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I have lots of things to say about this movie, which (besides having great acting from Daniel Day-Lewis and Jim Broadbent) puts you in mid-nineteenth-century New York so convincingly you can practically smell the pigs wandering the streets in Five Points, but what’s relevant to Languagehat is, of course, the language. Which is magnificent. Much of the script (especially Day-Lewis’s part) was obviously written with a deep love for the period’s mix of high and low, exemplified by the line “I don’t give a tuppenny fuck for your moral conundrums!” And the attention paid to detail can be heard in the way a policeman discussing problems at various locations during the Draft Riots refers to “Broad Way”; you can hear the two words, not ostentatiously but clearly. For that sort of thing I am willing to forgive some of the historical lapses (though not the absurd shelling of the city at the climax of the riots, obviously inserted to provide more bang for the multimillion bucks). I must warn potential viewers, though, that this is an extremely violent movie; anyone made queasy by multiple shootings, stabbings, hatchetings, brainings, and the like should avoid it (or at least wait for the video, where you can fast-forward through the gore).

I was looking for an entirely different word in the Shorter Oxford when I ran across the mysterious term “Osiandrian.” I don’t know why religious sects so often have such recondite-sounding names, but they do; in high school I was fascinated by the word “Muggletonian” (and still am, truth be told, though I have no idea what belief it was that Muggleton held so fervently), and I couldn’t resist this. I could quote you the Oxford‘s boring definition about the Atonement of Christ being wrought by His divine nature, but instead I will serve up this pungent piece of rhetoric from “The Osiandrian Controversy” at the fundamentalist-Lutheran site Concordia Lutheran Online:

Wherever the vicarious atonement of Christ is denied or minimized as the cause of man’s justification; wherever God’s forensic act of Objective Justification is rejected; wherever the “Christ in us” is substituted for (or stressed above) the “Christ FOR us”; wherever Christians are taught to place their confidence and look for the assurance of forgiveness in their “personal experience with Jesus Christ” and their mystical relationship with the indwelling Savior; and wherever poor sinners are directed to their own works of sanctification for favor with God, as if they in any way merit His goodness—there the error of Osiander still lurks in the bushes.

Addendum. Pete, of the excellent New Companion, provides this touching testimonial:

I do believe in God alone,
Likewise in Reeve and Muggleton.
This is the Muggletonian’s faith,
This is the God which we believe;
None salvation-knowledge hath,
But those of Muggleton and Reeve.
Christ is the Muggletonians’ king,
With whom eternally they’ll sing.

Update (Oct. 2020). The New Companion’s final post was June 21, 2005. Sic transit…

“Essentialism and Relativism in Gaelic and Sorbian Language Revival Discourses” (Paper given by Konstanze Glaser on 30 January 2002) is actually pretty interesting, with information on the background and present status of the two languages (that’s Scottish Gaelic, by the way, which I didn’t realize at first; since the paper was presented to the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, it’s understandable the Scottish part was taken for granted). And of course Languagehat is known to take an interest in Sorbian. The main reason I’m posting it, however, is the unexpected pairing of the two languages. When I saw the title, I blinked and repeated the words of my dear departed mother: “I never thought the subject would come up.” An excerpt:

Gaelic has served as a reminder of an original genetic and cultural link of indigenous Highlanders to the traditional Gaelic-speaking community of Ireland. Gaels have celebrated this link as a confirmation of their share in a rich cultural heritage and as a source of Pan-Celtic sensibilities, but there has never been a serious attempt to (re)establish a political union between them and their Irish counterparts. At the same time, Gaelic has functioned as a boundary marker towards the Lowlands. The Gaelic term Gàidhealtachd still is translated as both ‘Gaeldom’ and ‘Highlands’ even though the continued retreat of Gaelic language ability and language use to the Western periphery and a growing share of ‘Highland’ natives whose biographies were only marginally affected by the region’s traditional language and culture have made the composite meaning of the term Gàidhealtachd problematical.

Eeksy-Peeksy has a little ditty (or, as he calls it, augury doggerel) that made me laugh despite my wretched cold, and I thought I’d share it with my readers. However, since 1) it may offend those who are solemn about the Nativity season and 2) it contains words that I don’t want drawing Google hits to Languagehat, I will put the actual ditty in a comment; if the comments are temporarily missing (sigh), just click on the Eeksy link above to be taken right to it. I will probably not be blogging tomorrow (too busy stuffing myself with Norwegian meatballs), so I will take this opportunity to wish all Languagehat aficionados a merry & happy twenty-fifth of December, whether or not you assign any metaphysical significance to the date.

Thanks to a timely intervention by Anton Sherwood, the muttering Ogre, I found my missing entry by the simple expedient of republishing the archive. I apologize for crying wolf, but dammit, the gate of the sheepfold was open, I could have sworn I saw wolf tracks, and it’s so hard counting virtual sheep… At any rate, I am glad to know I have readers so willing to help out and encourage me to improve the blog; I appreciate all of your comments to the earlier entry, and I promise I’ll switch to Movable Type!

In a silly article called “Suddenly, It’s Easier to Find a Hero Than a Villain” [archived], Rick Lyman rehashes the ancient wheeze about how hard it is to find acceptable ethnic groups for a villain to belong to since the fall of the Soviet Union. I can forgive him that—the Times has to fill the “Week in Review” section somehow—but I can’t forgive him this sentence:

When it comes to choosing villains for big popcorn movies — a task that used to be as easy as “Where did we put those Nazi uniforms?” — it is becoming more and more difficult to take a step without trodding on someone’s tender toes.

“Trodding”?? Does Rick think about what he’s wroting, or does he just sat down and let flew? And where are the editors, for the love of god?

Addendum. Having recently beaten William Safire like a rented mule, I feel I should compliment him for this week’s column. Not only does he provide interesting information about the etymology of “pot” (I’m not at home and don’t have my full array of sources, but the Online Etymology Dictionary agrees: “pot (2) – ‘marijuana,’ 1938, probably a shortened form of Mexican Sp. potiguaya marijuana leaves.'”), he openly disagrees with the unfortunate Times decision to refer to Saddam Hussein as “Mr. Hussein.” As the column says, “Hussein is not a family name but his father’s first name.” This is something I rarely see referred to, and Safire is absolutely right to insist on calling the dictator “Saddam.”

I have never figured out how to pronounce the family name of Alberto Fujimori, quondam president of Peru. There is debate over whether he was born in Japan or Peru, but his native language is Spanish, so he (like all Peruvians) pronounces his name with a Spanish j (=kh). That should settle the matter, except that it feels strange to be pronouncing a clearly Japanese name in such an un-Japanese way. (Compare the discussion of how to pronounce foreign names in this earlier entry.)

I happened on a very well done site, The Ulwa Project, which includes a dictionary of this language (of the Misumalpan family) of eastern Nicaragua as well as Thomas Green’s dissertation, “A Lexicographic Study of Ulwa” (MIT 1989) and is dedicated to recording and preserving the fast-dwindling language. I liked very much Green’s acknowledgments, in which (along with the usual suspects) he thanks Eugene “Sully” Sullivan, “the night custodian on the third floor of the now-deceased Building 20…. He was always good for some Red Sox talk or griping about the system or keeping a pot of coffee brewing in one of the biohazard labs.”

Great stuff. For example, ‘boot up’ = inspinngehweorfastyrian. Via Avva.

Jacek Krankowski, a professional translator, has a very interesting discussion of problems involved in translating between languages with grammatical gender marking and those without. Some samples:

The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists; he did not realize that “sin” is feminine in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (grekh). Likewise a Russian child, while reading a translation of German tales, was astounded to find that Death, obviously a woman (Russian smert, fem.) was pictured as an old man (German der Tod, masc.). My sister Life, the title of a book of poems by Boris Pasternak, is quite natural in Russian, where ‘life’ is feminine (zhizn), but was enough to reduce to despair the Czech poet Josef Hora in his attempt to translate these poems, since in Czech this noun is masculine (zivot). (1959: 237)
Similarly, the German painter Stuck personified the gruesome war as a man (der Krieg, masc.) while, in contrast, the Polish painter Grotger represented a similar war-like figure as a woman (wojna, fem.) (de Courtenay, 1929: 246)….
In Daphne du Maurier’s gothic-like novel Rebecca, the protagonists, Maxim and his wife, have invited some relatives to their once-deserted manor in the English countryside. After dinner, Maxim’s brother-in-law expresses his admiration for the meal by saying:
Same cook I suppose, Maxim?
There is no later reference in the book to the cook and the sex of this chef de cuisine is never revealed. How does a translator, whose task it is to translate the sentence into a language that shows grammatical gender, cope with this problem? How does he/she know whether the cook is male or female? There seems to be no one agreed solution as five different translations into grammatical gender languages show:
French: la meme cuisinière
Italian : lo stesso cuoco
Spanish: el mismo cocinero
Portuguese: a mesma cozinheira
German: dieselbe Köchin
(Wandruszka 1969: 173)
The example demonstrates that three translators assigned ‘generally female’ and two ‘generally male’ as the social gender of cook. Whether this is due to the translators’ lack of knowledge as to what type of cook is more likely to be in a noble English manor or whether this is due to their ideological expectations as to what is likely in their own community, is an open question.

He gives several other examples of different translators coping with the same text; I love this sort of thing, and would happily read an entire book of it. [Via Enigmatic Mermaid.]