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Desbladet reminisces about a comedy sketch program called The Fast Show, on which one of the running gags was Channel Nine, presented “in a made-up language based mostly on the sound of Italian, with bits of Spanish” (“Republicca presente… totalla bien cantesta… C-h-a-n-e-l N-i-n-e!”). He quotes a very funny weather report and links to a complete script. Don’t miss it.

In the course of perusing the glorious Guide to World Language Dictionaries recently posted, I have discovered that the magisterial (and expensive—I was once tempted to spend $40 for it at a used-book store) Dravidian Etymological Dictionary of Burrow and Emeneau is online—for free! What a wonderful world!

And other multilingual experiences of a traveler to Tashkent: Buyer Bedazzled, by Ronald Cluett. Via Kip, who links to it in the course of a long reminiscence of being an American kid in ’70s Iran (in a town confusingly called Arak) that is well worth reading for its own sake.

This page from the FAQ of a site devoted to the movie Blade Runner has a detailed analysis of the multilingual “Cityspeak” (“a mixture of words and expressions from Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Hungarian and Japanese”) used in the movie. Sample:

Gaff: Monsieur, azonnal kövessen engem bitte. [French-Hungarian-German: “Sir, follow me immediately please!” (Thanks to eMU for translating the Hungarian part:- “azonnal” – means immediately; “kövessen” – means follow imperative; “engem” – means me. And of course “Monsieur” is French for Sir and “bitte” is German for please.)]

So this fish is about to become gefilte when suddenly it begins talking. In Hebrew. Read all about it! The scene is Zalmen Rosen’s fish market in New Square, NY…

Mr. Nivelo, who is not Jewish, lifted a live carp out of a box of iced-down fish and was about to club it in the head with a rubber hammer.

But the fish began speaking in Hebrew, according to the two men. Mr. Nivelo does not understand Hebrew, but the shock of a fish speaking any language, he said, forced him against the wall and down to the slimy wooden packing crates that cover the floor.
He looked around to see if the voice had come from the slop sink, the other room or the shop’s cat. Then he ran into the front of the store screaming, “The fish is talking!” and pulled Mr. Rosen away from the phone.

“I screamed, ‘It’s the devil! The devil is here!’ ” he recalled. “But Zalmen said to me, ‘You crazy, you a meshugeneh.’ ”

But Mr. Rosen said that when he approached the fish he heard it uttering warnings and commands in Hebrew.

“It said ‘Tzaruch shemirah’ and ‘Hasof bah,’ ” he said, “which essentially means that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is near.”

The fish commanded Mr. Rosen to pray and to study the Torah and identified itself as the soul of a local Hasidic man who died last year, childless. The man often bought carp at the shop for the Sabbath meals of poorer village residents.

Mr. Rosen panicked and tried to kill the fish with a machete-size knife. But the fish bucked so wildly that Mr. Rosen wound up cutting his own thumb and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. The fish flopped off the counter and back into the carp box and was butchered by Mr. Nivelo and sold.

I know the end seems abrupt, but to me that gives it the ring of authenticity. The carp was not long among us, but it spoke its piece.

Addendum. Since this appears to be an amazingly popular story (I’ve already had a day’s worth of hits this Sunday morning, mostly people seeking talking-carp information), and since (I am proud to say) I am the sole Google hit for “Hasof bah,” I feel it incumbent upon me to add some linguistic explanation for those in quest of it. Unfortunately, my Hebrew is rusty, but ha-sof ba is extremely simple: ‘the end (sof) is coming.’ Shemirah is a noun meaning ‘guard(ing), watch(ing), observance’; unfortunately tzaruch is beyond me. Can someone with more knowledge of Hebrew help out? Avva? Naomi?

Followup. Avva says (in the comments) that “tzarich shmira” would mean ‘protection (guardianship, vigilance) is needed’ in colloquial Modern Hebrew. The official Languagehat interpretation of the carp’s oracular utterance, therefore, is “Vigilance is needed; the end is coming.” Thanks, Avva! Furthermore, Jonathan Edelstein at The Head Heeb (March 16, 2003 entry; I can’t make the permalink work) deals with the Hasidic aspect and makes the point that “the choice of a fish also seems strange given the association of fish with the Christian religion. In at least some countries, including many of the Central and Eastern European countries that formed the cradle of Hasidism, the Christian symbolism of fish is specifically associated with carp, which are traditionally served at Christmas dinner.”

Further addendum. In Gogol’s Zapiski sumasshedshego [Notes of a madman] occurs the following sentence: Говорят, в Англии выплыла рыба, которая сказала два слова на таком странном языке, что ученые уже три года стараются определить и еще до сих пор ничего не открыли. [They say that in England a fish emerged that said two words in such a strange language that the scientists have been trying for three years to determine it and so far haven’t discovered a thing.] The fish keep trying to warn us, but do we listen?

Yet another addendum (Mar. 2016). I just learned from the Wikipedia article on New Square (there was no Wikipedia when I wrote the entry) that “New Square is named after the Ukrainian town Skvyra, where the Skver Hasidim have their roots. The founders intended to name the settlement New Skvir, but a typist-generated error anglicized the name.” I am very glad to learn this.

A “legally certified if somewhat lapsed lexicologist” investigates the history of the phrase and the foodstuff. With recipe.

The “Internationale” in dozens of languages, courtesy of Incoming Signals. (The post title is in Kirghiz.)

Addendum. Via MeFi, a site with audio files of the song in many languages. (No Kirghiz though.)

Alice Kaplan has a fascinating article in the latest issue of Mots Pluriels about the problems of translating and being translated; she discusses in detail the horrors of the failed French translation of her “autobiographical essay” French Lessons, a couple of French court cases involving translations of Wuthering Heights and of Kafka, and her own experience translating Roger Grenier, along the way describing the writer/translator relationships of Marguerite Yourcenar and her lover Grace Frick and of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and his drinking buddy John Marks. At the start she provides the following amazing Nabokov anecdote:

Vladimir Nabokov was famous for his vigilance concerning every word of his translations — and when this polyglot spotted an error, he could be unreasonable. His wife Véra, as vigilant as he, pored over the Swedish translations of his Pnin with the help of a dictionary and determined that entire passages were missing, and that the anti-communist slant of the original had been muted. She ordered the entire Swedish stock of both Pnin and Lolita destroyed. In July 1959, the Nabokovs’ lawyer served as witness to an enormous book burning on the outskirts of Stockholm. It’s a rare event in literary history when a writer burns his own books!

If you’re interested in translation, it’s well worth your time—as is the entire issue, which I have barely begun investigating; its theme is “translated lives,” and it includes essays (in French and English) on all manner of cross-cultural experiences (read the editors’ introduction). Many thanks to wood s lot for the link (and I urge everyone also to scroll down his page to yesterday’s excellent collection of links on the great filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who died Sunday).

Addendum. Also from the invaluable wood s lot comes a lively conversation between Jonathon Mays and Marek (of Gonzo Engaged), on Jonathon’s blog Stretching Thought, about translation (of Ferdydurke in particular) and how to deal with metaphors that don’t make sense in the target language. I particularly liked the following bit (which makes a fortuitous tie-in with the recent duct/duck-tape discussion here at Languagehat):

There are things in other languages that can’t be said in english… circumlocution becomes a duck tape of language.

Whenever I read some literature translated from Polish (or even original english books) I can’t help but to see miles and miles of duck tape applied to hold the structure of language together. Without circumlocution the whole thing falls apart. (most business books are like visiting garbage dumps for used duck tapes strips. No wonder most people who read a business book have no fucking clue what it was about. Cause it’s all duck tape and plastic sheeting)

Further addendum (Sept. 2022). I was all set to replace the dead Mots Pluriels links by Wayback Machine ones when I discovered the entire run is archived by the Australian National Library and is publicly available online! Way to go, everyone involved; let’s keep internet culture alive. (Sadly, the magazine only lasted for one more issue after the one I linked.)

Songdog, newly returned from Hawai’i, is “having a hard time deciding what to do about representing some Hawaiian words in HTML.” It seems the glottal stop is correctly represented by the ‘okina (a reversed apostrophe) rather than the straight quote/foot mark I’m using here, and long vowels should have a macron (kahakô) over them rather than the rounded mark I just used over the ô, and Songdog finds “the use of alternate fonts and plug-ins” a royal pain. (You may think this stuff is trivial, but a bill has been introduced in the Hawaiian legislature to “require the use of the kahako and the ‘okina diacritical marks when Hawaiian words are included in county and state documents.” So it’s not just proper diacritics, it’s the law!) If anyone has any suggestions, drop by his comment section. Me, I’m just happy I’ve learned how to do italics and links.
Addendum. I have acquired a new version of my moniker, thanks to Songdog; in Hawaiian, I’m ‘ôlelo pâpale!

Thank god for you language-loving readers, because otherwise, who would appreciate the wild joy I felt today on finding Andrew Dalby’s A Guide to World Language Dictionaries? This book has been out for five years now, and I never knew about it; why don’t publishers notify me immediately when they publish things so central to my concerns? This lists the best dictionaries available for around 300 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, and like Dalby’s equally wonderful Dictionary of Languages, it combines attention to detail with discursive descriptions in an irresistible way. The Introduction says:

For about half the world’s known languages there is probably some kind of published word-list or dictionary. For many of the better-known languages there is a large number of dictionaries to choose from, some of them simply in competition with one another, some dealing with a language variety, some offering different approaches to the same material. The catalogue of a large research library will include many thousands of language dictionaries.

This book is therefore very selective. The aim is to pick out those dictionaries that offer something more than a simple list of words placed along brief equivalents (‘glosses’) in another language…. [M]ost of the dictionaries listed here are likely to retain some value whatever else is published in their field. Typically, they not only list the vocabulary but also document it. They cite sources of information, oral or printed, and often quote them at length to show how a word is or was used. They suggest word origins, or discuss them at length with references to earlier scholarly work. They identify the special registers in which a word is used; they date its first or last recorded occurrence, and they supply the evidence to back up the dating.

This makes them among the most compelling of reference books. In many of the dictionaries listed here, every single article reports the results of original research, and each successive letter of the alphabet has taken years of labour to complete. Some, including the Oxford English Dictionary, can fairly be described as the greatest single literary enterprises in their language.

All right, that last sentence may be an overstatement, but if you can’t imagine thinking it in the rapture of poring through those closely printed Victorian pages, this book may not be for you. But if you have an unquenchable love for dictionaries and greedily collect them, I hope you can manage to at least find a copy in the library, because it will give you the same sort of vicarious thrill as travel guides that provide maps and lists of noteworthy sights in Samarkand, Isfahan, Timbuktu…

An example at random, from the SAMOYEDIC LANGUAGES section:

1348.
Nordische Reisen und Forschungen von M.A. Castrén. 1853-62. 12 vols.
    [Northern travels and researches of M.A. Castrén.] The result of two epic journeys in Arctic Russia and Siberia in 1842-4 and 1845-9. ‘We can follow his activities in his “Reiseberichte” and “Reiseerinnerungen”, which not only make very interesting reading, but at the same time are very valuable from ethnographical, geographical, historical and linguistic points of view. From these works we can see what superhuman will power and what self-sacrificing, heroic devotion to learning went into the preparation of the Samoyed grammar and dictionary. A Samoyed from Kanin, who happened to be in Finland, was a great help to him in this work. In 1851 he won the newly constituted chair of the Finnish language at Helsinki University. At this point Castrén was again stricken by his long ailment in 1852, and ended his earthly career after a few weeks of suffering. He was unable to complete the major fruit of his journey of several years, the Samoyed grammar. Castrén’s family sent the manuscripts he left behind to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which entrusted his good friend Anton Schiefner with their publication’ (Péter Hajdú, The Samoyed peoples and languages, Bloomington: Indiana University, 1963, pp. 84-5, abridged). The collection includes:
    Grammatik der samojedischen Sprachen [Grammar of the Samoyed languages], 1854, in which the phonology of Nganasan, Enets, Selkup and Kamassian were completed by Schiefner. Verb morphology and syntax were never completed.
    Wörterverzeichnisse aus den samojedischen Sprachen [Word-lists from the Samoyed languages], 1855.

Oh, and I should add that for languages that don’t use the standard Roman alphabet, an alphabet is provided (so the researcher will know proper alphabetical order), and all titles are given in the native alphabet as well as in transcription. Maybe you can resist; I couldn’t.