languagehat.com

Colm Tóibín’s review (LRB, Sept. 7; archived) of Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner is chock-full of good things and is of course catnip to any lover of Joyce. This is the most obviously Hattic passage:

Although this invaluable book is designed to be consulted rather than enjoyed, there are many useful ways in which the annotations can be read page by page. For anyone interested in the way Joyce’s Italian infused Ulysses, for example, we note the word ‘intestated’ as he uses it – from the Italian intestare, meaning to declare someone a beneficiary – does not have the same meaning as the English word ‘intestate’. ‘Incuneated’, from the Italian incuneare, ‘to wedge in’, has no entry in the OED. ‘Arruginated’, meaning ‘rusty’, from the Italian arrugginire, is also a Joycean neologism.

The immediately following paragraph is hilarious:

For students of tone, it’s interesting to see how long the editors can keep a straight face as, soberly and diligently, they write entry after entry, using a printed source for each and acknowledging the help of many named Joyceans. At times, you can almost hear a sigh or muffled laughter. In the Cyclops episode, there is a long, long list of saints, the majority only too real, that includes ‘S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous’. The annotation tells us: ‘Not actually saints.’ An annotation for ‘Doctor O’Gargle’ in the Oxen of the Sun episode reads: ‘Not a real doctor.’ The one for Father Cantekissem is: ‘Not a real priest.’

[Read more…]

In an essay from 2010, John Yau wrote about the poet Christopher Middleton, asking “Why isn’t Middleton’s work more widely read or, barring that, more widely praised, however little impact that might have on sales and reputation? Why has this poet glided gracefully under the radar for his entire career?” I confess that though the name was familiar to me, I couldn’t have told you anything about Middleton’s poetry; Yau writes:

Again, Kleinzahler’s observations are helpful: “The poetry of Middleton is not easy to characterize, not least of all because no one Middleton poem truly resembles another, much less one book resembling another in style and subject matter.” In other words, there is no carry-over, nothing that might, after you’ve read one of his poems, help you read the next. You always have to start all over again. If you look at a Jackson Pollock painting from 1948—a so-called drip painting done during the period after he made his first breakthrough to abstraction in 1947—whatever you glean from it (method, all-overness, accretion) will help you look at another done by Pollock a year or two later. This is less the case with Middleton.

One might think that shouldn’t matter, but obviously it does; I think similar situations have caused problems for Russian writers I admire, from Veltman to Buida. If people don’t have a hook to hang you on, you may wind up forgotten on the floor of the closet.

Thomas Kole’s Tenochtitlan site is a thing of beauty and something I wish could be done for every city with a suitable history. But this isn’t UrbanHat, and what enables me to bring it here is the fact that it’s presented in three languages, English, Spanish, and Nahuatl. The first paragraph in each:

The year is 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, once an unassuming settlement in the middle of Lake Texcoco, now a bustling metropolis. It is the capital of an empire ruling over, and receiving tribute from, more than 5 million people. Tenochtitlan is home to 200.000 farmers, artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests and aristocrats. At this time, it is one of the largest cities in the world.

Es el año 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, que alguna vez fue un modesto asentamiento en el Lago de Texcoco, es hoy una bulliciosa metrópoli, capital de un imperio que gobierna y recibe tributos de más de 5 millones de personas. Tenochtitlan alberga a 200,000 habitantes dedicados a la agricultura, el arte, el comercio, la guerra, el sacerdocio y el gobierno. Es una de las ciudades más grandes de su tiempo a nivel mundial.

Ipan xihuitl 13 Tochtli (1518), Mexico-Tenochtitlan huehcapan altepetl. Ye huecauh, zan altepetontli nepan Tetzcoco atezcatl. Inin ialtepenanyo in Excan Tlahtoloyan, ye tlahtoani, ye cecentlalia miec in centzonxiquipilli tlatlaca intlalcalaquil. Ompa chantiah cempohualli huan macuilxiquipilli miltecah, tlamatilizmatinimeh, pochtecah, yaoquizqueh, tlamacazqueh ihuan pipiltin. Zan cana huey altepetl yuhquin Tenochtitlan.

I’m curious about why “a portrait of” is rendered as “In ixtli, in yollotl in”; does Nahuatl require two words to convey the idea? (Via MetaFilter.)

Back in 2015 our beloved Martian, Siganus Sutor, told a story about a boy who dreamed that he was taught an unknown language, which eventually turned out to be spoken on a faraway island of Polynesia; now Y sends me a couple of related links. Gautier Demouveaux writes for Crumpe:

For years, this Frenchman dreamed in a language he did not know. After much research, Marc Liblin will end up finding the origin of this unknown language, spoken by a handful of inhabitants on a small Polynesian island in the Pacific. His story is told in a book by Éric Viennot, published by Michel Lafon, which will be released in bookstores this Thursday, April 6, 2023. […]

Éric Viennot fell in love with this fascinating story and first tried to verify its veracity, by looking for people from his family, via social networks. Marie Liblin never met Marc, but she remembers that, in her childhood, her grandfather spoke to her about him, simply mentioning a rather whimsical cousin, misunderstood by the rest of the family, who had left wife and children to live on the other side of the world. “It was only in 1998, shortly after Marc’s death, that I discovered this incredible story, remembers Marie Liblin, who was then 14 years old. A friend of my father sent us an article published in the magazine Tahiti-Pacific which recounted his life in broad strokes…”

In 1981, Marc Liblin, then 33 years old, lived in Luxeuil-les-Bains, in Haute-Saône. Married with two children, he works in the family foundry. But the man feels bad about himself, the fault of a recurring dream, in which an old character teaches him physics and especially an obscure language, which he gradually learns to speak fluently. These dreams obsess him and, while his marriage is failing, he decides to drop everything to try to find answers on this language that he seems to be the only one to speak.

He eventually meets Meretuini Make, “a woman from Rapa Iti, a very small island in French Polynesia lost in the middle of the Pacific”:
[Read more…]

The New Yorker has published one of its occasional archival issues (I can never decide whether I’m more pleased by the chance to read classic articles or irritated by the penny-pinching at the expense of writers who aren’t dead and could be contributing), and Emily Hahn’s 1987 Talk of the Town piece about the renovation of the Central Park zoo included the sentence “We’re also going to put in colobus monkeys, those beautiful black-and-white animals, and tamarins and squirrel monkeys.” I wasn’t familiar with the word colobus and couldn’t proceed until I had looked it up and knew how to pronounce it; Merriam-Webster says “ˈkä-lə-bəs” (and provides an audio file) and the OED agrees (British English /ˈkɒləbəs/ KOL-uh-buhss, U.S. English /ˈkɑləbəs/ KAH-luh-buhss), but AHD also provides an alternative with penultimate stress (kə-lō′-bəs). (Oddly, both M-W and AHD have it entered under the collocation “colobus monkey” even though it occurs by itself: the OED has citations like “is doubtless a Colobus” and “the red colobus occupies the upper storey [of forest], the black colobus the middle and the olive colobus the main closed canopy storey.”) But the etymology, to quote the OED, is “modern Latin (J. K. W. Illiger Prodromus systematis mammalium et avium (1811) 69), < Greek κολοβός docked”; in other words, the penultimate vowel is short, and the stress should (by the traditional rules) be on the first syllable. I can only hope that the innovative (and wrong, dammit) version recorded by AHD is but a blip and will vanish from (hypothetical and, alas, unlikely) future editions. It could, of course, spread and triumph in the (hypothetical and unlikely) event that English speakers start talking en masse about such monkeys, and in that case I would have to grit my teeth and accept it as I have been forced to accept so many other innovations that go against my personal Sprachgefühl, but I will carry on stressing the first syllable as God and J. K. W. Illiger intended.

(It also strikes me as odd that Illiger et al. felt the need to create a Latinate name rather than borrowing one from a local language of Gabon, Angola, or wherever, but I guess that’s the nineteenth century for you.)

A very silly and pointless article:

The globe hums with thousands of languages. But when did humans first lay out a structured system to communicate, one that was distinct to a particular area? […] Language comes in different forms—including speech, gestures and writing—which don’t all leave conclusive evidence behind. And experts use different approaches to determine a language’s age.

Tracing the oldest language is “a deceptively complicated task,” says Danny Hieber, a linguist who studies endangered languages. One way to identify a language’s origins is to find the point at which a single tongue with different dialects became two entirely distinct languages, such that people speaking those dialects could no longer understand each other. “For example, how far back in history would you need to go for English speakers to understand German speakers?” he says. That point in time would mark the origins of English and German as distinct languages, branching off from a common proto-Germanic language.

Alternatively, if we assume that most languages can be traced back to an original, universal human language, all languages are equally old. “You know that your parents spoke a language, and their parents spoke a language, and so forth. So intuitively, you’d imagine that all languages were born from a single origin,” Hieber says.

But it’s impossible to prove the existence of a proto-human language—the hypothetical direct ancestor of every language in the world. Accordingly, some linguists argue that the designation of the “oldest language” should belong to one with a well-established written record.

So we get a roundup of Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian (“the oldest languages with a clear written record”), Hebrew and Arabic (“both belong to the Afroasiatic language family, whose roots trace back to 18,000 to 8,000 B.C.E. […] contemporary linguists widely accept Afroasiatic as the oldest language family”), Chinese (“The language likely emerged from Proto-Sino-Tibetan, which is also an ancestor to Burmese and the Tibetan languages, around 4,500 years ago, although the exact date is disputed”), Sanskrit (“‘In my view, Sanskrit is the oldest continuous language tradition, meaning it’s still producing literature and people speak it, although it’s not a first language in the modern era,’ Patel says”), and Tamil (“Tamil [speakers] have been especially [enthusiastic] in trying to separate the language as uniquely ancient”). The conclusion:

Disagreements about the age of Sanskrit and Tamil illustrate the broader issues in pinpointing the world’s oldest language. “To answer this question, we’ve seen people create new histories, which are as much political as they are scientific,” Patel says. “There are bragging rights associated with being the oldest and still evolving language.”

The curious reader will learn pretty much nothing from all this, which seems pure clickbait. As Craig, who sent me the link, says: “Disappointing from Scientific American.”

In reading Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, I came across a reference to James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, a name I had seen before but never (as far as I recall) investigated. Now I looked him up, and was astonished by the breadth of activity revealed by that Wikipedia article:

In The Origin and Progress of Language, originally published in six volumes from 1774 to 1792, Burnett analysed the structure of languages and argued that humans had evolved language skills in response to changing environments and social structures. Burnett was the first to note that some languages create lengthy words for rather simple concepts. […] Monboddo studied languages of peoples colonised by Europeans, including those of the Carib, Eskimo, Huron, Algonquian, Peruvian (Quechua?) and Tahitian peoples. He saw the preponderance of polysyllabic words, whereas some of his predecessors had dismissed these languages as a series of monosyllabic grunts. […]

Monboddo also popularized Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn’s 17th-century theory of a “Skythian” proto-language, traced the evolution of modern European languages and gave particularly great effort to understanding the ancient Greek language, in which he was proficient. He argued that Greek is the most perfect language ever established because of its complex structure and tonality, rendering it capable of expressing a wide gamut of nuances. Monboddo was the first to formulate what is now known as the single-origin hypothesis, the theory that all human origin was from a single region of the earth; he reached this conclusion by reasoning from linguistic evolution (Jones, 1789). This theory is evidence of his thinking on the topic of the evolution of Man. […]

Monboddo is considered by some scholars as a precursive thinker in the theory of evolution. […] Charles Neaves, one of Monboddo’s successors on the high court of Scotland, believed that proper credit was not given to Monboddo in evolutionary theory development. Neaves wrote in verse:

Though Darwin now proclaims the law
And spreads it far abroad, O!
The man that first the secret saw
Was honest old Monboddo.
The architect precedence takes
Of him that bears the hod, O!
So up and at them, Land of Cakes,
We’ll vindicate Monboddo.

It’s very odd that he’s not mentioned in either of my two textbooks on the history of linguistics, The discovery of language by Holger Pedersen and Classics in linguistics by Donald E. Hayden; some of his ideas were silly in retrospect, but that’s true of all those early guys. At any rate, what interests me here is that word Monboddo; it’s an honorary title “based on the name of his father’s estate and family seat, Monboddo House,” but that article on the house provides no etymology for the odd name. Furthermore, it mentions “Burnett of Leys”; there is no Wikipedia article for Leys in this sense (though there is a disambiguation page), but I was able to determine from other sources that it’s pronounced /liːz/ and is from the word lea ‘meadow.’ At any rate, any information on Monboddo will be most welcome.

A couple of years ago I posted an update on The Most Common Language In Each US State—Besides English And Spanish; now WordFinderX has a new version, with a somewhat updated national map (German seems to be spreading) and more granular maps showing the West (Hindi in Fremont), the Southwest (Tagalog in Gilbert), the Midwest (Swahili in Fargo), the Southeast (Tamil in Winston-Salem), the Northeast (Greek in Wilmington), and New York City (as impressive a spread as you might imagine, with Staten Island featuring, from north to south, Russian, Chinese, and Italian). Thanks, Taylor!

The Economist’s language columnist Johnson joins the discussion of AI that’s been roiling the online world:

More and more people are using simple, free tools, not only to decode text but also to speak. With these apps’ conversation mode, you talk into a phone and a spoken translation is heard moments later; the app can also listen for another language and produce a translation in yours.

You may still get a surprise or two. Google Translate may be the best-known name in machine translation, but it often blunders. Take “my wife is gluten-free,” the kind of thing you might say at a restaurant abroad. In French or Italian, Google Translate renders this as “my wife is without gluten”—true to the words rather than the meaning. DeepL, a rival, does better, offering various options, most of them along the correct lines.

The best tool may not be a translation app at all. Though not marketed for the purpose, ChatGPT, a generative AI system that churns out prose according to users’ prompts, is multilingual. Rather than entering an exact text to translate, users can tell ChatGPT to “write a message in Spanish to a waiter that my wife and I would like the tasting menu, but that she is gluten-free, so we would like substitutions for anything that has gluten.” And out pops a perfect paragraph, including the way Spanish-speakers actually say “my wife is gluten-free”: mi esposa es celíaca. It is a paraphrase rather than a translation, more like having a native-speaking dinner companion than an automated interpreter.

[Read more…]

Lynn Patyk discussed her recent book Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs at Bloggers Karamazov (The Official Blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society), and I found her ideas new and worth sharing:

KB: You write that provocation is “the key artistic mechanism of Dostoevsky’s creation” (p. 9). Why is provocation such an important aspect of Dostoevsky’s work?

LP: I think Dostoevsky dreaded boredom and being boring, and as I just said, provocation is a key communicative tactic to avoid that. Dostoevsky avoided becoming an engineer (so as to avoid being boring) but I often think of him as engineering his fiction – his communicative/plot situations – to keep things moving. I often refer to provocation this way in my book, as the primum mobile, or perpetuum mobile, or the moving mover. It’s a key reason why Dostoevsky’s fiction is so breathless and dynamic. Provocation also hits the ball into the other’s court, with all the suspense and uncertainty that that entails. So every time there is a provocation, there is the breathless “what will the reaction be?” and this opens a space… which in fiction approximates the space of possibility and freedom, as if there is no author and all of the characters are autonomous agents reacting spontaneously and “in the moment.”

[Read more…]