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We’ve had Iraqi ire; here’s Irish ire. Choose your terms and it will give you an Irish curse, with pronunciation. Example:

English: May the hounds of hell destroy your underwear.
Irish: Go scriosa cúnna ifrinn do chuid fo-éadaigh.
Phonetic: guh SHKRIH-suh KOO-nuh IHF-rin duh khwihj FO-AY-dee.

Via Out Of Ambit.

Update (Feb. 2020). Out Of Ambit was Diane Duane’s blog; I’ve substituted an archived link for the dead curse-engine one, but alas, you can’t get the curses any more, or at least I can’t.

Through the kind offices of David Quidnunc I have discovered this list of words used by Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Said Al-Sahhaf at his morning press conferences. Some samples:

Isabat al-Awghad al-Dawliyeen: The Gang of International Villains
a reference to the American administration
Akrout (pl. akarit): loathsome, pimp
a reference to British Prime Minister Tony Blair
Ahmaq: stupid
usually a reference to President Bush
al-Tabe: The subordinate
a reference to PM Blair
al-Tabe al-Jadid: The New Subordinate
a reference to Spanish Prime Minister Aznar

The information was provided by the Middle East Media Research Center, who are to be commended for their diligence.

That’s the title of a book by Akira Miura that I picked up on my last visit to the Strand. It contains a selection of the many English loanwords in Japanese, and it has that combination of scrupulous accuracy (in this case, even giving pitch contours, which I have replaced with an acute accent on the last high-pitched vowel) and wide-ranging, even eccentric, commentary that I find almost impossible to resist. Some sample entries:

baipuréeyaa (lit. byplayer)
A supporting actor or actress is called wither wakiyaku, a non-loan, or baipureeyaa, a pseudo-loan. Baipureeyaa is such a cleverly made pseudo-loan that most scholars don’t seem to realize that there is no such word as *byplayer in English. Of all the dictionaries and other publications I consulted, Bunkacho (p. 69) was the only one that pointed this out. In fact, most loanword dictionaries list the nonexistent English *byplayer as the origin of baipureeyaa!

beniya-íta (< veneer + Japanese ita ‘board’)
Veneer was introduced into Japanese in the Taisho era (1912-26) and became beniya (Arakawa, p. 1207). Later, however, the non–loan word íta ‘board’ was added to form beniya-ita (lit. veneer board). *Veneer board would, of course, be redundant in English, but since beniya alone would have sounded a little too unfamiliar to most Japanese, it is quite understandable why ita was added to make the meaning clear. Concerning this point, Umegaki (1975b, p. 208) proposes an extremely interesting hypothesis. He suggests that beniya must have been misinterpreted by some Japanese as the name of a lumber dealer since, as everyone knows, the names of many Japanese stores, dealers, and manufacturers have the suffix -ya at the end, as in the case of Matsu-ya and Fuji-ya. According to Umegaki, people who thus analyzed the word as Beni plus -ya must haave added ita to indicate ‘boards manufactured by Beni-ya’! Be that as it may, beniya-ita has since come to mean not only ‘veneer’ but also ‘plywood.’ In other words, although veneer and plywood mean two different things in English, beniya-ita covers the meanings of both in Japanese.

cháko (< chalk) Chako, from English chalk, refers to a special kind of chalk used for marking in sewing. The regular kind of chalk used for writing on a blackboard is chóoku, also from chalk. The fact that chako does not reflect the spelling of chalk indicates that the word was learned through the ear.

Chalk is one of the limited number of English words that have yielded more than one corresponding loanword in Japanese. Other examples of this type are iron (which has become both aian ‘an iron-headed golf club’ and airon ‘an iron for pressing clothes’) and ruby (which has produced both rúbi ‘small kana printed alongside Chinese characters’ and rúbii ‘a kind of jewel’).

Some other interesting loans: fákku ‘fuck’ (he warns Japanese readers that the English word is “far more strident”), feminísuto (which means ‘man who is indulgent with women,’ giving his seat to them or buying presents for them, rather than ‘feminist’), hóchikisu ‘stapler’ (from the name of its inventor, Hotchkiss), and múudii (which is from “moody” but is associated by Japanese with “mood music” and thus has the implication ‘creating a pleasant, langorous mood,’ which can cause problems when Japanese try using the word in English).

A comprehensive collection of links. Via Plep.

Avva describes how he hit upon the word “uglyography” (an invention of Southey’s) in the OED, looked for it online, and found exactly one Google hit: on a page of Forthright’s Phrontistery [since 2006 at this URL]. I thought I’d share this remarkable site with you; its primary feature is a “14000-word dictionary of obscure and rare words, the International House of Logorrhea,” and anyone who enjoys the dustier corners of the English vocabulary will want to explore it.

Via Ilya Vinarsky comes this 1975 article (pdf format) by Eugene Garfield urging Russians to give up their ugly Cyrillic (“Cyrillic has nothing but capitals”) for the flexible, international Roman alphabet. Before you join the lynch mob (“I have been accused of scientific and linguistic imperialism and chauvinism…”), let me remind you that none other than Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov thought the same thing! (Edmund Wilson, naturally, disagreed: “This alphabet, since five useless characters were got rid of at the time of the Revolution, is one of the only features of Russian that are really convenient and logical—far more practical than the English alphabet.”)

A couple of quotes from one of my favorite cynics and masters of language (“I master only the language of others; mine does with me what it will”), Karl Kraus:

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print. (Wie wird die Welt regiert und in den Krieg geführt? Diplomaten belügen Journalisten und glauben es wenn sie`s lesen.)

War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn’t any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone’s being worse off. (Krieg ist zuerst die Hoffnung, dass es einem besser gehen wird, hierauf die Erwartung, dass es dem anderen schlechter gehen wird, dann die Genugtuung, dass es dem anderen auch nicht besser geht, und schließlich die Überraschung, dass es beiden schlechter geht.)

The very first Languagehat post was about the language spoken by Adam and Eve, or rather theories thereof, so my eye was lured by a book by Maurice Olender called The Languages of Paradise on that very subject. I managed not to buy it (I’m trying to cut back, honest), but I found an article (pdf file) by Olender from a post on crank linguistics by Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who seems to know a lot about language, so you can find the story (or his version of it) there. If scholarly wackiness amuses you, you’ll enjoy it.

A big hello to Meredith, whose Linguistiblog looks very promising; she doesn’t give an e-mail address, so I can’t drop her a line, but I assume she’ll see this eventually. Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!

Update (July 2019). The blog is long gone; here‘s an archived version from later in 2003 (the last post on the blog was August 21, 2003).

I got excited when Juliet posted this link, but when I went there I discovered there was no Sumerian text, just an interview with Dr. Simo Parpola, the Assyriologist who did the translation; I guess you have to buy the CD if you want the goods. Still, it’s worth posting if only for the remarkable picture of Doctor Ammondt (who did an earlier CD Rocking in Latin) as a Sumerian deity—as is the extensive page of Sumerian links where Juliet found the Elvis. Furthermore, it led me to this article by Parpola on the survival of Assyrians and their culture after the fall of the Assyrian Empire, which should fascinate anyone who, like me, is interested in ancient Mesopotamia:

Yet it is clear that no such thing as a wholesale massacre of all Assyrians ever happened. It is true that some of the great cities of Assyria were utterly destroyed and looted—archaeology confirms this—, some deportations were certainly carried out, and a good part of the Assyrian aristocracy was probably massacred by the conquerors. However, Assyria was a vast and densely populated country, and outside the few destroyed urban centers life went on as usual….

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