languagehat.com

I am a lady bug and I
hope I look pretty and
I hope no kids will
trap me to keep being
locked up in something
because I have no idea
what the thing they lock
me up in is called and I am
so sorry it’s dinner time
good evening I have to go.
  –Julia Mayhew

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A story in the Hindustan Times discusses the effect of “e-governance” on the information technology market in India.

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An interesting reminiscence in The Threepenny Review by Bernard Malamud’s daughter Janna; this excerpt expresses the basic dilemma of the artist:

As with the quandary between the Shakespeare play and the baby, I think Dad struggled mightily with this dilemma of ruthlessness. How much should you allow yourself to pain, or harm, or simply not take care of the people around you in the service of art-making? Jude’s cry to Arabella, “have a little pity on the creature,” could have been my father’s central moral tenet.

Characteristically, the one time I met Malamud (in New Haven, circa 1980) I asked him about the pronunciation of his name: did the family say me-LAH-med, as in Yiddish? He laughed and said it had doubtless been that way in the old country, but in America the family said MA-lamud. I nodded, satisfied. I suppose I could have asked about the morality of the artist, but then I’d be Moralhat, wouldn’t I? And he wouldn’t have been able to give as satisfying an answer. (Link via the invaluable wood s lot.)

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I apologize for being late with this—the link will probably expire tomorrow—but I didn’t want to let go without comment one of the few entirely sensible things the NY Times has published on language; no surprise, given that it’s by Geoffrey Nunberg, whom I have previously praised. It’s called “The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics” and it should be the final word on the idiotic controversy over the College Board sentence “Toni Morrison’s genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.” Nunberg discusses the alleged rule that would make the sentence incorrect, and says:

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P. Kerim Friedman has a good post deconstructing a NY Times article by David Berreby that attacks the whole concept of trying to preserve languages. My favorite sentence: “He fails to grasp that the process of language death only seems natural if you accept the power inequalities that cause it in the first place.” Well said, Kerim! (Karen Chung tried to get a discussion of the article going on LINGUISTList, but it didn’t get very far.)

Via The Discouraging Word comes word of the discovery of the “oldest writing in English”: four runes on a brooch. Since we can’t even be sure it’s English, I’m dubious about the historical importance of the find, but here’s the start of the Daily Telegraph story by Paul Stokes:

What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes representing the letters N, E, I and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The six inch cruciform brooch is among one million artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. Dominic Powlesland, the archaeologist leading the excavation team, said: “This could well be the earliest example of written English we know of.
“Only one or two other runic inscriptions from around this period have been found, but this is either the earliest or one of them. We have no idea what the letters mean, except that it would have been something in early English.
“Whether it is a charm of some form, a person’s initials or the first letters of a phrase is something only future research will be able to determine. It was obviously something treasured by its owner as it had been carefully repaired.”

And we should bear in mind the following warning from Hugh R. Whinfrey in his article on runic inscriptions:

The most tenuous aspect of using the runestones as historical evidence is taking the absence or scarcity of them as supporting evidence to a hypothesis. Considering the millennium or so since their construction, many have been doubtlessly lost forever. A crude estimate made with liberally unrealistic assumptions concerning early English runic inscriptions yields a guess that at most one per cent of the objects actually inscribed are known to scholars today.

Update (Oct. 2023). I have been unable to turn up anything about this from the last two decades; the only hits are from 2003, e.g., from HADAS newsletter-392-november-2003:

What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes respresentating the letters N, E, I, and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The brooch is among one millions artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. The meaning of the writing is not, as yet, understood. English Heritage has provided £55,000 to display the finds at Malton Museum.

My conclusion: it was overhyped at the time.

If you’re worried about confusing those words, read this post (illustrated!) at Dr. Weevil and you need never fear embarrassment again.

The latest entry [Friday, June 6] at The Discouraging Word, “The koan of the meshuggeneh,” has this to say about the etymology of koan: “Koan comes straight from the Japanese, from ko, public, and an, variously defined by our usual dictionary sources as “matter, material for thought” (OED, AH) and “proposition” (M-W).” It bothered me that the second definition was so vague, and even more that the word was only traced back to Japanese when it was clearly a Sino-Japanese loan word—I expect dictionaries to be more precise these days. So I did a little research and discovered that the original Chinese word, gongan (kung-an for you unreconstructed Wade-Gilesians), meant ‘legal case’; it’s composed of gong ‘public’ and an ‘(legal) case, records’ (the links go to the characters, with translations and renditions in Cantonese, Hakka, Minnan, Wu, and Sino-korean as well; I take this opportunity to bow reverently in the direction of the online Chinese character dictionary, one of the best language resources on the net).

A more detailed description comes from this site:

In ancient China, the koan (Chinese: gongan) was an official document that handed down an important judgment, a final determination of truth and falsehood. Adapting and subverting this notion, Zen (Chinese: Chan) Masters to this day make use of all sorts of stories, problems and situations, the more shocking the better, in order to cultivate their students’ awareness. The method usually consists of a question and an enigmatic answer. It is believed that such answers arise from the mysterious, irrational or paradoxical nature of truth. Only an apparently illogical answer can reveal it.

This may be old hat to any Zen masters among you, but it was new to me. And if anyone knows how and when the semantic shift occurred, please share.

I cannot resist posting the following links; the second is of obvious linguistic relevance, and the first is just so damn funny I have to share it. But they are rough and knotty and deal with scandalous or salacious material. Readers of delicate sensibilities should pass over this entire entry. You have been warned.

1. A John Dolan review of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a rehab memoir. Anyone who knows the Exile and its evil ways will not be surprised to hear that it begins “This is the worst thing I’ve ever read” and then takes off the gloves. It gets down and dirty. It may well be unfair. But I really can’t bring myself to care when it includes passages like this:

Walking on a trail outside the clinic, Frey names and capitalizes everything: “Trail,” “Tree,” “Animals.” Then he sees a lower-case “bird.” I was offended for our feathered friend. Why don’t the birds get their caps like everybody else?

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat otter”: “There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”

Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

I warn you, however, that the review contains Bad Language and Worse Attitudes.

2. The second link contains almost nothing but Bad Language. It is, in fact, an immensely long and learned discussion of what must be considered (in the U.S., at any rate) the Worst Word in the English Language. (Damn, I’ve picked up James Frey’s Capital Abuse Habit.) No, not the f-word, which we hear so often only the most reclusive and old-fashioned could possibly be shocked by it, but the c-word. It is A Cultural History of C*nt (the namby-pamby asterisk being mine, not the author’s—an attempt to avoid misdirected Google hits). It begins with an etymological excursus to which, frankly, you should not pay much attention (“The ‘cu’ prefix of ‘cunnus’ has long associations with femininity…. Eric Partridge discusses the ‘quintessential femineity’ [Partridge, 1937/1961] of ‘cu’, and James McDonald explains that this word/sound, or an equivalent such as ‘ku’, ‘existed in a common Germanic language over two thousand years ago.”) and proceeds to a fascinating history of the usage of the word. Here is one of the few bits I can actually quote without resorting to more asterisks; it’s also as funny as the Frey review:

…when John Spellar MP made a speech in the House of Commons: “[he tried to say] ‘We recognise that these cuts in the defence medical services had gone too far,’ but he inserted an unwanted letter ‘n’ in the word ‘cuts’. It still made perfect sense.”

The author is Matthew Hunt (yes, it rhymes), and the piece is headed “Dissertation”; it has a long enough bibliography that it may actually be one. At any rate, enjoy it if you dare!

Credits: the first link is via No-Sword Sieve (2003-06-04, bottom), the second via Stavros. Thanks, guys!

There is a much-cited aphorism in linguistics that “a language is a dialect with an army”; I think I had seen it attributed to Max Weinreich, but I did not know that he originally wrote it in Yiddish as “A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot” [‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’] in the article “Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt” (“Yivo” and the problems of our time) in the periodical Yivo-bleter 25.1 [1945]. Now I do, thanks to a page of the Danish Babel site, which includes all manner of good things, such as How to Say “Merry Christmas (and a Happy New Year)” in 300 Languages, the Yiddish version of which is given as “A freylikhn geburtstog funem goyishn meshiakh, un a git yor,” though I have to wonder under what circumstances this sentence has ever been spoken. (I suggest skipping down past the ordering by word for ‘Christmas’ to the list by language family, which is preceded by a large USORTEREDE.)

Addendum. Jim at UJG has added a paragraph with new information, including this page with further details on the quote (“Weinreich attributes this formulation to a young man who came to his lectures, and he decided, ‘I must bring to a large audience this wonderful formulation of the social fate of Yiddish.'”). All praise to Jim!

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