languagehat.com

I’ve been following the adventures of Nick Nicholas on Facebook as he traveled through Greece and Cyprus, and I’m pleased to report he’s posted some linguistic observations at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (to quote myself from a few years ago: have I mentioned how happy I am that Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος is back?):

I’m not going to make this a course on Cypriot, and I’m not going to explain the technical terminology thoroughly; at least not yet. I’m tired, and I just want to capture the things that struck me about Cypriot after a week of hearing it all around me, even if in a potentially attenuated-for-“Penpushers” form.

(“Penpushers”, καλαμαράες, being speakers of Standard Greek.)

Phonology: my family were certainly doing most of the familiar Cypriot processes: double consonants, dissimilation of fricative + fricative (e.g. vɣ > fk, fx > fk), palatoalveolar allophony. They did not seem to be doing a whole lot of fricative + yod dissimilation (e.g. ðj > θc). x > θ I caught only a couple of times. As I’d been warned by Tsimplakou, lots of dropping of intervocalic ɣ, intermittent for ð (though ɣajðurin > ɣaurin “donkey” and koruðes > korues “girls” was regular), none for v.

Something I didn’t know about beforehand: ʎ > j. So I heard /palja/ [paʎa] rendered as [paja] several times.

[Read more…]

Nothing spectacular, but a nice story from Mike Cummings at Yale News:

Turning the pages of a manuscript copy of the Maʿrifetnāme, an 18th-century encyclopedia authored by the Ottoman scholar and Sufi poet İbrāhīm Ḥaḳḳī Efendi, can lead readers to seventh heaven and the depths of hell. A copy of the beautifully illuminated manuscript — one of just a handful from the 18th century known to exist — is housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, part of the Yale Library. It features a detailed illustration of the Islamic conception of Judgment Day, including the seven layers of paradise and perdition, the scales used to weigh people’s deeds, and the book in which their sins and virtues are recorded. A cauldron of tar awaits those cast into hell. A lote tree marks the upper boundary of heaven.

Brightly colored world maps, diagrams, and charts join the rendering of the afterlife within the manuscript’s pages. The Ottoman-Turkish text explores a vast range of subjects, including astronomy, biology, physics, faith, mathematics, and mysticism. The manuscript is an intellectual feast for scholars and bibliophiles. But until now, few knew how to find it.

The Maʿrifetnāme is one of 567 Ottoman-Turkish objects — spanning the mid-15th century to the early 20th century, including hundreds of manuscripts, a scroll calendar, imperial orders, and the passport of an Ottoman pasha — being cataloged so that researchers can easily find and access them in the library’s collections.

[Read more…]

I won’t get around to reading the bulk of Yuri Leving’s Keys to the “Gift” (see this post) for a while yet, but I couldn’t resist gobbling up the introductory material, and I had to pass along this passage from the section “How to Use This Book” (freely available at JSTOR). After explaining that he had initially resisted The Gift before devouring it with increasing pleasure on his honeymoon (on a kibbutz), he writes:

As often happens, I hesitated for a long time to analyze my feelings rationally and examine the source of my delight under any sort of intellectual magnifying glass. Then, in 1996, Professor Roman Timenchik (my beloved teacher at the Hebrew University) offered for the very first time his graduate seminar entitled “The Russian Nabokov.”

That first semester we only read about twenty-five pages of the opening chapter (the entire novel is over three hundred pages). Usually we looked at several sentences per class, but in the case of some particularly complex constructions, we might spend up to two sessions on a single phrase. Practicing the method of close reading (and our readings were very close indeed!) we brainstormed about the text. We began by discussing a simple understanding of the pragmatic message of each sentence, then moved toward dissecting the syntax, before finally attempting to crack the metatextual codes and track down the implicit literary allusions. I audited the same course the following year and our progress turned out to be even more modest: we managed to get through only the first fifteen pages. By the time I left Israel, I had attended Timenchik’s seminar three times (twice from start to finish and then less regularly in the third year due to other commitments), and our intense discussions almost never duplicated the debates of the previous years, proving to be just as interesting, stimulating, and refreshing.

During the seminars, some of us questioned whether Nabokov could have possibly kept consciously in his mind such a multiplicity of allusions and reminiscences, fusing them in packed images that so deftly entrapped his readers and laying semantically explosive mines in the dense field of his prose. Could our overzealous interpretations lead us to unintentionally presumptuous fallacies? One of the puzzled students, unable to restrain himself, once exclaimed: “But even if half of what we discover here is true, then Nabokov’s mind had to be a kind of computer!”

Timenchik instantly retorted: “Then a computer he was.”

Of course, there’s no way of knowing how much Nabokov (or any other author) kept consciously in mind while writing, but I sure wish I’d been able to take that seminar.

Robyn Berghoff and Emanuel Bylund at The Conversation discuss a problem of mismatch; after pointing out that multilingualism is important and has consequences, they say:

The problem is that much of the published research about multilingualism is not conducted in the world’s most multilingual societies. For example, the African continent is home to some of the most multilingual countries in the world. Cameroon has a population of around 27 million people; over 250 different languages are spoken as first languages, often alongside English and French or both.

Studies of African multilingual contexts are almost non-existent in high-impact scientific journals, however. This matters because it is research published in these journals that receives the most attention globally and is therefore most likely to shape people’s understanding of multilingualism.

Our recent study provides new empirical evidence of the geographic bias in multilingualism research published in high-impact scientific journals. We show that the regions most commonly studied are not particularly multilingual. The reverse is also true: the most multilingual regions are massively understudied in research on multilingualism.

A pair of maps provide a very clear illustration of the problem; they continue:
[Read more…]

Daniel Hahn’s piece on translating children’s books (archived) in the special issue of the New York Times Book Review on translation I wrote about here starts with one of the best examples of what a translator should be able to deal with that I’ve seen:

In “Where the Wild Things Are,” the boy Max finds himself sailing off, in a private boat, “through night and day / and in and out of weeks / and almost over a year,” to the eponymous land. There are about a thousand little components that combine to make “Where the Wild Things Are,” for me, one of the greatest of American books, and among them is that brief phrase “in and out of weeks.” It is entirely new, yet comprehensible, positioning the reader right in the middle of that experience of time passing.

Another writer might express a roughly similar idea in more predictable terms, of course. But Maurice Sendak was a genius, and any paraphrase will always diminish him.

Over its 60 years, “Where the Wild Things Are” has been translated into several dozen languages. I’ve looked at many of the translations, and I have yet to find one that makes that line as interesting as Sendak’s. The translators seem to assume that dull simplicity is good enough (it’s only a children’s book, after all), that “in and out of weeks” is essentially no different than “for several weeks” and that, in short, blunt meaning trumps everything.

The inadequacy of the world’s “Where the Wild Things Are” translations is one of my pet peeves. (We translators can be demanding.) Sendak’s book is marvelous across so many dimensions, and I feel the losses keenly — more keenly than is perhaps reasonable. But I believe my job as a translator is to preserve all the dimensions of a book, not just one of them. When I find complexity, my job is to keep complexity, or more accurately to reconstruct it. And some of the most complex books I’ve reconstructed have been children’s picture books.

He goes on to give examples from his own experience, including an extended discussion of a passage from Brazilian (Roger Mello’s picture-book João by a Thread), but I really like that Sendak example. If you render it as if it were “for several weeks,” you’ve failed the test.

I checked a couple of Russian versions: Maria Blinkina-Melnik has “неделю за неделей” (‘week after week’) and Timur Maisak has the slightly more marked “от недели к неделе” (‘from week to week’). I don’t know if there’s a good way to produce an equivalent to “in and out of weeks” that would be similarly enstranged, but I wish they’d tried harder.

Another new slang term I was unaware of, via Ben Yagoda’s website Not One-Off Britishisms:

It’s not in the OED or Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but an Urban Dictionary post from 2010 has it as one of nine (count ’em, nine) “hoover” definitions:

v. colloquial Being manipulated back into a relationship with threats of suicide, self-harm, or threats of false criminal accusations. Relationship manipulation often associated with individuals suffering from personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

The next example I could find was in the title of a 2017 book by (American) Amber Ault: Hoovering: How to Resist the Pull of a Toxic Relationship & Recover Your Freedom Now. And the word seems to be very much still out there, as witness 2022 articles in Psychology Today and Bustle. Those are both American publications, which leads me to suspect that psychological hoovering is an American coinage. But I’m not sure and would be interested in evidence either way.

I too am interested; I can’t say I care for the term, but that of course is an entirely predictable and meaningless reaction to the new and unfamiliar. A commenter at Ben’s site also dislikes it, but in an amusingly over-the-top peeverish way: “an absurdity in which mentally lazy people join the vast hordes of mentally lazy people […] Every time that I provide a simple comment about language, someone indignantly defends, by denying, the deterioration of language.”

By the way, while I have your attention, I ran across the term полярный торт in a Russian text (it literally means “polar cake”), and when I googled it and saw the images, I said “Oh yeah, that’s…” but couldn’t think of the term. I asked my wife and she said “vanilla wafers,” and that sounds right, but I wonder what my readers call such things.

A report from Heritage Daily:

A team of archaeologists and computer scientists have created an AI program that can translate ancient cuneiform tablets instantly using neural machine learning translations. In a paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus, from the Oxford University Press, the researchers have applied the AI program to translate Akkadian texts with a high level of accuracy. […]

According to the researchers: “Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them.”

The AI program has a high level accuracy when translating formal Akkadian texts such as royal decrees or omens that follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or tracts, were more likely to have “hallucinations” – an AI term meaning that the machine generated a result completely unrelated to the text provided.

The goal of the neural machine translation (NMT) into English from Akkadian is to be part of a human–machine collaboration, by creating a pipeline that assists the scholar or student of the ancient language. Currently, the NMT model is available on an online notebook and the source code has been made available on GitHub at Akkademia. The researchers are currently developing an online application called the Babylonian Engine.

Nice to know that AI is good for something, although one does worry about the hallucinations… (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

I was reading this MetaFilter post, which begins:

“The whole story of why we’ll never get an LBD movie.” Over a year ago, Ashley Clements started producing The Look Back Diaries. After all of the episodes were discussed, she’s started discussing the behind-the-scenes tea […]

At this point I was distracted from wondering what the Look Back Diaries might be and started wondering about this use of “tea.” Fortunately, Google was at hand, and the first hit was this Later page:

In slang, “tea” is a term used to refer to gossip or inside information. It is often used in the phrase “spill the tea” or “serve the tea,” which means to share juicy or exclusive details about a situation or person.

In African American Vernacular English (AAVE), “tea” is used as slang to refer to gossip, news, or personal information. The origin of the term is uncertain, but it is believed to have originated in the LGBTQ+ community and then spread to other aspects of African American culture before being adopted by mainstream culture. The term “spilling tea” is often used to describe the act of sharing gossip or revealing personal information.

It goes on to share some idiotic ideas about where the term might have originated (yes, the word “acronym” crops up), but I get the idea, and once again am grateful for the instant knowledge available at the touch of a keyboard. Surprisingly, this sense is not in Green’s, and I wonder if my readers are familiar with it.

Bernhard Warner reports from Dublin for the NY Times (archived):

Like Henry Higgins, the phonetician from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” Marius Cotescu and Georgi Tinchev recently demonstrated how their student was trying to overcome pronunciation difficulties. The two data scientists, who work for Amazon in Europe, were teaching Alexa, the company’s digital assistant. Their task: to help Alexa master an Irish-accented English with the aid of artificial intelligence and recordings from native speakers.

During the demonstration, Alexa spoke about a memorable night out. “The party last night was great craic,” Alexa said with a lilt, using the Irish word for fun. “We got ice cream on the way home, and we were happy out.” Mr. Tinchev shook his head. Alexa had dropped the “r” in “party,” making the word sound flat, like pah-tee. Too British, he concluded.

The technologists are part of a team at Amazon working on a challenging area of data science known as voice disentanglement. It’s a tricky issue that has gained new relevance amid a wave of A.I. developments, with researchers believing the speech and technology puzzle can help make A.I.-powered devices, bots and speech synthesizers more conversational — that is, capable of pulling off a multitude of regional accents. […]

[Read more…]

Jack Morava sent me a clip of Jorge Luis Borges talking about the English language; it was on Instagram, and looking around for a more accessible place to send people, I found Jordan M. Poss’s blog post, which has not only the clip (it turns out to be from a 1977 interview with William F Buckley Jr on “Firing Line”) but a partial transcript and Poss’s thoughts on it all. The transcript starts:

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

The whole thing is transcribed, if in a rebarbative format, here. Of course it’s easy to poke holes in his linguistic analysis, but he’s not a linguist, he’s a writer talking enthusiastically about a language he loves, and I enjoy it — not to mention that it’s great to hear him speak. (I met him back in 1969, but my memory is not like Funes’s.) Thanks, Jack!