languagehat.com

Laura Simmons writes about language loss for IFLScience:

Is it possible for someone who is bilingual or multilingual to unlearn their first language? The short answer is… kind of. It’s certainly possible to forget a lot of the vocabulary and grammar that once came naturally, through a process known as language attrition.

One leading researcher in this area is Professor Monika S. Schmid, a linguist from the University of York in the UK. A native German speaker, Schmid describes her own experiences with language attrition on her website. Some of the common signs of this include forgetting specific words, using odd expressions or putting words together incorrectly, and becoming more hesitant when speaking.

It’s very common for people who spend long periods of time learning and speaking a new language to start to have difficulty with their native language – in linguist-speak, the L1. But while this can be distressing, it is unlikely that an adult will completely forget a language they once spoke fluently.

For young children, however, it’s a different story. Children’s brains are much more flexible when it comes to language acquisition, but that also leaves them more vulnerable to completely losing their L1 if they’re in an environment where they’re no longer exposed to it. […]

[Read more…]

Andrew Higgins (“Reporting from Comrat, Moldova” — there’s a dateline you don’t often see!) explains the difficult situation of Gagauz for the NY Times (archived):

He has published collections of poetry, written more than 20 books, as well as plays, translated works by foreign literary giants like Moliere and is rated as a master of his native language. His prodigious output, however, is not matched by the size of his readership. His children can’t understand a word he has written.

Todur Zanet writes in Gagauz, an obscure Turkic tongue used by so few people that, the writer worries, the main value of his literary output probably lies with future scholars interested in dead languages. “At least they will have something interesting to study,” he said. “Our language is dying and within two or three generations it will be dead,” Mr. Zanet, 65, said in an interview in Comrat, the capital of his home region of Gagauzia, an autonomous ethnic enclave in the former Soviet republic of Moldova.

Others are less pessimistic and note that while used routinely at home and work by only a few thousand people, Gagauz is similar to Turkish and several other Turkic languages widely used in parts of the former Soviet Union like Azerbaijan and Central Asia. […]

[Read more…]

I know there’s a ton of blathering about AI and ChatGPT out there, and I have no desire to overload LH with it, but I found this discussion by Andrew Deck interesting (and cheering) enough to share:

Training an AI tool to generate high-quality literary writing, like poetry, is no small challenge. Many large language models (LLMs) are not trained to be creative. One of the criteria used by AI researchers to judge creativity is novelty — how different the writing generated by a model is from what already exists in the world. But tools like ChatGPT were built to mimic human writing, not to innovate on it. […]

ChatGPT, for example, even struggles to imitate the structure and rhythm of well-established poets in English, especially when the poets are famous for breaking literary norms. A recent study found ChatGPT largely fails to produce English-language poems in the style of Walt Whitman, one of the more easily accessible poetry catalogs in the American canon. Whitman’s style features fluid and unstructured verse, but ChatGPT often wrongly defaulted to the rigid norm of four-line stanzas. It continued to do this even when prompted not to.

These issues are often exacerbated when ChatGPT is asked to produce poetic writing in languages other than English. The same researchers struggled to imitate common Polish styles of poetry, according to Goes. Earlier this year, researchers attempted to refine models to address shortcomings in AI-generated Japanese poetry, such as haiku and waka.

Rest of World observed similar problems when we tested ChatGPT’s ability to write a poem in Tamil. The poems were incoherent at best.

I know, I know, they’ll probably get better at it as more bushels of money are thrown at the problem, but one can hope. (And speaking of money: “Telugu-speaking contractors, for example, can only earn $1.43 per hour.” I try not to dream of guillotines, but they make it so hard…) Thanks, Trevor!

As a Nabokovian of long standing, I really should have read his novel Transparent Things (1972), but I think I was put off by the reviews at the time and besides was beginning my doomed trek through graduate school. I’ll read it eventually, VV! At any rate, once Nabokov became acceptable reading in Russia, it was immediately translated (by Dolinin and Meilakh) as Просвечивающие предметы [Translucent objects] (1991); a few years later it was rendered by S. Ilyin as Прозрачные вещи [Transparent things] (1996). Now there’s a new translation by Andrei Babikov with a completely different title, «Сквозняк из прошлого» [A draft from the past]; this is from the last stanza of his 1930 poem “Ты, светлый житель будущих веков…” (the whole poem is quoted here):

Я здесь с тобой. Укрыться ты не волен.
К тебе на грудь я прянул через мрак.
Вот холодок ты чувствуешь: сквозняк
из прошлого… Прощай же. Я доволен.

I’m here with you. You are not free to hide.
Across the dark I pounced upon your chest.
And now you feel a chilly breeze: a draft
out of the past… Goodbye. I am content.

As Babikov explains here (and as is mentioned in English in the previous link), Nabokov’s widow Vera told Gennady Barabtarlo that a Russian translation should be called by that title; Babikov says “Буквальный русский перевод английского названия не передаёт всего многообразия заложенных в нём значений, поскольку английское things — это не только предметы, но и существа, и духи” [A literal Russian translation of the English name doesn’t convey the full variety of meanings inherent in it, since English “things” are not only objects, but also beings and spirits].

What strikes me is that A Draft from the Past would be an awkward title in English because of the polysemy of draft: the ‘current of air’ sense is probably not foremost in most people’s minds. (In the poem, of course, it’s clear from context.)

Back in 2017 I posted about Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, and now her version of the Iliad has come out, to mixed reviews. Conveniently, I have been sent links to one rave (thanks, Songdog!) and one pan (thanks, Eduardo!), so I will present bits from both. First, Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s praise in the Washington Post (archived):

Wilson has forged a poetic style in English that captures the essence of Homeric Greek, a style that she explains in her helpful “Translator’s Note.” Eschewing rhyme, she has arranged her verse into a loose iambic pentameter, allowing it to spill over to occupy some 4,000 more lines than the original poem. On the page the metricality of Wilson’s verse is lost — the rhythm comes alive only when you read aloud, the words whistling up the windpipe, animating the tongue and striking the ear. No other translation communicates the oral nature of the poem so brilliantly.

Another key element in Wilson’s style is the register, poised between the high epic and the everyday. Her tone manages a sweeping grandeur without pomposity, and is both refreshingly modern and largely free of the jarring chattiness of contemporary colloquialisms. (There are a few exceptions where Wilson’s choice of vocabulary is somewhat incongruous: Achilles leaves his guests “flabbergasted,” for example; Paris is labeled a “sleazy flirt”; and Odysseus threatens to expose another man’s “private parts” when he is angry with him.) The resulting text is — and I mean this in the best possible way — highly readable. Wilson’s “Iliad” is a genuine page-turner, and it is all too easy to gallop through it as one would a beach read.

Wilson’s style is like the proverbial mountain stream — clean and clear, and bubbling along at pace. Reading hundreds of lines listing one violent death after another can, in some translations of the epic, feel somewhat tiresome, but in Wilson’s hands it is more like watching a tightly edited movie, the scenes slick and bloodily compelling. In her “Odyssey,” Wilson restricted herself to the same number of lines as the original poem, meaning that some sections came across as somewhat abrupt in English. In her “Iliad,” she has set herself free from this constraint, with some of the poem’s 24 books running hundreds of lines longer than in the original, and the verse breathes more easily as a result.

As counterpoint, Valerie Stivers bashes it for Compact. After calling it “the most readable Iliad I’ve encountered” and saying “many of her turns of phrase are direct and beautiful,” she goes on the attack:
[Read more…]

Composer Abie Rotenberg enjoys the potpourri that is Yeshivish Yiddish, and so will you. The start:

VERSE 1:
To originate a language, a new way to talk and speak,
is a most imposing challenge, a monumental feat.
It takes a special talent, ’tis not for the faint of heart,
and most are doomed to failure before they even start.

But in the hallowed halls of yeshivos far and wide,
our young men have discovered a new way to verbalize.
With Yiddish, English, Hebrew, it’s a mixture of all three,
and a dash of Aramaic- A linguistic potpourri!

CHORUS 1:
Yeshivishe reid, Yeshivishe shprach!
Takeh, Epis, Gradeh, ah gevaldige zach!
It’s called Yeshivishe reid, Yeshivishe shprach,
it’s the talk of the town, Mamesh tug un nacht!

It gets increasingly Hebrew/Yiddish-laden, with lines like:

I said “Then it’s an Onus if to Seder I’ll be late”,
“No”, he said, “I’m Makpid- Ein Somchin Al Hanes!”

(Calling rozele…)

It occurred to me to wonder how far back the titular cliché went. Needless to say, I started by googling, and I found a remarkable unanimity among the websites that aimed to assist the eager seeker after truth; this Check English Words page is representative:

“My work here is done” is a popular phrase that originates from a piece of media called The Lone Ranger. There are countless examples of the phrase being used in pop culture, but The Lone Ranger is the earliest example of it being used. The Lone Ranger came out in 1938, and as the years went by, more and more pop culture movies and shows used the phrase.

I even found a site that gave a specific episode that used it, but I won’t bother to try to find it again, because it’s all a lot of hooey. The Lone Ranger used it for the same reason people use it now: it’s a memorable meme. And it started long before the Ranger ever ranged. A Google Books search easily turned up examples like these:

“Oh yes, my work here is done, and well done.” –Fergus Hume, A Traitor in London (1900), p. 158.

“My work here is done; and I am only going at my Father’s summons.” –T.S. Arthur, “The Story-Teller: Deborah Norman,” Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine, Vol. 43 (1875), p. 665.

“But my work here is done.” — George E. Fisher, Declaring all the Counsel of God (1852), p. 16.

“My work here is done. I am going to dwell in a world I am wholly unworthy of.” — David Stowell, Sermon […] (1836), p. 12.

I’m sure I could turn up earlier examples, but I think I’ve proved my point, so my work… well, you know.

This is another of those new developments in English that occasionally pop up to astonish me; Peter Dizikes reports for MIT News:

Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses, which add information to sentences. For instance: “The senator, with whom we were speaking, is a policy expert.” Relative clauses often feature “who,” “which,” “that,” and so on. Before long a student, Kanoe Evile ’23, raised her hand.

“How does this account for the ‘whom of which’ construction?” Evile asked.

Pesetsky, who has been teaching linguistics at MIT since 1988, had never encountered the phrase “whom of which” before. “I thought, ‘What?’” Pesetsky recalls.

But to Evile, “whom of which” seems normal, as in, “Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals.” After the class she talked to Pesetsky. He suggested Evile write a paper about it for the course, 24.902 (Introduction to Syntax).

“He said, ‘I’ve never heard of that, but it might make an interesting topic,’” Evile says. She started hunting for online examples that evening. Some of the material she ultimately found came from social media; one example was in a Connecticut state government document. Among her finds: “Dave, Carter, Stefan, LeRoi, Boyd, and Tim are special people whom of which make special music together.” And: “Our 7th figure in the set is one of the show’s main reoccurring [sic] characters, whom of which we all love to hate.” And: “Oh, that’s me whom which you’re looking for.” (Sometimes “of” is dropped.)

[Read more…]

I don’t do computer games (haven’t touched one since I was bored waiting for someone and played a round of Leisure Suit Larry back in the ’80s), but how can I not post about Chants of Sennaar? To quote the description by Fizz at MetaFilter, where I learned about it:

Chants of Sennaar is a language-based puzzle game based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In this retelling, your character makes their way through five floors of a tower, each of which is home to a different community with a different language. Using a pictorial journal, you assign every word you find to a picture, slowly piecing together each language as you go. You use the words you learn to solve other puzzles, navigate the tower, and understand what others are saying. All this is made possible through decoding language — and I can’t overstate how fun the process is.

I’m not actually going to play it, but I celebrate its existence! (Sennaar is the Septuagint’s Σενναάρ, an alternate form of Shinar.)

I know I post a lot about efforts to keep languages alive, but Rhoda Meek’s piece in The National (Glasgow) focuses on an aspect not often discussed (at least at LH) — the psychological barriers to using a fading language, in this case Scots Gaelic:

If Gaelic is to be “saved” in any ­meaningful way, we need a radical change in how we approach it, and that change has to start in the Gaidhealtachd itself – not by creating new speakers – but by inspiring those of us who already speak it. […]

Even as a reasonably confident Gaelic speaker, my opportunities to use Gaelic in Tiree are limited. I use it with some of the more willing older speakers – particularly in the context of crofting and fishing, or at funerals and animal sales. Over the last few years, a few of us “younger” ones have ­taken to proactively speaking to each other in public, or in the shop or pub, starting ­conversations in Gaelic and carrying on – trying to break the discomfort we feel. We’re ignoring the desire to be polite in the company of English speakers, and ­finishing our conversations in Gaelic ­before switching language. […]

The truth is that in a desire to do the right thing, we have “educationalised” Gaelic to the point that everyone is ­suffering. Older, native speakers, with ­beautiful, lyrical, spoken Gaelic, steeped in their ­dialects and with idiomatic turns of phrase I would die for, often think that their Gaelic isn’t good enough because it isn’t “school Gaelic”. They might use it among themselves, but rarely with my generation. The majority of school-age kids don’t regularly hear Gaelic at home or in the community. So how can they possibly ­become confidently fluent?

[Read more…]