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The OED’s June 2004 Newsletter is called “19 April 2004: a day in the life of the OED” and contains descriptions of what the various editors, managers, planners, &c did on that day. It’s full of great tidbits of the lexicographical life. One entry that puzzled me was:

Katherine Martin, Assistant Editor (North American Editorial Unit)
I was working on a draft entry for the verb other (and the related adjective othered). Due to the complex and philosophical nature of these terms (and our mutual interest in the subject matter), Abigail and I decided to split them up — she took on the noun othering — so that we could discuss the definitions in detail and share our research.

Is anyone familiar with this verb “to other”? I’m guessing that it means something like ‘to render alien or unfamiliar’ (like German verfremden), but I’d like to know more.
(Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)
Update. The draft entry is up, and here it is:

[Read more…]

A correspondent has very kindly apprised me of an addition to the Online Books Page, namely A briefe and a playne introduction, teachyng how to pronounce the letters in the British tong, (now comenly called Walsh), by W. Salesburye (London, 1550)—it’s available as a pdf file, accessible from here. It’s a 39-page booklet doing just what the title promises, even if the continuation is perhaps false advertising: “…wherby an English man shal not only w[ith] ease read the said tong rightly: but markyng the same wel, it shal be a meane for him with one labour and diligence to attaine to the true and natural pronuncation of other expediente and most excellente languages.” At any rate, here’s the description of ch:

[Read more…]

George[s?] Coedes (more properly Cœdès) was a remarkable scholar who “bestrode the field of Southeast Asian study for over half a century.” What I am concerned with here, however, is his name. I don’t know how to pronounce it. For a long time, apparently assimilating it to words like cœlacanthe, I pronounced it “say-DES” (to myself, that is—I don’t think I’ve ever had occasion to discuss him with anyone else). But it occurs to me that it could equally well be “ko-eh-DES” (like coefficient). Since I have no idea of his family background or the origin of the name, I am at a loss. Does anybody know? (And by “know,” I mean have actual information, like how they say it at the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient where he taught for many years.)
[Note: o-e ligatures added in Cœdès and cœlacanthe.]

Update (July 2008): French Wikipedia says “prononcer ‘cédesse’.”

I was amazed and delighted, reading the fat double Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker, to come across the following in the Aleksandar Hemon story “Szmura’s Room” (an excellent but grim story—I love Hemon’s manic, word-drunk style, but he does have a Balkan sense of the world):

“Микола, I would have liked so much to have you as my grandson-in-law.” “Пани Майска, I am too young to get married,” Szmura said.

Although it’s normal to see Roman text in Cyrillic books, I think this is the first time I’ve seen Cyrillic text in an English context (outside of scholarly works, of course). The odd thing is that in the online version [archived], the passage reads like this:

“Mikola, I would have liked so much to have you as my grandson-in-law.” “Pani Majcka, I am too young to get married,” Szmura said.

I would have thought it would be easier to put the Cyrillic online than in the print version, but such does not appear to be the case. And why is the Ukrainian name Майска rendered “Majcka” when in the rest of the story it is given (correctly) as Mayska?

I’ve run into several excellent online resources today, and voilà, I share them with you!
1) Via the most excellent Grande Rousse, Charles Baudelaire, with sections on his life, his works, and “regards” (texts about him and his work). Here, to give you a sample, is the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal, one of the great explosions of poetry into an unsuspecting world (they also have the second).
2. wood s lot celebrates Anna Akmatova’s birthday today with a splendid collection of links, the most astonishing of which to me is a video clip of the poet reading a bit of her poem “To the Muse.”
3. Finally, but far from leastly, a hypertext edition of my favorite Faulkner novel (and one of my favorite novels, period), The Sound and the Fury. There are many more good Faulkner links at matteo’s MetaFilter post, from which I took this gem.

I will have to look for a copy of Chto neponyatno u klassikov, ili Entsiklopediya russkogo byta XIX veka [What you don’t understand in the classics, or Encyclopedia of daily life in the 19th century] (Moscow, 1998), a few excerpts of which are online here, dealing with the ways people addressed one another. As anyone at all familiar with prerevolutionary Russian society knows, inferiors called superiors by resounding titles while superiors used the equivalent of “my good man,” or simply a name, to them. The most interesting of the excerpts concerns the suffix -s, a contracted form of sudar’ ‘sir,’ omnipresent in prerevolutionary literature as an indication of politeness or servility, depending on the situation. It was known as слово-ер-с [slovo-er-s], from the old name of the letter s (slovo, literally ‘word’) and er (pronounced “yer”), the name of the hard sign formerly used after all words ending in a consonant. In The Brothers Karamazov the disgraced Staff Captain Snegirev says to call him Captain Slovoyersov, since in the second half of his life he has had to begin humbly using the -s ending. And there’s a wonderful quote from Pushkin’s Pikovaya dama [Queen of spades] (the beginning of Chapter 6):

—Atande!
—Kak vy smeli mne skazat’ atande?
—Vashe prevoskhoditel’stvo, ya skazal atande-s!
[“Wait!”
“How dare you say ‘Wait’ to me?”
“Your Excellency, i said ‘Wait, sir’!”]

(Via Avva.)

Addendum. I finally found slovo-erik in Dahl, hiding two-thirds of the way down column 256 of Volume 4 (of the third edition, 1903-1909, edited and corrected by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, the only one worth getting from a linguistic point of view); the definition reads: “-s, added to words v znak osoboi vezhlivosti prezhnikh vremen [‘as a mark of special politeness of former times,’ an odd phrasing that leaves it unclear whether it is the politeness or the suffix that is obsolete].” This implies that even before the revolution the slovo-er-s or slovo-erik was considered a relic.

Update. When I wrote this entry, I had no idea why the final -s of slovo-er-s was there, but I suppose I figured it was too picky a detail to get into. Now, thanks to a commenter on this post, I know: in the old system of reading Russian by syllables, using the old names of the Cyrillic letters, a final hard sign was read with the preceding consonant following it, so that, e.g., великъ [velikъ] would be read “веди езь, ве; люди иже, ли, вели; како еркъ, великъ” [vedi + ez’ = ve; lyudi + izhe = li > veli; kako + yerkъ > velikъ], where yerkъ is yer (hard sign) plus the preceding k (called kako). In exactly the same way, the suffix -съ (in the old spelling) was read “слово-ер-съ.” Mystery solved!

A 1903 book, Folk Tales From the Russian, has been put online. It has very nice Art Nouveau-ish illustrations and the translations are quaintly charming, but I confess the reason I’m memorializing it here is the name of the author, Verra Xenophontovna Kalamatiano de Blumenthal. She hereby replaces Astrid Pouppez de Ketteris de Hollaeken and the rest of the Belgian aristocracy in my onomastic affections. (Via Plep [9th June].)

I went to the Donnell again and this time found fewer pickings—but I was glad to discover A.V. Fedorov’s Vvedenie v teoriyu perevoda [Introduction to the theory of translation] (Moskva, 1953) for 25 cents. As soon as I saw the date I knew what I would find, and sure enough, the Foreword begins: “Questions of translation, linked in the closest fashion on the one hand with the disciplines of scientific linguistics—general linguistics, lexicology, grammar, and the stylistics of separate languages, and on the other with the history and theory of literature and the wide field of historical and philosophical sciences, can be fruitfully decided only in the light and on the basis of the works of I.V. Stalin on linguistics.” Chapter One, after a quick couple of paragraphs of groundwork, gets down to business: a quote from Marx and Engels (“Language is as old as consciousness”), a quote from Lenin (“Language is the most valuable means of human intercourse [obshchenie]”), and an entire paragraph by the Great Leader and Teacher (language as tool—I can’t bring myself to translate the whole gobbet of verbiage). But the book isn’t valuable only as a curiosity; it’s got lots of bilingual passages, with detailed discussion of the problems involved. I just wonder how quickly a revised edition came out after Stalin died that very year.

A Latin Wiki! “Ave! Vicipædia (sive Wikipedia) cooperandi opus est ut creatur Libera Encyclopaedia. Omnes ad participandum invitati sunt. Nunque sunt 2453 articuli.” (I note with a sigh that the only actual article so far under Linguistica is on Noam Chomsky. At least it’s nice and short.) The list of
Nationes mundi is lots of fun, and leads to questions like “Why do they Latinize Djibouti (as Dzibutum) but not Burkina Faso, particularly when Burcina would be such a fine Latinate form? (Via Avva, who links to its short but useful Sententia section in the course of his discussion of the phrase in vino veritas and Blok’s distortion of it.)

The transcript of the Nova program “In Search of the First Language” is well worth reading; the discussants are real linguists, unlike so many of the talking heads that wind up on TV (I went to grad school with one of them), and you can learn a lot from what they say. But as I wrote on the Wordorigins thread where this was posted, you should take this caveat very seriously:

This picture that Dolgopolsky paints of the Proto-Nostratic world is controversial and not widely accepted. In fact, most linguists argue that any attempt to come up with a language spoken fifteen thousand years ago is pure speculation.

Nostratic is wishful thinking. The rest is real linguistics.