languagehat.com

Mikhail Viesel has done an online version of Natalya Stavrovskaya’s translation of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities). Although most of the site is accessible only for Russian-speakers, the explanation page is available in English: “…Invisible cities online is oriented primarily not towards representing the text per se (as in Pale Fire), nor to its studies and analysis (as Decameron Web), but towards the creation of a complete esthetical impression. In other words, it ought to be treated as an art-project: not to study Calvino’s work, but to delight in it.” Besides the intrinsic interest of the description, there are links to other, similar projects. (Via Avva.)

A paper by Rolf Herwig on “The Interrelation between Adverbs of Manner and Adverbs of Degree”; Herwig investigates the use of mild(ly), sad(ly), and warm(ly) in a large corpus, concentrating on the degree to which each has been “delexicalized” (come to be used as a simple intensifier). Near the beginning there is an interesting discussion of perceptions of language change:

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A new study, as reported by BBC News, concludes that “people who speak Mandarin Chinese use both sides of their brain to understand the language,” as compared to “English-language speakers who only need to use one side of their brain.” Interesting if true; I’ll await further research before drawing any exciting conclusions. I’m not impressed by the idiotic quote “Native English speakers, for example, find it extraordinarily difficult to learn Mandarin.” (Thanks, Ron!)

I’ve always loved the word “loosestrife,” without having a mental picture of the actual plant (sadly often the case with me and plant names). Now I have two. I’m visiting my wife’s family in the Berkshires (the wooded hilly region of western Massachusetts), and I was told that the attractive purple flowers fringing the pond were purple loosestrife, an invasive species that “now poses a serious threat to native emergent vegetation in shallowwater marshes” throughout the northeast. And when I asked what the pretty clusters of small white flowers in a vase were, I was told they were gooseneck loosestrife. Gooseneck loosestrife! Isn’t that a wonderful phrase? I’ve been mumbling it to myself ever since. (And they do look astonishingly like the heads of geese.)

Addendum. Incidentally, “loosestrife” is an interesting word; it pretends to be a translation of lysimachia, but that Greek word is actually derived from a personal name, Lysimachus (or Lysimakhos if you’re into that sort of thing).

There is a translation of “Oedipus Rex” into Solomon Island Pijin, and according to the web site “Bikman Edipusu” has been staged in Honiara at least twice. Now that’s a cultural gap to cross; wonder how it goes over? (Thanks to Alan for the link.)

1) The Discouraging Word recounts the experience of listening to the letters-from-listeners section of All Things Considered concerning the pronunciation of “schism,” which I myself also heard. Like the good folks at TDW, I was pleased that ATC stood up for their use of skizem and justified it with the relevant usage note at the American Heritage Dictionary. I myself unthinkingly said skizem until I read somewhere that it was a grave solecism to say anything but sizem; I adopted that ecclesiastico-British version until I realized it was false to current American usage, and am now trying to reprogram myself. It’s damnably hard to know how to say words that are not in common use.

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Via wood s lot, this selection of “short narrative works in German from the late 18th to the end of the 19th centuries, featuring verified texts from documented editions and, whenever possible, English translations.” Goethe, Schiller, Hofmann, Kleist, the Brothers Grimm, and more.

I’m looking forward to seeing the new (15th) edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, even though Chicago isn’t the style bible where I work. A NY Times story by Dinitia Smith lays out some of the changes (aside from the inevitably extended coverage of web addresses):

¶Capital letters. The old manual recommended using small capitals in some cases, like AM and PM. But it is difficult for writers on a word processor to switch from regular size capitals to smaller. “In the new edition we now prefer lower case a.m. and p.m., with periods in between,” Ms. Samen said, “and we are saying small caps are an alternative.”
¶Ordinal numbers. The Manual used to prefer 3d and 2d, but it is now O.K. to use 2nd and 3rd, “like the rest of the world,” Ms. Samen pointed out.
¶Dates. Previous editions recommended the British style: 1 July 2003. Now one can write them “the way everybody does it in real life,” Ms. Samen said: July 1, 2003.

As a linguist (ret’d), I welcome the approval given to sentences beginning with “and” or “but” (a study apparently showed that 10% of “sentences in first-rate writing” so begin). And as an editor I am delighted that they are retaining the time-honored en dash (–), however much Jim at UJG may deplore it. Sorry, my friend, but some things are sacred.

Do you vaguely wonder how well you remember a language you half-learned a while back? Try the Proficiency Tests provided by Transparent Language. They’re not very hard (I got 97/150, or 64%, on Latin, a language I was getting rusty at almost 40 years ago), but they don’t take long and are quite enjoyable if you enjoy that sort of thing. (Those of you who still have nightmares featuring multiple-choice exams should probably tiptoe on by.) A tip of the pileus to Des for the link.

Des, who is “far too busy with prinsessor for such trivia,” has tossed me a link to a Guardian story by Stephen Oppenheimer about, yes, the Origin of Language. I’m too enervated by the muggy weather even to do the kind of quick runthrough I did for my earlier entry on a similar NY Times story (also featuring Chomsky, chimps, and Dr. Michael Corballis, but with fewer skulls and more clicks), so I will simply join with Des in suggesting that “language was invented specifically to allow groundless speculation of how language developed.”

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