languagehat.com

The NY Times has decided once again to clamber aboard their spavined, cross-eyed nag and charge creakily into battle with the windmills of linguistics. The lead article in today’s science section is “Early Voices: The Leap to Language,” by Nicholas Wade, a long, long attempt to construct a coherent narrative about the prehistory of language based on misunderstood scraps of interviews and floating ideas. I just can’t bring myself to go into full deconstructive mode (for that, try here and here), so I’ll just offer a supercondensed version of the article:

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The Discouraging Word carries out lexicographical investigations of those three words (surely linked here for the first time) with its usual vigor and enthusiasm; scroll down to the relevant headings. (TDW is a proudly nineteenth-century blog: impeccable style, no permalinks.) Readers with ornitho-etymological ambitions can try answering the question there posed (s.v. “owly” [Thursday, July 10, 2003]): how did owls come to be associated with grumpiness?

I myself have a question about the movie-industry use of “vigorish” exemplified in this quote:

The companies are not in any way stealing from the picture-makers. They have to have built-in vigorishes—or else they’d go broke. Who pays for the 21 million dollars lost on The Sorcerer? The Studio!

This does not seem to fit under either of the dictionary definitions, ‘percentage taken by a bookie or the house on a bet’ or ‘interest, especially excessive interest, paid to a moneylender.’ Anybody have information on the movie definition and how it developed?

(You can leave suggestions here, since TDW has no comment function either. Please don’t anybody tell them Queen Victoria has passed on, at least not without hiding the laudanum first.)

Addendum. TDW also discusses the word “natch,” for which (in the Scots sense ‘incision, notch’) Anatoly supplies a delightful Burns quote in the comments.

Avva has linked a site with three poems by Wislawa Szymborska, the first two with the Polish original accompanied by a translation into English and several into Russian, the last only in Polish and Russian. It’s a good opportunity to at least get a sense of what the originals are like, and of course if you know Russian it’s a feast of multiple translations.

Here’s a sample—Polish (without diacritics) and English—from Avva’s entry:

Dwie malpy Bruegla

Tak wyglada moj wielki maturalny sen:
siedza w oknie dwie malpy przykute lancuchem,
za oknem fruwa niebo
i kapie sie morze.
Zdaje z historii ludzi.
Jakam sie i brne.
Malpa wpatrzona we mnie, ironicznie slucha,
druga niby to drzemie —
a kiedy po pytaniu nastaje milczenie,
podpowiada mi
cichym brzakaniem lancucha.

TWO MONKEYS BY BRUEGHEL

I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing —
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.

Translation by Magnus Y. Krynski, Robert A. Maguire

I’ve finally gotten around to the June 5 issue of the LRB, and in a Paul Laity review of a biography of George Steer, a war correspondent of the 1930s, found an excellent story about Evelyn Waugh. Steer and Waugh were both in Ethiopia for the Italian invasion of 1935; Steer, like most journalists, was against the Italians, while Waugh (predictably enough) took the imperialist side. Laity says:

But then Waugh was a hopelessly unsuccessful reporter. (He did send one significant cable to the Mail, informing the editor that the Italian minister in Addis was withdrawing his staff—a sign that the invasion was imminent. To keep the story from competitive colleagues, however, he sent it in Latin, and a puzzled subeditor in London was still trying to work out what it meant when the fighting began.)

Had he been working for the Times, of course, he wouldn’t have had this problem, but Steer had beaten him out for that job.

Addendum. I should add, for curious non-Latinists, that the title of this entry is line 850 of Seneca’s Oedipus (spoken by the impatient eponymous king, who is about to learn distressing facts about his ancestry) and means ‘Why do you look for words? Truth hates delay’; the latter hemistich is used by Denis Dutton as the motto of his Arts & Letters Daily.

A fascinating MetaFilter thread (started by the ever-inquiring y2karl) on the theories of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. Lots of good links and food for thought.

Tom at digenis.org has an entry (scroll down to “The Soul of Kazakhstan”) quoting the cover story, “The Soul of Kazakhstan,” from the May/June 2003 issue of Saudi Aramco World. The article is apparently excerpted from a picture book of the same name, with essays by Alma Kunanbay and photos by Wayne Eastep (a selection of the latter can be seen at the book’s website); it includes many facets of Kazakh life, but what interests us here is the material on the Kazakh “art of the word.” To quote Tom:

Kunanbay also mentions the Kazakh belief that words can hold a special, magical power. In the Kazakh language and culture there is a concept called ‘art of the word’ which refers to ‘clever, flowery speech loaded with metaphors, proverbs, and allegory.’

The zenith of this belief is the aytis, a musical-poetic duel between two epic singers (called akin) before a large, knowledgeable audience. Kunanbay says:

The language forms in an aytis are so complex, and the nuances and associations so arcane, that a meaningful translation to another language is virtually impossible. There is a tremendous variety of aytis within Kazakh poetic culture: qiz ben zhigit aytisi, for example, is a verbal duel between a girl and a boy; din aytisi is a verbal duel about religion; zhumbaq aytisi, a verbal duel with riddles; aqindar aytisi, a verbal duel between bards; and so on.

Sounds like it would fit right into the Rothenbergs’ Symposium of the Whole, and I’d like to know more about it. [Mistaken hypothesis deleted thanks to a comment by Dctr.]

Outside of poetic duels, it appears Kazakh, like the other Central Asian languages, is not faring well in the media; see this article by Aleksandr Khamagayev; the issue of Media Insight Central Asia to which the article is an introduction can be accessed via the Cimera publications site—just click on Media Insight Central Asia under Publications at the left, then Archive MICA 2002 (English version), then MICA Nr. 27 / August 2002. If there’s a more direct way, avoiding the damn frames, I don’t know it.

Language hat is going to spend the next week in California. Regular blogging will resume July 13; in the interim, I urge you to visit the excellent sites blogrolled at right, and (for those of you in climates resembling that of New York) drink plenty of fluids and stay in the shade.
Update. I’m back, and I thank you all for your various bon voyages.

Avva has posted a complete transcription of Jonathan Ree’s essay “Being foreign is different” (Times Literary Supplement, 6/9/96), one of the most interesting things I’ve read lately on translation. The text is without italics or accents, but it’s generally easy enough to see where they should be; for one section which their absence renders incomprehensible, he provides an accented version, and I will add italics:

Take, for example, the celebrated essay “La Différence”, in which Derrida tried to open out the concept of difference by comparing the French différer with Greek diapherein, Latin differre, and differieren in German. As everyone must know by now, Derrida dramatized his point by coining the non-word différance, spelled with an “a”, alongside the ordinary French word différence, spelled with an “e”. And since the two forms are pronounced the same, they made a nice illustration of Derrida’s point about writing not being a depiction of speech; manifestly, the difference between différance and différence could be seen but not heard.
As it happens, it is easy to reproduce this effect in English. Différance can be transliterated as “differance” with an “a”, yielding an English non-word which sounds the same as the ordinary English word “difference”, thus translating Derrida’s device perfectly. This was the solution adopted in David Allison’s translation, published in 1973. But a decade later, Alan Bass produced a new version, which opted to leave différance in French. This crazy translation took off, just at the time when Derrida was becoming a cult author in English, and as a result thousands of English-speaking Derrideans were left floundering for a French pronunciation of différance, apparently under the impression that they were being loyal to its quintessential Frenchness. Unluckily for them, though, différance was not a French concept at all, and – by making the difference between differance and “difference” audible, all too audible – the Derrideans were not only missing Derrida’s point, but spoiling it too. It was as if the translator, rather than helping us engage with ideas and argue over them, preferred to fetishize their foreignness and turn us into dazzled spectators of an exotic scene.

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I do love a well-used word. In a report on the Chinese Three Gorges Dam project and the consequent flooding of fields and villages in this week’s New Yorker, Peter Hessler says of a fellow building a fishing boat:

Huang is shirtless, a skinny, square-jawed man with efficient ropelike muscles. Later, when I ask if he’s worried about the boat’s not being tested before the water rises, he gives me the slightly annoyed look of a shipwright hassled by diluvian reporters. Huang Zongming is a righteous man, and he knows that his boat will float.

Well played, sir! Deucedly well played!

And, speaking of words, there’s a lexicographical examination of “blandishment” over at The Discouraging Word today (no permalinks).

I was reading a recent issue of the LRB and came to “Mohocks,” by Liam McIlvanney, a review of The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era by David Finkelstein. I almost skipped it because, really, who cares?—but my omnivorous reading habits kicked in and I plunged ahead. I’m glad I did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have learned about the Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of mostly imaginary conversations between the Edinburgh wits of the 1820s that were a regular feature of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. McIlvanney describes them as follows:

Wilson’s dialogues are… an astonishing repository of literary Scots, particularly in the speeches of the [Ettrick] Shepherd [James Hogg], those unpredictable and extravagant vernacular riffs. Since the 17th century, Scots has been (in David Craig’s useful phrase) a ‘reductive idiom’, a way of undercutting Latinate English, and we get a lot of this in the Noctes… But we also get lengthy, vertiginously inventive passages in which the Scots tongue is put through its paces in a manner almost without parallel in 19th-century writing. The Scots of the Noctes is a language not merely of pawky humour and vituperation, but of philosophical speculation, impressionistic description, political oratory, sentimental rhapsody, critical pronouncement, religious devotion. In short, it is a language fit for all purposes, and if he did nothing else in his long and varied career, Wilson composed, as Cockburn noted, ‘the best Scotch that has been written in modern times’.

So I’m hoping somebody will put it, or at least a good sample of it, online. (There is actually a searchable archive of Blackwood’s here, but alas only for 1843-1863, well after the years of the Ambrosianae—named, incidentally, for a real Edinburgh tavern, Ambrose’s of Picardy Place, where they were set.)

By the way, I urge anyone with the slightest fondness for the kind of theological weirdness exploited by, say, Hawthorne to read Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner; you can even do so online. It’s a real hoot, and at the same time sends a shudder down the spine.

Addendum. The Scribe has taken note of my call for online Noctes and has posted some at The Discouraging Word under the rubric (le mot juste—it’s red) “Dogs and skating in the Noctes” [roughly halfway down — thanks, January First-of-May!]. Even the few excerpts there show amazing range, from the casual (“It’s lang sin’ I’ve drank sae muckle sawt water at ae sittin’—at ae soomin’, I mean—as I hae dune, sir, sin’ that Steam-boat gaed by. She does indeed kick up a deevil o’ a rumpus.”) to the exalted:

But the mystery o’ life canna gang out like the pluff o’ a cawnle. Perhaps the verra bit bonny glitterin’ insecks that we ca’ ephemeral, because they dance out but ae single day, never dee, but keep for ever and aye openin’ and shuttin’ their wings in mony million atmospheres, and may do sae through a’ eternity. The universe is aiblins wide eneuch.

Many thanks for the prompt satisfaction!