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A glorious rant by Paul Ford on Ftrain, all about printed books and colophons and monkey grunts and McSweeney’s abuse of ligatures. Many thanks to wood s lot for the link.
A brief excerpt:

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Or your citation can, at any rate. Read the How to contribute page and fill out a submission form, and if you’ve actually managed to sniff out a truffle their professional hounds have missed, you may have the satisfaction of seeing your find, first online and eventually in the next edition. Furthermore, you can see your name online if you give them a proper citation for one of the unidentified quotations from Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, which shouldn’t be too hard; just wade through, say, William Derham’s Physico-Theology: Or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, From his Works of Creation. Being the Substance of Sexteen Sermons Preached in St. Mary-le-Bow Church, London, At the Honourable Mr. Boyle’s Lectures, 1711, and 1712 keeping an eagle eye out for the seven needed quotations (for example, “In a scarcity in Silesia a rumour was spread of its raining millet-seed; but it was found to be only the seeds of the ivy-leaved speedwell, or small henbit”). Send in the citation and they’ll fade the quotation on the page and add your name in parenthesis, immortalized as a… well, I think they should revive the old Byzantine title of logothete for this purpose.

Furthermore, you can chat with Jesse Sheidlower, the Principal North American Editor of the dictionary, Monday night via A.Word.A.Day (this information courtesy of Ryan at Linguistiblog).

Update (Feb. 2020). All the links were dead; I have replaced them with archived versions for historical context, but here is the current “Contribute to the OED” page.

A discussion of Russian writers (in Russian) by Evgeny Rein, a poet who sat at Akhmatova’s feet and was a mentor to Joseph Brodsky, contains the following fascinating (to me, anyway) paragraph:

Brodsky hated restaurants—he didn’t know how to behave in them, and he preferred cheap snack places where he felt sure of himself. In a restaurant the waiters gave him the willies, he felt like everybody was staring suspiciously at him and laughing at him, guessing that he didn’t have any money. All the more because he often got taken out to restaurants. And even though nobody begrudged the money they spent on him, he took it very hard and didn’t want to always be a sponger and a parasite. But then years later when I visited him in America, he’d become a real restaurant hound. The pricier the restaurant, the more eagerly he went there. Obviously, he’d changed places in life—or rather, he’d gotten one.

For Russian readers, here’s the original:

А рестораны Бродский ненавидел — не умел себя в них вести, и всему предпочитал пельменную, шашлычную, рюмочную, где чувствовал себя уверенно. В ресторане он комплексовал по поводу официантов, ему казалось, что все смотрят на него с подозрением и подсмеиваются, догадываясь, что денег у него нет. Тем более что часто он ходил в ресторан за чужие деньги. И хотя никто на него денег не жалел, он это очень переживал и не хотел быть вечным нахлебником и приживалой. Но потом, через годы, когда я посетил его в Америке, он стал человеком сугубо ресторанным. Чем дороже ресторан, тем охотнее он туда шел. По-видимому, поменялось место в жизни. Вернее, он его получил.

Jonathan Crowe of mcwetboy.com sent me a link to this Globe and Mail article, “Rebirth of dialects mirrors new regionalism” by Doug Saunders.

France spent much of the 20th century trying to eliminate the minority languages that were spoken by half its population 100 years ago. But now, France is experiencing a renaissance of interest in its regions and their languages, foods and customs. Not just Breton, but also Alsatian, Basque, Catalan, Corsican, Flemish and Provençal.

Find out about Breizh-Cola, among other things. Thanks, Jonathan! (And anyone interested in maps should investigate his excellent Map Room.)

A fantastic Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative from the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University, courtesy of Renee. There are Narratives, Music, Epics (Alpamysh, Dede Korkut, Manas, you name it), and much more, mostly in pdf or mp3 files. Enjoy.

I’m slowly working my way through Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs, and I’ve run across a couple of quotations that not only rhyme with each other but enter into a useful dialog with the recent controversy over translation, in which the complete review raised hackles by objecting to the whole concept. I’ve tried to make the case that they were simply pointing out the fallacy of thinking you’ve made real contact with a work of literature by reading a translation, but these quotations put the issue in a larger context.

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Via Jonathan Edelstein at The Head Heeb, a fascinating Al-Ahram supplement on the Armenian minority in Egypt. To steal Jonathan’s summary:

In the 1940s, this community numbered as many as 100,000 members, most of whom arrived as refugees from the Turkish genocide of 1915-17. During the Nasser era, however, they suffered from the same expropriation and punitive measures that affected the Greek and Jewish communities. The Egyptian Armenians, who live mostly in Alexandria and Cairo, are undergoing something of a resurgence today, but they number fewer than 6000.

The supplement includes several articles, one of which, “Little Armenia” by Fayza Hassan, includes this paragraph on the dialect of the community:

The difference in dialects is often mentioned by Armenians who have visited Armenia. Aida Ostayan, who has been directing the Armenian programme on Radio Cairo for 30 years, explains: "The Armenians of Armenia were under Persian and Russian influence; they are the Eastern Armenians. We, on the other hand, lived in the Ottoman provinces and our roots are more European." Ostayan herself was born in Aleppo. "The language is really the same, but there are differences in accent (as in Egyptian Arabic and Lebanese for instance), and words have been borrowed from one or the other culture, which sometimes lead to confusion," she says.

I once visited the Armenian quarter of Aleppo and heard an Armenian priest chant from the Bible: quite an experience. Must learn Armenian one of these days…

An excellent article by William Schmalstieg called “The Origin of the Lithuanian Language” is actually much more comprehensive, giving a good account of how the comparative method works in the case of Indo-European. Highly recommended. (Found in a comment by George Vaitkunas in the comments to this Open Brackets entry. Thanks, George!)

That is a French anagram, and what I like to think of as a main purpose (it means ‘high gleaning’), of Languagehat. Construct your own Gallic anagrams here (courtesy of La grande rousse).

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Anyone interested in the use of “like” as a discourse marker (“He was like, ‘No way!'”) might want to investigate this bibliography (found at P. Kerim Friedman’s academic blog; his general site is here, and apparently you have to click on “Academic” under “My Other Blogs” in the left column—the URL is the same).

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