Mark Liberman has a most interesting series of posts at Language Log, taking off from a querulous comment of mine on a Semantic Compositions entry (“I was disappointed in Mark’s post; I hate to see him joining the bandwagon of people making easy jokes about winetalk”). Anyone at all interested in the topic should read Apologia pro risu suo, Grand Cru Smackdown, and More on winetalk culture. I should say that I did not mean to imply that the exotic descriptions used by so many wine writers are all exact and scientific, or that I do not myself often find them funny as hell. In the immortal words of Theodore Sturgeon, “90% of everything is crud,” and that certainly applies to wine babble. I merely resent the fact that the noble art and science of wine appreciation is so frequently the target of free-floating populist resentment and suffers indignities not often heaped on, say, art historians (who are at least equally given to unverifiable specifications and unsuitable metaphors). I just wish Americans drank wine as routinely as soft drinks so they wouldn’t see it as some sort of Old World boondoggle.
LOGOMACY.
A new language blog—they’re coming thick and fast! Joshua (of Foolippic and Books Do Furnish A Room) has started Logomacy (Between logomachy and logomancy…) because:
First: I wanted to play around with the WordPress blogging software so that I can move away from the now moribund MovableType 2.6x
Second: Recently I’ve been doing a lot of stuff relating to words and language (reading linguistics blogs, studying Latin and Old English, creating wikis and blogs relating to both those pursuits) and while I’ve been blogging about some of it, I’ve been feeling that none of my current blogs is really appropriate for these topics. The handful of readers of Foolippic, for instance, don’t care about Old English at all (and nor should they).
His latest entry makes an interesting point about learning languages: “all language learning is over-learning. In other words the entire point of learning something in a new language should be to learn it until recall is not just effortless, but comes to mind unbidden before you even have to direct your attention to recall.”
MOTHER TONGUE.
‘I started to translate in seventy-three
in the schoolyard. For a bit of fun
to begin with – the occasional “fuck”
for the bite of another language’s smoke
at the back of my throat, its bitter chemicals.
Soon I was hooked on whole sentences
behind the shed, and lessons in Welsh
seemed very boring. I started on print,
Jeeves & Wooster, Dick Francis, James Bond,
in Welsh covers. That worked for a while
until Mam discovered Jean Plaidy inside
a Welsh concordance one Sunday night.
There were ructions: a language, she screamed,
should be for a lifetime. Too late for me.
Soon I was snorting Simenon
and Flaubert. Had to read much more
for any effect. One night I OD’d
after reading far too much Proust.
I came to, but it scared me. For a while
I went Welsh-only but it was bland
and my taste was changing. Before too long
I was back on translating, found that three
languages weren’t enough. The “ch”
in German was easy, Rilke a buzz…
For a language fetishist like me
sex is part of the problem. Umlauts make me sweat,
so I need a multilingual man
but they’re rare in West Wales and tend to be
married already. If only I’d kept
myself much purer, with simpler tastes,
the Welsh might be living…
Detective, you speak
Russian, I hear, and Japanese.
Could you whisper some softly?
I’m begging you. Please…’
—Gwyneth Lewis
DOUBLE-TONGUED WORD WRESTER.
The excellent Grant Barrett (aka Mo Nickels) has started a new word site:
Double-Tongued Word Wrester records words as they enter and leave the English language. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language.
There are a lot of word sites out there, you say? Yes, but most of them are seriously untrustworthy, being concerned more with fun than with facts. This one you can take to the bank; Grant is an actual lexicographer, for Oxford University Press in New York City. The entries are not only fun and interesting, they come with extensive citations. The latest, for example, is “jitterbug n. a gang member; a juvenile delinquent.” Now, this is a meaning I was totally unaware of; I knew only the Merriam-Webster definition ‘a jazz variation of the two-step…; one who dances the jitterbug.’ (I checked Cassell to get the British perspective, and was surprised to find that the dance-related meanings are labeled “Hist.” and the primary meaning is given as ‘a person who spreads alarm,’ yet another meaning unknown to me!) The definition is followed by nine citations, from a 1941 Bosley Crowther movie review (“The big holdup job gets messed up by a couple of ‘jitterbugs’ who are assisting on it, the girl turns out a great disappointment, the gunman is rendered a fugitive with a moll and a dog who love him”) to a quote from last Sunday’s Palm Beach Post (“…he would join the idle, young black males in jail. ‘Jitterbugs,’ Lupo called them, using street lingo”). I’m going to bookmark the site instantly, and I suggest you all do the same.
CHUKOVSKY ON CHANGE II.
I’m continuing the translation I began in a recent entry of Kornei Chukovsky’s comments on changes in Russian and generational reaction to them.
If the youth of those days [the 1840s] happened to use in conversation words unknown to earlier generations such as fakt [fact], rezul’tat [result], erunda [nonsense], solidarnost’ [solidarity; joint responsibility], the representatives of those earlier generations declared that Russian speech suffered no small loss from such an influx of highly vulgar words.
“Where did this fakt come from?” asked the indignant Faddei Bulgarin in 1847. “What sort of word is that? A corruption.”
Yakov Grot at the end of the [18]60s declared the newly appeared word vdokhnovlyat’ [to inspire] “disgraceful.”
Even such a word as nauchnyi [scientific] had to overcome considerable opposition from old-fashioned purists before it entered our speech as of right. Let us recall how struck Gogol was by the word in 1851. Until then he had never heard of it.
Old men demanded that the word uchenyi [learned] be used instead: a learned book, a learned treatise. The word “scientific” seemed to them inadmissably vulgar…
Of course, the old men were wrong. [All these words] are now felt, by young and old alike, as perfectly regular, rooted words that no one could do without!
…I have been put into a quandary by new forms such as [end-stressed] vyborá (in place of vybory ‘elections’ [stressed on the first syllable]), dogovorá (in place of dogovóry ‘agreements; treaties’), lektorá (in place of léktory ‘lecturers’). I heard in them something devil-may-care, reckless, wild, rakish. In vain I told myself that the Russian literary language had long since legitimized such forms.
“Two hundred years ago,” I told myself, “Lomonosov was already saying that Russians prefer the ending –a to the ‘boring’ –i.”
(He gives examples of words that changed endings in succeeding generations, for instance tom ‘volume’:)
If Chekhov, for example, had heard the word tomá, he would have thought the French composer Ambroise Thomas was being discussed…
Each time, I came to the conclusion that it was useless to protest against these forms. I could get as agitated as I liked, but it was impossible not to see that here was a centuries-long, unstoppable process of the replacement of final unstressed –i by the strongly stressed ending –á.
…[In language] everything moves, everything flows, everything changes. And only the most naive purists maintain that language is something immovable, eternally congealed—not a turbulent stream, but a stagnant lake.
This seems to me an exemplary attitude towards language change on the part of someone sensitive to the nuances of usage and attached to the forms he grew up with, but aware of the necessity and inevitability of change. A man after my own heart.
BOLOGNA.
This word refers, in American English, to a type of sausage most commonly encountered as an extremely cheap lunchmeat (on which I survived in my early penniless days in NYC); it is pronounced the way the WWII-era exclamation derived from it is spelled: baloney. I just discovered that the corresponding Russian word болонья (bolon’ya), as in English a lower-case use of the Italian city name, means ‘lightweight waterproof material; a raincoat made of such material.’ Talk about your false friends!
TRANSLATION EXCHANGE.
A new blog, translation eXchange, was started in April by a group of translators (and they invite others to join). Their mission:
This is intended as a forum for those interested in translation (and more generally, in world affairs) to post and comment upon relevant articles and information. Anything from political subterfuge to book reviews. Let’s just talk translation.
They’ve recently linked to reviews of translated books and an article by Sarah Enany from Egypt Today about a local production of Wilder’s Our Town that is “a translation, not an adaptation: The play retains the original names, setting and even the same music. And this is a good thing, I believe, for two reasons. First, too many translations now are Egyptianized, and in a way it’s a shame. It’s good for Egyptian audiences to really see a piece of foreign culture every once in a while, without a language barrier.”
A very promising site, brought to us courtesy of Transblawg.
A LANGUAGE MUSEUM.
“…of curious and interesting uses of the English language,” the title of John Higgins‘s engaging site continues. It contains lists of minimal pairs, homophones, homographs, and much else, including a frequency count of the days of the week (“It seems that we talk about days of the week more than we write about them, and that we are more interested in the weekend than in weekdays, with Saturday, Sunday and Friday filling the top three places both in speech and in writing. It is interesting that Friday overtakes Saturday in speech but is a long way behind in writing”). Thanks to aldiboronti at WordOrigins for the link.
SOUTH INDIAN NAMES.
Rangachari Anand has an interesting entry on how South Indian names work:
South Indian names can be confusing. My “official” name on my passport is Rangachari Anand. However, my name is “officially” backwards! If you were to meet me on the street, I’d like you to call me “Anand”.
So then perhaps you might conclude that we write our family name first like the Koreans. But thats not the case either. Its actually a little more complicated…
His blog contains “Essays and articles about IT and Indian English,” and in the latter category is an entry about the word bifurcation:
Bifurcation is one my favorite words in the English language… It is certainly not a commonly used word in the West. Indians however, love this word and use it in common speech. If you were to ask for directions when traveling in India, it is very likely that the person giving you directions would say some thing like “when the road bifurcates, go right…”
A CLOTH OF DARKNESS.
Nancy Gandhi at under the fire star has a wonderful entry “Poems for the Rainy Season,” quoting several poems from Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara’s Treasury, translated by Daniel H. H. Ingalls; this one particularly appeals to me:
A cloth of darkness inlaid with fireflies;
flashes of lightning;
the mighty cloud mass guessed at from the roll of thunder;
a trumpeting of elephants;
an east wind scented by opening buds of ketaki,
and falling rain:
I know not how a man can bear the nights that hold all these,
when separated from his love.
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