, to which there are two (2) answers: “Yes, I often eat seal-meat” or “Since I’ve just eaten, no thanks”.

The Dico du Net is a collaborative French dictionary of words having some relation to the internet; its ambit includes:

des domaines aussi variés que : le référencement, la mesure d’audience, l’hébergement de sites, la création de sites web, le développement de logiciels, le moteur Google, DMOZ, les weblogs, les noms de domaine, les normes d’Internet, l’e-Marketing et l’e-Commerce…

For blog, for example, they have a brief definition (“A la base, un blog est un journal personnel ou un carnet de voyage disponible sur le web”), a longer description, several related entries ( Blogroll  –  Joueb  –  Permalink ), other sites on the subject, the author’s name, and commentary; they urge participation from readers. (Via La Grande Rousse.)

“Minding my p’s & q’s” by Denny Johnson is a loving account of his career in typesetting, starting out as a printer’s devil back in the days when “upper case” meant a literal case:

The Job Case in our shop resembled a huge dark green wood bedroom dresser, built at that time, I supposed, certainly somewhere in California, maybe just after the Gold Rush. It stood five feet high, about a foot over my head. It was almost six feet wide, and stained with years of printer’s ink and chewing tobacco; it was sturdy and unmovable. Ever at its side on the floor — a mucky red Hills Brothers coffee can was the compositors’ constant companion — his spittoon.

Instead of three or four deep drawers for underwear, t-shirts and socks, there were sixteen drawers, eight down per side. All the drawers were labeled but their identification tags had long since been obliterated by ink smudged fingerprints. Each drawer was three inches deep by three-feet square and separated by small individual wood fences or dividers that allotted the drawer into special custom cubicles. Every drawer was designed to hold a different, complete font of hand-type from six to twelve point. This is twelve point; this is eight point; so it’s clear that not only did the compositor have to separate and put away each letter in their appropriate letter home, he needed to put the correct letters with their identical sized brethren in the proper drawer as well. If not, sentences would unquestionably suffer and the reader be put upon to wade through dissimilar sized letters and misspelled words, in a sort of alphabet soup that the proofreader would routinely mark: W/F (Wrong Font).

All twenty-six letters of the alphabet, punctuations and numbers were allotted a different size partition in the drawer according to their order of significance: i.e. how often they turned up in words. A line of type was set by hand, letter by letter, character by character, one at a time. Words and the resulting sentences and paragraphs were compiled using an iron composing stick which was just over eight inches long and two inches broad. This the typesetter held in his left hand while the other was free to go for the necessary letter, piece by piece. […]

In all probability it was a good logical mind some time early in the 15th century that had configured these spaces so that there were larger cubicles and smaller cubicles depending on that letter’s consequence in the news of the day — an associate perhaps of John Guttenberg or one of his moveable-type cronies in 1448? In the early days of printing the compositor would sit or stand — depending upon the charity of his employer — beside an angled frame upon which he would set type. There were usually two drawer cases of type in use at a given time — one UPPER and one lower case. […]

That brings us to the four demons of which hardly anything has been written, yet they seem to be the cause of a good deal of anxiety for readers and typesetters alike over history. Now, you might propose that a d is a pretty recognizable and well-thought-of-character, and not one to discover himself mixed up with other letters of lesser popularity. But in fact the d finds himself in some very dubious company when he goes getting mixed up with the b, p, and q, aka: the four demons. They’re so named because they most often were the characters that ended up in some other letter’s stall causing chaos between compositor, proof reader, and printer’s devil — whose job as it turns out was to see that it never happened. And that certainly didn’t mean that it didn’t or couldn’t. In fact it happened all the time. There was always someone in the print shop yelling: “Wrong Font!”

It’s not written in the most professional manner, but it’s a joyous romp through the history of modern typesetting by someone who’s got the molten-lead burns to show for it (“Everyone who worked at and around the Linotypes was burned or injured at one time or another”), and anyone who’s ever felt the romance of those days should enjoy this as much as I did. The link comes via Teresa at Making Light, who adds her own, and needless to say better written, reminiscences (“I remember the Linotype, with its inscrutable keyboard, matrixes falling down chutes like a literate pachinko game, lead pig hung up on a chain to melt, bucket hanging off one side of the machine for collecting and re-melting old slugs, and all too eloquent splashes of now-cooled lead on the floor around it”); the comments, as usual, are a rich source of supplementary vitamins.