languagehat.com

William Safire’s column today is neither so idiotic as to require yet another Safire-flogging nor so informative as to be cited for its own sake (it’s a routine investigation into the history of the phrase “tipping point”), but it uses a spelling variant that leapt out at me and sent me running to the dictionaries. In the course of trying to find a replacement for the now overused phrase, he says: “Turning point? Not a lot of bezazz, and it does not express the idea of the straw that breaks the camel’s back…” Bezazz! I knew the word “pizzazz” had variants, as befits such an irrepressibly slangy term, but I hadn’t seen this one. Merriam-Webster gives only “pizazz” as an alternate, while American Heritage allows you to simplify either of the z clusters, but neither offers a version in b-. Then I tried the OED, and bingo: “Also bezaz, bezazz, bizzazz, pazazz, pazzazz, pezazz, pizazz, pizzaz.” Now there’s generosity for you; in fact, I wonder whether there is any entry for which they offer more variants. The curious thing, though, is that all the citations with initial b– seem to be British:

1964 New Statesman 28 Aug. 291/1 A Shakespeare one [sc. exhibition].. with most of its bezazz—pop art, wire sculpture, giant beefeaters—left by the Avon. 1965 Sunday Times (Colour Suppl.) 16 May 12/1 She.. still wears trousers frequently. ‘I don’t really feel happy in bezazz.’ 1968 Daily Tel. 24 Dec. 8/4 Miss [Ginger] Rogers has ‘bezazz’, as was obvious from the number of reporters and photographers clustering round her. But Mr. Marshall.. claimed it should be ‘pezazz’, derived from American TV commercials and meaning something like effervescence.

The last one is particularly interesting, implying as it does a difference between U.K. and U.S. usage. I’m hoping The Discouraging Word will get on the case and turn up further information. (This entry can, by the way, be considered a bookend to a previous one on a rare variant spelling for “flibbertigibbet.”)

I have occasionally made offhand remarks indicating my dislike for Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories and, still worse, his effect on the field, but I have not had the heart to go into detail; I’m worn out from all the arguing I did about him back when I was an actual linguist (now, I just play one on the internet). Fortunately, my procrastination has paid off (as it so often does), and Scott Martens has done the job for me. I direct anyone who wants to know exactly how wrong and destructive Chomsky has been to go forthwith to Pedantry and scroll down to “Friday, July 25, 2003: My carefully considered and well earned aversion to Noam Chomsky” (I won’t even try to provide a permalink, Blogger being what it is). Quick summary: “His principles ultimately produced nothing, and may well have set linguistics back decades. The day will come when his legacy is compared to Skinner’s, and when historians of the social sciences will debate which one ultimately caused the most damage.” But there’s much, much more.

Addendum. Scott expands on the subject in the comments to this entry.

A caveat: after sixteen paragraphs, you will reach the sentence “There was some more stuff I was going to say about Cambodia.” You can stop there, unless you’re particularly interested in the still-simmering argument over exactly what Uncle Noam said about the Khmer Rouge 25 years ago and whether it was justified given what was known at the time. As Scott says, “There’s something about that country that seems to drive its students mad.”

Again via Avva, an online corpus of transcribed French conversations:

The French corpus is currently comprised of 51 hours of spoken French recorded in Paris, Grenoble, Monpellier and Avignon. We are in the process of transcribing this data and so far we have five texts available on-line. Soon we hope to post more texts as well as ethnographic information about the speakers and the speech situations. The twenty-seven texts below are comprised of approximately 119,000 words total.

Invaluable for anyone wanting to research French as she is actually spoke.

I mean, sure there’s a lot of Pushkin online, but I just discovered (via a comment in Avva) the mother lode: the entire 10-volume edition, with bad language supplied in angle brackets (it’s never printed in Russian editions, thanks to lingering prudery), the originals of things he wrote in French (linked to Russian translations), very reader-friendly format… bless this newfangled internet!

And I’ve just hit the “rvb” link and discovered it’s only part of an online library that includes full editions of Dostoevsky (15 volumes), Derzhavin, and Khlebnikov, not to mention works by Bely, Remizov, and others, as well as Gnedich’s 1829 translation of the Iliad. It may well be that every other Russian-reading person in the universe has long known of this resource—it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been behind the curve—but I’m very glad I finally caught up.

Addendum. Anatoly, in the comments, sent me to another Russsian literature site that has more material, including the 16-volume edition of Pushkin used by scholars. Unfortunately, it uses an annoying frames interface, so I can only link to the main Pushkin page; to get to the edition you have to click on the + next to Произведения Пушкина on the left, then on the + by Собрания сочинений Пушкина, then on the one by Полное собрание сочинений в шестнадцати томах. — 1937—1959, at which point you get the list of volumes. Furthermore, the alphabetical index is a text file, so if you’re looking for a particular poem you have to go to the index, find the page number, then go back to (say) Volume Two and estimate where that page number would be in the list of entries. Contrast with the RVB site above, where the index has links that take you right to the desired work. But it’s still good to have all this stuff online.

Further addendum. This site has all of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, &c. in transcription. Most useful.

There’s a fascinating discussion at the site I Love Everything (with which I was previously unfamiliar, but whose name definitely appeals to me) that began with the question “How do the deaf interpret rhyme?” Along with some understandable defensiveness from deaf people interpreting it as implying they should value rhyme in some way, it became a very interesting exchange of ideas; this in particular brings up things I had never thought about and would like to know more about:

There are entirely different patterns by which poetry & narrative are constructed in the deaf community. A deaf person can of course read conventional poetry, with rhyme and all that, but it tends not to carry the same weight or interest that sign-specific stories & poetry do.

There is an enormously rich “oral” tradition (ie, carried on exclusively through signing and not written down) in the deaf community that is pretty much entirely unknown to the hearing world. I recently wrote a screenplay for an animated program for deaf children my ex is producing for p b s. I wrote the scenario, which was then translated into ASL by her and by the deaf actors doing improvisations (they filmed it in rotoscope). My original script almost completely vanished, since the puns and jokes and signifiers and the interesting patterns they can be put into are so hugely different from written speech.

The deaf world is really a self-sustaining alternate universe, with its own cultural codes and achievements. Hearing-based formal elements, like rhyme, are largely irrelevant to them and it’s a common mistake (one I used to make as well; I’m not trying to scold you) to assume they value, or should value, the same things we do.

— chester (goth_casua…), July 25th, 2003

This gives me the sense of an entire cultural world about which I know nothing, like when I first began to realize the riches of Persian civilization. So many worlds, so little time—how can people ever get bored?

A useful little article by Michele A. Berdy from the Moscow Times (once again via the excellent Taccuino di traduzione).

Addendum (March 2020). Might as well provide some excerpts:

One of my favorite interjections is aga, which is a rather low-brow sign of agreement, something like yup, sure, you got it, uh-huh in American English. — Ty kupil khleb? — Aga. (Did you pick up bread? — Uh-huh.)

Another good interjection to know is fu, a kind of all-purpose expression of disdain, disgust or displeasure. Ty chital statyu v Izvestiyakh? Fu! Gadost! Nenavizhu kompromat! (Did you see the article in Izvestia? — Yuck! Disgusting! I hate smear articles!) When you use it to refer to a bad smell or something revolting, in English you say Phew! P-U!

[…]
Ai-ai-ai, said with a wag of the head, means “shame on you,” and is expressed in English as Tsk tsk. Brys! Fu! or Kysh! are what you shout at your cat when she’s on the countertop and about to dive into your chicken dinner. In American English we shout Shoo! or Scat!

[…]
And then there’s Au, which is both a call for someone you are looking for, or a response to the call. For example, when you walk in your colleague’s room and say Sasha! he can respond with Au, pronounced as a diphthong. In English you might say, “Here I am.” or “Yes?” But when you get separated from your fellow mushroom hunter in the woods, you call out Auuuuu!, elongating the syllables and letting them float on the wind. […] When translating Au!, ignore the dictionary suggestion “You-hoo!” In fact, take out your thickest marker and cross it out. Even though it’s close in sound, trust me — no one has used this in English except as a joke since 1942. Most of the time we just shout out the person’s name, making the syllables last a few seconds: A-a-a-a-lex! Su-u-u-san! Not as universal as Auuu!, but it does the trick.

Note that ага, which she transliterates as “aga,” can be pronounced [mhm] (with the mouth closed), [əhə] (with open mouth), or [aga], a spelling pronunciation.

Via Taccuino di traduzione, a multilingual online course for translators; here‘s the English version. From Translation studies – part one:

[Read more…]

Olympia Morata (1526-55) was a remarkable woman who was educated in the ducal court of Ferrara, fell out of favor, and left with her husband for his home town of Schweinfurt in 1550; they were forced by the wars of religion to flee in 1554 to Heidelberg, where she died the following year. In her short life she became known as a great scholar and writer, admired all across Europe (by those who did not revile her as a “Calvinist Amazon”) and an inspiration to all women scholars. A new book, The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic, edited and translated by Holt N. Parker, presents all of her writings that survive (most were lost in the siege of Schweinfurt) along with an introduction that is, amazingly, both erudite and compellingly readable. On her marriage:

Thus far, Morata’s life follows a pattern common to many of the learned women of early modern Europe: a brief burst of erudition, which enjoyed masculine encouragement only as long as the scholar remained a young girl. Once she became older, no longer merely a curiosity for display but a potential disturbance to the order of things, she was married off, and her talents absorbed in child rearing and domesticity.

Two things made Morata’s story different. One is the extraordinary nature of her talents and her determination to pursue her study of “divine letters” despite circumstances far more horrific than mere disfavor at court. The other was the nature of her marriage and her husband. It was at this bleak period of her life, when she had lost her father, her childhood friend, and her position at court, that she found a partner in a marriage that seemed to both husband and wife to be literally made in heaven: “He has also given me as a bride to a man who greatly enjoys my studies”… Andreas Grunthler was a relative of Johannes Sinapius’s and a brilliant medical student, deeply learned in Greek… In him Morata found what the “silly women” and men of the first Dialogue had declared impossible, “a man who would prefer you to be educated than to be rich.”

Morata and Grunthler were married sometime in late 1549 or early 1550, and Olympia composed a Greek poem for the occasion… The letters and all the testimony of their friends paint a picture of a remarkable marriage. It was clearly a love match… Her letters to him are deeply moving and remind us (if we need reminding) that in the Renaissance, Latin was a living language, so much so that a learned German married to a learned Italian might well conduct their loves and lives in it. Their marriage was conceived by the couple themselves as a match between equals, and looked upon by their friends as such…

And on her Latinity:

Her Latin is simply splendid. She ranks as one of the great stylists in an age of talent. Her prose is a flexible instrument, always correct but capable of ranging from the most formal (for example, in her letters to Vergerio) to the most conversational (for example, in her dialogues and her letters to her husband). Her writing is deep-dyed in classical literature. She lightly tossed off allusions, which she expected her equally learned readers to catch. I have attempted to note in passing only the more obvious ones. I have doubtless missed many others.

I will take the word of Prof. Parker (whom I have known for many years) for her Latin, not one of my favorite languages, but I can vouch for her excellent Greek. I will limit myself to quoting one poem, her defiant “To Eutychus Pontanus Gallus,” followed by Parker’s translation (I have transliterated the Greek, silently emending one typo):

oupote men xumpâsin eni phresin hêndane tauto
   koupote pâsin ison Zeus paredôke noon.
hippodamos Kastôr, pux d’ ên agathos Polydeukês,
   ekgonos ex tautês ornithos amphoteros.
kagô men thêlus gegauia ta thêluka leipon
   nêmata, kerkidion, stêmona, kai kalathous.
Mousaôn d’ agamai leimôna ton anthemoenta
   Parnassou th’ hilarous tou dilophoio khorous.
allai terpontai men isos alloisi gunaikes.
   tauta de moi kudos. tauta de kharmosunê.

Never did the same thing please the hearts of all,
   and never did Zeus grant the same mind to all.
Castor is a horse-tamer, but Polydeuces is good with his fist,
   both the offspring of the same bird.
And I, though born female, have left feminine things,
   yarn, shuttle, loom-threads, and work-baskets.
I admire the flowery meadow of the Muses,
   and the pleasant choruses of twin-peaked Parnassus.
Other women perhaps delight in other things.
   These are my glory, these my delight.

The original can be seen here (poem at top left), along with all her original texts, at Boris Körkel’s Morata website (in German).

The dubbed versions of Hollywood films created by Dmitry Puchkov—known as Senior Police Detective Goblin, or Goblin for short—are much sought after by connoisseurs of Russian swearing, according to this story by Carl Schreck in the Moscow Times.

Damn, shoot, darn, hell.
Watch the standard Russian translation of Guy Ritchie’s 2001 crime caper “Snatch” and you’d think that these are the foulest words known to gangsters in London’s criminal underworld.
But watch Dmitry Puchkov’s Russian translation of the same film and you’ll hear an array of expletives that would make a sailor blush. Puchkov even changed the Russian title—”Bolshoi Kush,” or “Big Score”—to an extremely crude, if justifiably accurate, variant: “Spizdili.”
While sex and violence are accepted components of Russian movies, profanity is still a major taboo. Puchkov’s unique obscenity-laden translations of English-language movies have made him one of the hottest commodities on Russia’s gigantic pirate movie market.

But he doesn’t limit himself to translation in the strict sense:

By far, the Goblin films most in demand are Puchkov’s farcical translations of the first two “Lord of the Rings” films. He has translated the first film, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” as “Bratva i Koltso,” or “The Posse and the Ring,” and the second film, “Two Towers,” as “Dve Sorvanniye Bashni,” or “Two Toppled Towers,” a play on a Russian expression meaning to go crazy.
Puchkov sets J.R.R. Tolkien’s tale in Russia and re-christens several characters with comical Russified names. For example, Frodo Baggins is renamed Fyodor Sumkin (from the Russian word sumka, or bag), and Gollum is renamed Goly, the Russian word for “naked.”
The films feature some obscene banter, conversations about newly built McDonald’s restaurants and a soundtrack including songs from Tatu and Zemfira, among others.

He is, needless to say, likely to be sued, and he admits his activities “may come to an end soon, assuming a studio doesn’t decide to hire him to translate the movies for which it has legal distribution rights.” I just hope I get a chance to experience the fruits of his genius. (Thanks to Taccuino di traduzione, the new translation blog of Isabella Massardo, for the link.)

Update. See this digenis.org post for further developments (as of May 2005):

So, now that Puchkov has been snatched up by the studios to create legitimate translations of their films, will he stop altogether creating spoofs like the ones that built up his popularity? It doesn’t look like it. In fact, Puchkov announced that he will continue to make these hilarious translations under the project called Bozhya Iskra (The Divine Spark), a side project of his main company Polny P.

For the most part, the public loves him. Even Leonid Volodarsky, arguably the most famous translator of modern films into Russian, thinks well of Goblin. My guess is that we’ll see Puchkov doing a lot more official dubbings of films – perhaps he’ll even expand into some different genres.

That’s the name of a new blog by Brian Lennon, a Ph.D candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University [in 2021 a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State]. So far he’s written caustically literate posts about the idea that Americans should be learning English as a second language, the “abysmal linguistic incompetence of U.S. intelligence services,” the QWERTYUIOP keyboard, Scots slang, and other topics. Welcome to Upper Blogovia, sir!

Addendum. UJG has delivered a further smackdown to the ESL story.